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Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny was discharged from a Berlin hospital on Sept. 23, having spent nearly three weeks in a coma after being poisoned. Navalny lost consciousness while on an Aug. 20 flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow. After the plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, Navalny was admitted to the hospital, where doctors suspected poisoning. Later, he was transferred to Germany for treatment, where doctors eventually determined Navalny had indeed been poisoned with the chemical agent known as Novichok, the same agent used in the 2018 case in Salisbury, U.K., where a former Russian agent and his daughter were poisoned.Doctors who treated Navalny in Russia claimed they found no trace of poison in his system before he was flown out of the country.And just as in the Salisbury case, Russian officials and state media began to produce a wide variety of narratives denying involvement in Navalny’s poisoning and suggesting that he was not poisoned at all. But on Sept. 23, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova went a step further, suggesting that Novichok was never produced in Russia or the Soviet Union. "Never, neither on the territory of the Soviet Union nor in the times of the Soviet Union, nor in the times of the Russian Federation nor on the territory of the Russian Federation, was there research that would have had either the direct [name] or the codename Novichok, she said.That is false.Not only is it well established that Novichok was developed in the Soviet Union
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