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The Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny fell into a coma during a flight to Moscow last month. His party quickly rushed him via air ambulance to Germany, where non-Russian doctors could tend to his health. Their reasoning? The party suspected that Navalny was poisoned by someone from within Russia’s own government.
The German government on Wednesday publicly confirmed that Navalny was poisoned using a nerve agent. The nerve agent in question was from the Novichok group. Currently, the opposition leader is receiving treatment from doctors in a hospital in Berlin.
Typically, one would rather be at the hospital for a routine rheumatoid diagnosis instead of a poisoning. Navalny’s friends and fellow opposition members allege that the poisoning could have been ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Novichok weapons are both lethal and unusual. They are rarely if ever seen by scientists outside of Russia, as they were created in secret by Soviet scientists in the 1980s. Their very existence is only known to the outside world because of a leak of information in the mid-90s.
Steffen Seibert, a spokesman for the German government, confirmed to reporters that Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent. According to Seibert, scientists have provided “unequivocal evidence of a chemical nerve agent” from the Novichok group being used in the poisoning.
“The federal government condemns this attack in the strongest possible terms,” Seibert continued in the statement. “The Russian government is urged to explain itself regarding the incident.”
In the statement, Seibert noted that it was “shocking” to find that a nerve agent had been used against the opposition politician. Russian government officials have stated that they had not yet received official word from the German government on Navalny’s status.
German Prime Minister Angela Merkel said she discussed Navalny’s status with other ministers earlier on Wednesday.
Navalny is a well-known and popular anti-corruption blogger in Russia. He has been an ardent critic of Vladimir Putin, the former Kremlin operative who has been in power for twenty years.
Following Navalny falling ill, his chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, tweeted his belief that Putin tried to have Navalny poisoned. He went further, alleging that Putin wasn’t just trying to scare him, but that he was trying to assassinate him.
Notably, Novichok nerve agents have been connected to other mysterious attacks and deaths related to the Kremlin. In 2018, former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter were targeted by a Novichok nerve agent. Both her and his daughter recovered, but a bystander was killed in the attack.
