THE ALLEGED ‘poisoning’ of Russia’s unsuccessful opposition leader Alexei Navalny by a ‘Novichok-like nerve agent’ has been trumpeted by the capitalist press as if it were fact, accompanied with demands for massive new sanctions against Russia.
In fact, on August 20, a plane carrying Navalny made an emergency landing in Omsk after he suddenly felt unwell on a flight from Siberia to Moscow. Navalny was taken to hospital in Omsk whilst in a coma and was put on a ventilator. His condition was stabilised and his life saved.
On August 22, his Russian doctors gave their permission for him to be flown in a private plane to Germany for specialised treatment.
If this was a case of the Russian state poisoning a powerful enemy, his life would not have been saved in Omsk and he would never have been allowed to go to Berlin, where Russia’s capitalist enemies would make sure that Russia was accused of attempted murder. Never before has the alleged poisoner saved the victim’s life and then flown the victim to another country for specialised treatment.
German doctors duly stated on August 24 that they had found signs of ‘Novichok’.
However, extraordinarily the doctors added that there was ‘no threat to his life’ but there was the possibility of ‘long-term effects on his nervous system’.
This is even more ludicrous than the supposed Russian poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia by ‘Novichok’ which just happened to take place down the road from Britain’s biological warfare centre, Porton Down, near Salisbury.
The Tory government has now launched itself into a new anti-Russian Cold War. A ‘red scare’ is well under way, with the US and UK governments launching hourly attacks on both Russia and China in a frenzy of anti-communism.
As is well known, the Tory government is also supporting the coup attempt to topple President Lukashenko in Russia’s brotherly state Belarus, where pro-Western counter-revolutionaries, reinforced by Ukrainian fascists, took to the streets the moment the presidential election polls closed, claiming ‘we were robbed’.
There is every reason to think that the Navalny incident arose out of the failure of President Putin to attempt to persuade Lukashenko, with whom he has had a number of rows, to quit the scene to help the EU to add Belarus to the counter-revolution it organised in the Ukraine.
Navalny failed to get within a mile of Putin in the Russian elections, so his use value had fallen to near zero and he could indeed be more useful to the West dead than alive.
The International Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has already waded into the anti-Russia attack. It labelled the alleged ‘poisoning’ as a ‘violation of international law’.
OPCW President Fernando Arias expressed ‘grave concerns’. If Navalny was indeed affected by a ‘Novichok-type substance’, it would violate the Chemical Weapons Convention, according to Arias.
So the OPCW has now ratcheted up the ‘incident’ to that of a ‘violation of international law’ and use of ‘chemical weapons’. Countries have gone to war for less!
The anti-Belarus, anti-Russian and anti-China drive can only be understood in the context of the world capitalist crisis, a crisis that is being rapidly accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic, and is reaching the point where Western governments and even the US government could be overthrown by the masses.
The capitalist classes are now desperate to smash up the gains of the Russian and Chinese revolutions. They are desperate for new markets, and desperate to divert attention from their own political and economic crisis.
They are trying to do what they did in Ukraine to Belarus. They are angry that Putin did not help them in Belarus, so now they want massive new sanctions against Russia and China.
For UK, US and EU workers the enemy is not Russia or China, two deformed workers’ states; the enemy is the bankrupt capitalist class at home.
Now is the time for the working class of the world to unite to build the Fourth International and carry out socialist revolutions in the UK, the EU and the USA. This is the best way to aid the Russian, Chinese, Belarusian and Ukrainian workers.
