‘He felt not well’ Russia’s foreign minister tells Tucker Carlson that Western allegations concerning Alexey Navalny’s death compare to the Bucha Massacre and Salisbury Poisonings
How did anti-Kremlin opposition leader Alexey Navalny die? Well, maybe the Germans “did something” to him. That is what Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested in a recent exchange with the American right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson. In the interview, published on Thursday, Lavrov broached Navalny’s February 2024 death before Carlson even raised the subject, claiming that Germany has withheld information about the opposition leader’s medical treatment in the fall of 2020.
Lavrov likened this supposed concealment to “the Bucha thing,” referring to Russian occupation troops’ mass murder of Ukrainian civilians and POWs in a city outside Kyiv in March 2022. (Moscow denies that its soldiers committed these well-documented atrocities.) Lavrov also claimed that British authorities have refused to share “anything credible” with Moscow about the March 2016 poisoning of former British double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.
Lavrov: Just like we don't have any answer to the question, where [are] the results of [the] medical analysis of Alexey Navalny, who died recently, but who was treated in Germany in the fall of 2020. When he [felt] bad on a plane over Russia, the plane landed. He was treated by the Russian doctors in Siberia.
Then, the Germans wanted to take him. We immediately allowed the plane to come. They took him. In less than 24 hours, he was in Germany. And then the Germans continued to say that we poisoned him. And now the analysis confirmed that he was poisoned. We asked for the test results to be given to us. They said, no, we give it to the organization on chemical weapons. We went to this organization, we are members, and we said, can you show to us, because this is our citizen, we are accused of having poisoned him. They said that the Germans told us not to give it to you. They found nothing in the civilian hospital, and the announcement that he was poisoned was made after he was treated in the military Bundeswehr hospital. So it seems that this secret is not going…
Carlson: So, how did Navalny die?
Lavrov: Well, he died serving the term in Russia. As far as it was reported, every now and then, he felt not well. [This] was another reason why we continued to ask the Germans: Can you show us the results you found? Because we did not find what they found. And what they did to him, I don’t know.
Carlson: What the Germans did to him?
Lavrov: Yeah, because they don't explain to anybody, including us. Or maybe they explain to the Americans. Maybe this is credible. But they never told us how they treated him, what they found, and what methods they were using.
Carlson: How do you think he died?
Lavrov: I am not a doctor. But for anybody to guess, even for the doctors to try to guess, they need to have information. And if the person was taken to Germany to be treated after he had been poisoned, the results of the tests cannot be secret.
We still cannot get anything credible on the fate of Skripals - Sergei Skripal and his daughter. The information is not provided to us. He is our citizen; she is our citizen. We have all the rights and the conventions [to] which the U.K. is party, to get information.
Vladimir Putin previously described Alexey Navalny’s death as a natural but unfortunate occurrence in prisons worldwide. “Yes, he passed away; it’s always a sad event. But we’ve had other cases of people dying in places of detention. And hasn’t this happened in the United States? It has, repeatedly,” Putin said in March after he secured a fifth presidential term.
Navalny died on February 16 in a West Siberian prison. Official records provided to his widow attribute his death to “a combination of illnesses” culminating in “arrhythmia triggered by a hypertensive crisis.” Navalny’s former physician, Alexander Polupan, dismissed this document as “bullshit,” arguing officials either failed to identify what really killed him or decided to conceal it. Months later, the news outlet The Insider and the Telegram channel VChK-OGPU published a longer version of the death report, revealing that Navalny fainted and vomited before his death. Doctors who studied the document told The Insider that Navalny’s symptoms are consistent with poisoning.