The Federal Prison Service (FSIN) on Monday accused Navalny of violating the terms of a suspended prison sentence he is still serving out over a conviction dating from 2014.
The investigation, which Navalny endorsed, said it had identified a team of assassins from Russia’s FSB security service, who had stalked him for years. It named the intelligence officers and poison laboratories it said were behind the operation.
“It’s a trick to attack the leaders (of Russia),” says Putin.
Western government have concluded that Navalny was poisoned by Novichok, a military-grade poison that would be hard for non-state assassins to procure.
On Belarus, the ministers said they were ready to sanction strongman leader Lukashenko, as the bloc seeks to step up pressure over his regime's crackdown on protesters.
The OPCW said in a statement on Monday its "Technical Secretariat is ready to provide the requested expertise and that a team of experts could be deployed on short notice."
The Navalny case is only the latest in what Berlin has seen as a series of provocations by Putin that have damaged ties and called future cooperation into question.
In relation to these presumptuous comments that... (Novichok) was developed here, it is imperative to say the following.
For many years, specialists in many Western and countries and in the specialised structures of NATO have worked with this wide-ranging group of chemical components.