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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Alexei Navalny would have suffered from dramatic cholinesterase inhibition effects from the combination of drugs he took before his collapse and hospitalisation in Omsk on August 20, and before these drugs were detected in his blood and urine on his admission to the Charité – Universitätsmedizin in Berlin on August 22.

European medical sources report the lithium found by the Berlin doctors in Navalny’s blood is commonly used to treat bipolar disorders. It is known to depress the butyryl cholinesterase which Navalny’s laboratory testing also revealed in the German hospital.

According to a leading medical psychiatrist treating patients for depression and  bipolar disorder,  if Navalny was also being treated to stabilise his insulin level with the well-known Metformin, that drug is known to be a cholinesterase inhibitor.

When Navalny appears in a Moscow court, his full medical records, including the laboratory tests recorded at Omsk Emergency Hospital No. 1 before he left for Germany, are likely to be produced in evidence. His previous medical history, including reported episodes of acute pancreatitis and  diabetes, which Navalny’s spokesmen have denied, is also likely to be revealed.  

At stake is a courtroom test of Navalny’s allegation that he was attacked with a Novichok nerve agent by men of the Federal Security Service (FSB). Also at stake is a forensic test of the  medical evidence of Russian, German and other doctors that Navalny “collapsed because of the drugs he was taking”, as the expert source on the use and abuse of benzodiazepines   says he suspects.

The western government case is that Navalny was the target of the crime of attempted murder,  and that a Russian-made Novichok was the weapon used. The Russian government case is that the medical evidence is of a metabolic crisis caused by the combination of alcohol, lithium,  and benzos taken by Navalny himself.  

If the Russian prosecutors also charge Navalny with assisting the German intelligence agency BND, the CIA,  MI6, and the Bellingcat propaganda unit to fabricate the Novichok story, Navalny will face Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code. That’s the crime of treason – “assistance rendered to a foreign State, a foreign organization, or their representatives in hostile activities to the detriment of the external security of the Russian Federation, committed by a citizen of the Russian Federation.”

The Biden Administration’s new national security advisor Jake Sullivan declared on Sunday evening, following Navalny’s arrest at Sheremetyevo Airport, there must be no Russian court proceeding and no court test of the evidence because he and the US Government have decided the case  already.

Source: https://twitter.com/jakejsullivan/

The day before, the German Justice Ministry announced  it is now up to the Russians to “clarify the crime”. The German statement stopped short of declaring what the crime was, and who was the culprit. “The German government assumes that the Russian government will now immediately take all necessary steps to clarify the crime against Mr. Navalny. This crime must be solved in Russia. This requires investigations commensurate with the seriousness of this crime”.   The German officials have added that they have now provided a transcript of Navalny’s statements to German prosecutors. They have not provided the biochemical analyses performed by the German Army laboratory in Munich. Blood, urine, tissue and clothing samples have been identified by German officials as having been gathered already by Russian prosecutors in Tomsk and Omsk, before Navalny’s trip to Germany.

The German medical evidence of the alleged attack was published by Navalny’s treating doctors, led by Kai-Uwe Eckardt, a diabetes specialist, on December 22 in the British medical journal, The Lancet.  The biomedical and pharmacological evidence was set out in four appendices which were separately published by The Lancet, and separately peer-reviewed (an exceptional circumstance, according to medical researchers). Read this evidence here.

Navalny’s glucose and insulin levels were in the normal range, according to Appendix S1.

The biomedical test results for his pancreas, liver and kidney function were abnormal. For example:

According to the published report, this evidence was gathered “on admission”. Blood and urine tests revealing a list of drugs  Navalny had consumed had been done by the Germans “on arrival of the patient at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (day 3).” Day 3 appears to refer to August 22.

Source: https://drive.google.com/

The Navalny case report written by Eckardt and his subordinates at Charité can be read here.  Analysis of what exactly was diagnosed in Berlin as the cause of Navalny’s cholinesterase inhibition can be read here.

The initial hospital diagnosis was issued, not by Eckardt, but by a press spokesman for the hospital. On August 24 she announced that “clinical findings indicate poisoning with a substance from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors. The specific substance involved remains unknown, and a further series of comprehensive testing has been initiated.”

