[Peace-discuss] Alexey Navalny's health is a proxy fight over interference in gas pipeline?

[J.B. Nicholson]

https://on.rt.com/apum -- RT's latest article on Navalny's current status:

> Alexey Navalny has emerged from a medically induced coma and is being weaned off
> mechanical ventilation, according to Berlin’s Charité hospital, where the
> anti-corruption activist is undergoing treatment for alleged poisoning.
> 
> On Monday afternoon, the German clinic reported that the condition of the
> opposition figure and Moscow protest leader has improved, and he is now responding
> to verbal stimuli. “It remains too early to gauge the potential long-term effects
> of his severe poisoning,” the statement said.

[...]

> Contrary to the diagnosis of the German specialists, the doctors who first treated
> him in Omsk have stuck to their diagnosis that the activist was not poisoned.
> According to Alexander Sabaev, the chief toxicologist at the Omsk hospital,
> Russian scientists found no traces of toxic substances in his kidneys, liver, or
> lungs.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHHUrz4wQRU -- RT's latest report on Germany's threat 
of anti-Russian sanctions and (for the first time) threatening the Nord Stream gas 
pipelines (which will run from Russia to Germany) if Russia doesn't answer for 
Russian national Alexey Navalny's poisoning. Russia has remained consistent that (as 
the article above says) "Russian scientists found no traces of toxic substances in 
his kidneys, liver, or lungs".



My take:

Is the fracas over Navalny's health really a proxy fight over the gas pipeline? Is 
the US playing a hand in this, being that Nord Stream's majority shareholder is 
Russian state company Gazprom which is a competitor to US energy firms?

Germany has so far offered no evidence to back up its claim that Navalny was 
poisoned. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said:
> [...] if the German Government is sincere in its statements, it should respond to
> the request of the Russian General Prosecutor's office as soon as possible. That
> was passed along on August 27 [2020]. It is the German side that really lacks
> urgency... By not sending a response, Berlin is slowing down the very
> investigative process it is calling for. Is that on purpose?


Germany's choice to offer no evidence to back up its claim of poisoning is 
reminiscent of how the UK behaved in the Skripal poisoning -- even when Russian 
nationals are involved, the UK withheld both access to the Skripals and material 
evidence to back up the UK's claim that it was "highly likely" (according to then-PM 
Theresa May) that Russia had a hand in poisoning the Skripals. A Tory MP was quoted 
calling that poisoning "state-sponsored attempted murder". As far as I know, the UK 
has to date not come up with evidence to back up their claims.

The tenuous link that sealed the deal for establishment Western media appears to be 
the unbacked claims of UK government officials and the name of the set of poisons 
which were said to be involved in both the Navalny & Skripal poisonings, the 
so-called "Novichok" poisons (Russian for "newcomer"). But those poisons had been 
published for years prior to the Skripal poisonings. Therefore knowledge of them has 
been readily available to anyone. One is said to need a chemical lab to manufacture 
any of those poisons (one couldn't do it at home in their garage), but in the case of 
the Skripal and Sturgess poisonings in Salisbury there is a nearby chemical lab.

Even the alleged poison involved is questionable: in the Skripal and Sturgess 
poisonings, we were told that the Novichok set of poisons were incredibly lethal in 
low quantity -- a small amount of the poison in powder form could kill many grown 
men, RT told us. But the Skripals and the policeman who initially looked into the 
Skripals (father and daughter) did not die. They were merely incapacitated and made 
ill for a while, then they all recovered. The UK government bought Mr. Skripal's home 
and everything in it, and the UK government killed his pets. Dawn Sturgess died in a 
second Salisbury poisoning but her death may have been because of being weakened by a 
previous heroin addiction (we were told that one of Sturgess or her partner was a 
former heroin addict but it wasn't clear which one was the former addict). Here too 
with Navalny, the western establishment media tells us Navalny was poisoned with the 
nerve agent Novichok (without identifying which substance) and yet he lives.