Of Alexi Naval in 2019.
Photographer: Andrei Rudakov / Bloomberg
Photographer: Andrei Rudakov / Bloomberg
While Alexei Navalny’s team was having breakfast in the Siberian city of Tomsk, they heard that the opposition leader had fallen violently ill on a flight home to Moscow.
Activists ran into the Xander Hotel room, which was left just hours earlier, and wandered off to collect evidence. In an Instagram post on Thursday, he said, “It was clear to us that the novel didn’t get a little sick.” “We decided to take everything that could be useful.”
A plastic Syaatoi Istochnik (‘sacred source’) water bottle that they had picked up would be found weeks later by a German military lab at Novichok, the first weapon-grade nerve agent developed by the Soviets. According to three Berlin officials familiar with the findings, the use of a banned chemical weapon in the 20th August attack has left German officials with little suspicion that the operation has been handed over to the highest levels of the Russian government.
German officials and his colleagues said a quick action was taken by the pilot of his flight to make an emergency landing and the medical personnel who first treated him saved his life at the age of 44, German officials and his colleagues said. Leaving a trail of evidence pointing to the Kremlin with the eye of its assassins, Berlin cannot ignore it.
What Western officials call a desperate attempt to assassinate an opponent has created a new low spiral in Russia’s relations with Europe, and, moreover, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose patience has already been tested by President Vladimir Putin. German prosecutors say the government was at loggerheads over how to respond to the 2015 cyberattack on Bundestag and the 2019 assassination in Berlin, German prosecutors say.
Even against the Kremlin’s record of misconduct, the main critic’s ruthless target would be disastrous for Putin’s already low position in the West, a European diplomat said.
The Kremlin says it has found no evidence that Navalny was poisoned and rejected Merkel’s calls to open a criminal investigation. Russian officials have presented conflicting accounts of what might have happened, ranging from claims that Naval was ill with mere instructions, while in the days following the attack she was taken to Germany in a medical-induced coma for treatment.
Western officials have denied the allegations. Calling on Moscow to respond to the attack, the European Union and others are weighing the response, from expelling Russian diplomats to more painful economic sanctions. Merkel has suggested that it could also take action against the 9.5 billion euros (11 11 billion) Nord Flow 2 pipeline to take Russian gas to Germany.
From her Berlin hospital room, Navalny has started posting Instagram shots.
Known for his YouTube videos exposing official corruption and targeting the ruling party, the novel has long been a target for the Kremlin year. Putin and other top officials go to great lengths not to reveal their names in public. Putin’s spokesman called him a “Berlin patient.” Says.
But during the years of his activism, he was repeatedly imprisoned for weeks at a time and attacked on the streets by protesters – almost losing sight in one eye at a time – the poisoning attack being the first apparent attempt of his life.
The Kremlin has a long and deadly history of using such weapons to pursue those it favored with mixed success. The attack on Sergei Skripal, a former spy for 2018 in Salisbury, UK, did not kill him, but made many others sick and killed a bystander who came in contact with Novichok.
The attack on Naval took place in the heart of Siberia, where perhaps the Federal Security Service, or FSB, whose agents had been following his every move for years, would probably be an easy target for his assassins.
Navalny and his team were shooting a video on local corruption ahead of the regional elections in Tomsk in hopes of rallying supporters to defeat the ruling party. Some members of the team stayed with the camera crew to finish the shooting while Naval returned to Moscow with some others.
According to flight witnesses and video, shortly after the plane took off, however, Naval was surrounded, screamed in pain and lost consciousness. The crew asked if any doctors were aboard and planned an emergency landing in the nearby city of Omsk.
As they descended, the airport tower warned them that they had called the terminal with a bomb threat. But the pilot was not confused, telling the ambulance to head straight to the runway.
If the plane its Moscow. Had the two-hour flight to Moscow continued, Navalny could have died, according to allies.
On the ground in Omsk, medical personnel quickly read his symptoms as poison and took him to drink poisonous medicine. The only drug effective against agents such as Notichoc was administering atropine.
Back in Tomsk, despite news of his illness spreading around the world, police still did not secure his hotel rooms. Navalny’s comrades took a bottle of water and other evidence and headed to the airport to be flown to Germany, where they hoped he would be taken for treatment.
Opposition politician Vladimir Milova wrote on Twitter, referring to the Russian preliminary article by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, “The FBK has brilliantly pushed the FSB forward.” “They took evidence from under their noses (a bottle of Tomsk hotel novice) and drove it out of the country.”
Vladimir Yuglev, an expert on the team that developed the poison decades ago, said he suspected that Novichok had been put on a water bottle in an attempt to kill Navalny during or shortly after the flight. “Those who did this counted to the smallest detail of everything, but they failed to consider one crucial thing: the human factor,” he said.
Officials initially refused to allow Navalny to go to Germany, so private aviation made the long journey to bring him that his crew had to spend more hours under flight-safety rules. But by Saturday morning, less than 48 hours after falling ill, he had been flown to Berlin by a private group backed by Merkel’s government.
Medical tests at Charity Hospital in the center of the German capital quickly showed that Navalny was poisoned with a range of chemicals, including pesticides, drugs and neurotransmitters, with the cholinesterase inhibitor.
Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin.
Photographer: Christian Bossi / Bloomberg
Days later, the German military’s Institute for Pharmacology and Toxicology, one of the world’s few first-hand knowledge laboratories of poison, came to a new conclusion. That Wednesday morning, Merkel convened six top cabinet members to brief them – and agreed that a quick response was needed. Police tightened security around the hospital for fear of another attempt on his life.
For Merkel, the self-described Russophile, who grew up in East Germany, had run out of patience. His message to the Kremlin was wrong by its standards.
“It is clear that Alexei is the victim of a novel crime,” Merkel told reporters gathered hours later. “The purpose was to calm him down.”
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