The December 22 publication does not reveal a more specific identification by Eckardt and the Berlin doctors. They wrote in their case report of “severe poisoning with a cholinesterase inhibitor”; “severe cholinesterase inhibition”; and “complete inhibition of acetylcholinesterase in red blood cells, thereby confirming exposure to a cholinesterase inhibitor”. The only claim the Berlin doctors make in their report that Navalny had been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent came, not from their testing or treatment, but from the Munich laboratory of the Institute of Pharmacology asnd Toxicology of the German Army (IPTB) “several days after establishing the diagnosis of cholinesterase inhibitor poisoning”.

Eckardt and his group also acknowledge that the IPTB work “did not affect therapeutic decisions”.  This disclaimer contradicts almost all the medical literature on the highly specific treatment of cases of organophosphorus and nerve agent poisoning. It implies that the German treatment of Navalny would have been the same if he hadn’t been poisoned by a Novichok at all.

The IPTB results remain German and  NATO state secrets; they have not been reported to the Russian prosecutors for their investigation, nor has the chemical identification of the alleged nerve agent compound been divulged publicly, or to the prosecutors who have requested it.  For details of that story, read this.

Independent western toxicologists, pharmacologists, and physicians believe that if the Lancet evidence of Navalny’s drug intake is to be believed, he had consumed a potentially lethal cocktail of drugs which, if combined with alcohol and a pre-existing diabetic condition, could have trigged the cholinesterase inhibitor impact. “When an individual is on benzos, he typically becomes so clouded and confused that he loses control of what he has been taking,” the medical psychiatrist observes.  The expert adds that the 0.2 blood alcohol level reported from the Omsk hospital testing on August 20 “is an extremely high level.”

The 0.2 test result was first reported from Navalny’s urine by Alexander Sabaev (right), chief toxicologist at the Russian hospital, on October 10. “It was in the urine, but it wasn’t in the blood. This suggests that the alcohol is in the stage of elimination…The patient is not drunk, but perhaps this alcohol was in the blood… hours earlier. Most likely, six to eight hours ago.”
Sabaev’s estimate of this interval put Navalny’s consumption of alcohol between 10 in the evening and midnight in Tomsk, before his flight to Moscow.  

Navalny responded by calling Sabaev a liar. The evidence of heavy drinking was “completely brazen and in every word,” Navalny told the press.  

When Navalny faces court in Moscow, the veracity of the clinical testing in Omsk and Berlin, and of Navalny’s claims, will be tested for the first time. If Navalny has been prescribed Metformin for diabetes and lithium for bipolar condition, the evidence will be available for Navalny’s lawyers to challenge. Evidence of who has been telling the truth about the reported drinking party in Tomsk, the night before Navalny’s collapse, will also be tested by prosecutors and defence lawyers

According to the available western medical and psychiatric expertise, the drug combination with heavy drinking would constitute “poisoning with a substance from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors” – but not evidence of a criminal attack. “If a patient is bipolar, he or she is not always coherent. Bipolar I and bipolar II have been identified in the clinical literature,   and the manic episodes they cause are of different duration and severity. Add benzos, and you have the preconditions for patient collapse.”

For the UK National Health Service warning on metformin, read this.

Until Navalny’s return on Sunday, the western press have been assuming the charges against him for which he was arrested and is now imprisoned are a probation violation   and diverting public donations to personal profit. Navalny has retorted: “I immediately said: they will try to jail me for not dying and then looking for my killers. For proving that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is personally behind everything. He is a thief, ready to kill those who refuse to keep quiet about his theft,” Navalny said in a tweet on December 29.

The sources of the evidence Navalny calls “proving Putin is personally behind everything” have already been identified as coming from the German Army and BND. The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov added on October 1:  “It’s not the patient working with Western intelligence, it’s Western intelligence working with him. That would be more accurate. There is such information. I can even say definitely – specialists of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency are working with him currently.”

If “such information” will now become the courtroom case against Navalny, the charge will be treason.

Source: http://www.russian-criminal-code.com/

For analysis of how the charge of treason may be prosecuted against Navalny in court, read this assessment by Meduza, a pro-Navalny publication based in Riga, Latvia.  Meduza’s chronicle of Navalny’s flight from Berlin to Moscow and his arrest yesterday,  does not suspect that he may be charged with an Article 275 offence.

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