Navalny poisioning: West taking united action against Russia looks distant as US drags its feet

What unfolds in the Navalny affair will greatly depend on the outcome of the US presidential election, explains Kim Sengupta

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny pictured giving a speech in Moscow on 29 September, 2019. (Yuri Kadobnov/AFP)

The last time that Germany accused the Kremlin of illicit acts, the head of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, Leonid Slutsky, decried it as “another example of global fake stories”, pointing to the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal as “a classic example of this”.

Slutsky made these remarks three months ago when Berlin said it was seeking European Union sanctions after new evidence had emerged of Moscow’s alleged culpability in the hacking of the German parliament in June 2015.

“This is a kind of post-pandemic cold shower, an attempt to return to square one in the western world, where Russia was accused of all sins absolutely undeservedly, based purely on conjecture”, he said.