"Of course, these are grave accusations. So they should be grounded well, not like in the Skripal case, where there is no evidence for the 'hand of the Russian government' so far," Friesen said, mentioning that he expects the German government to provide evidence.
Berlin on Wednesday claimed that a German military laboratory possessed undeniable proof of 44-year-old Navalny's intoxication with a nerve agent from the Novichok group.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova subsequently noted that the German government's claims of Navalny's poisoning lack evidence, and added that it was perplexing why Berlin first addressed the EU, NATO and third parties, such as the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), in relation to the case, instead of contacting Russia directly.
On 20 August, Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny fell gravely ill during a domestic Russian flight. Following an emergency landing in the Siberian city of Omsk, he was taken to a local hospital and, according to regional doctors, he arrived just 17 minutes after landing.
For the next 44 hours, doctors waged an uninterrupted struggle for his life, as he went into a coma and was put on an artificial lung ventilator.
Upon conducting multiple tests, Russian medics established that no traces of poison had been found in his system, saying that Navalny's condition was caused by an abrupt drop of glucose in his blood due to a metabolic imbalance.
On 22 August, Navalny was flown to Berlin for further treatment. German doctors claimed that they had found traces of a substance from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors in his body, which the Russian doctors denied, referring to his test results.
