The planning to fly Alexei Navalny (lead image) from Russia to Germany, and there to accuse the Kremlin of trying to kill him with Novichok, started
before Navalny himself knew he was ill.
The new evidence comes from records of the German medical evacuation team based in Nuremberg. This five-man team — two pilots, two paramedic nurses, one physician specialist in emergency medicine — flew from Nuremberg to Omsk; collected Navalny, and with his wife Yulia Navalnaya and assistant Maria Pevchikh, flew to Berlin, where Navalny was revived.
But the evidence reveals
their mission began with orders to the aircraft and to the team members when they were at Shannon airport, western Ireland,
on the morning of August 20, 2020; those orders were
first issued the day before, on August 19. That's the day before Navalny collapsed on a flight between Tomsk and Moscow, and then following the emergency diversion of the aircraft to Omsk, before he was taken to Omsk Emergency Hospital Number 1.
The German evidence, newly obtained this week, also discloses that
the first allegation that Navalny had been poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent came from Pevchikh. She told the German medevac doctor and paramedics when they were with Navalny in the intensive care unit at the Omsk hospital where Navalny was being treated. "She spoke English perfectly", Dr Philipp Jacoby remembers.
The evidence of the poisoning was in several water bottles Pevchikh had taken from Navalny's hotel room in Tomsk, and brought to Omsk after recording a film of herself and others from Navalny's staff collecting them from the hotel room. These bottles Navalnaya and Pevchikh asked the German doctor to take through the Omsk airport baggage check and on to the medevac aircraft in a backpack attached to his own luggage. "She didn't tell us what was inside," Jacoby said in an interview this week. "You could feel they were half-litre bottles, the hotel-room type, maybe five of them. The backpack was strapped to my bag and it went on board with me."
Comment: So while the State Department is trying to take credit for people who have actually managed to escape, they're actually the ones throwing a spanner in the works. Figures.
See also: