Russian opposition figure Navalny, who has been discharged from the Charité hospital in Berlin where he was treated after an alleged poisoning, claimed in an interview with Der Spiegel that Putin “was behind the crime”. But some analysts pour scorn on the suggestion that the Russian president ordered the political figure to be poisoned.
Claims that the Russian leadership could be behind the Alexei Navalny incident do not hold water given that no evidence of his alleged poisoning with the Novichok nerve agent has ever been made public, Andy Vermaut, a Belgian human rights activist and political commentator, believes.
Moreover, Vermaut points out that it remains unclear “why exactly would Russia use a nerve gas that points directly in their direction”, explaining that such a chemical agent could be produced “easily” with the use of “two separate components from fertiliser that can be obtained separately”.
“Would Putin, sitting comfortably in his chair, have any interest in poisoning an opposition leader and making such stupid and transparent moves?”
The claim that Russia could have used Novichok against Navalny raises questions, given that Moscow was accused of poisoning ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the UK town of Salisbury in 2018, according to George Szamuely, the author of Bombs for Peace: NATO‘s Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia.
“Novichok, supposedly the most deadly nerve agent known to man, fails to kill its purported…
