BERLIN – For two days the whole world has been wondering what role it could have played Angela Merkel in the spectacular rescue of Alexei Navalny, the anti-Putinian opponent poisoned in Siberia and transferred to Berlin by plane financed by a Berlin NGO with private money. And perhaps the Finnish president provided an answer yesterday Sauli Niinistö.
NGO flight blocked: risk of diplomatic clash Berlin-Moscow over Navalnyj
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The chancellor would have called him to talk to him about the Russian opponent, he told the Finnish broadcaster Yle. And Niinistö would have agreed with Merkel to call the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to ask him to allow Navalnyj to travel to Germany. The head of the Kremlin would have replied “there are no political obstacles”. The Finnish president has offered himself as an intermediary between Merkel and Putin.
During those same hectic hours, Navalny’s family was grappling with Omsk doctors, who argued that the anti-corruption lawyer couldn’t travel. A diagnosis denied by the German team who arrived from Berlin on Friday morning to take him to Germany. And in the evening, mysteriously, Russian doctors changed their minds and Navalny was transferred to Berlin on Friday night.
Navalnyj transferred from Siberia to Germany: “First step to save his life”
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Already on Thursday Merkel had been unusually clear about her probable poisoning. He had asked for clarification of the circumstances of his illness and had offered him hospitality in Germany. But the next day, when the situation became complicated with the ‘kidnapping’ by Siberian doctors, the German government was silent.
The chancellor seems to have chosen an intermediary like the Finnish president precisely to avoid direct internal interference, not to ask Putin to free his most popular opponent and to avert a new diplomatic crisis.
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The Belarus nightmare may have prompted Putin to take the risky move
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Relations between Moscow and Berlin have recently precipitated again after the German judiciary has ascertained the ‘hand’ of the Russian secret services in two dramatic events in recent years: the murder of a Georgian-Chechen dissident in a Berlin park in 2017 and the cyberattack on the German parliament in 2015. The conclusions of the German prosecutors and the lack of Russian cooperation in the investigation into the murder in the Tierpark led the Merkel government to expel some Russian diplomats and threaten European cyber sanctions against Russia.
