DISINFO: An OPCW document refutes the West’s allegations about the poisoning of Navalny
SUMMARY
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has published a document that raises serious questions about the West's account of the alleged poisoning of the Russian dissident, Alexei Navalny.
On its tenth page, it was stated that the Technical Secretariat of the OPCW dispatched on 20 August 2020, at the request of Germany, a team to conduct a special visit to provide technical assistance, on the occasion of an "alleged poisoning incident of a Russian citizen."
This document raises serious questions about the chronology of events and refutes the West’s allegations about the poisoning of the Russian opposition activist. On August 20 a plane in which Navalny was traveling made an emergency landing in the Russian Siberian city of Omsk due to his deteriorating health, and only two days later, on August 22, Navalny was transferred to Berlin with the consent of the Russian authorities, which means that the OPCW team had been dispatched to provide "technical assistance" to Germany before the story emerged about Navalny's poisoning.
RESPONSE
This is a recurring pro-Kremlin narrative trying to deflect the blame for Navalny's poisoning from Russian actors. This narrative is also consistent with multiple previous attempts at discrediting the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The claim was neither counterbalanced nor critically challenged in the article.
In fact, mentioning 20 August as the date when the OPCW secretariat deployed a technical assistance team was simply a mistake in the draft report of the Ninety-Seventh Session of the OPCW's Executive Council, as explained by the spokesman of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs Rainer Breul. The mistake was later fixed in an updated version of the report.
In an old OPCW document published in October 2020, it is clearly stated that Germany made the request on September 4 (see paragraph 1) and that the team was deployed on September 5 (see paragraph 2).
See similar cases that Navalny might have been poisoned in Germany, that Navalny was poisoned by an MI6 agent, and that Alexei Navalny, originally an anti-Russian project, was poisoned by his sponsors.