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A group of international newspapers, including the investigative journalism site Bellingcat, the CNN, the Russian site The inside and the german magazine Mirror, in collaboration with country, carried out a detailed investigation that appears to prove that the FSB, the Russian state’s internal security agency, successor to the KGB, is implicated in the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition who fell into a coma after arriving upon contact with a nerve agent, a highly toxic chemical compound that is also used as a chemical weapon.
On August 20 of this year, Navalny collapsed while traveling on a plane leaving the city of Tomsk, Siberia, and headed for Moscow. The plane landed in the nearest city, Omsk, where Navalny was admitted to intensive care. Doctors at the hospital initially said they found no signs of intoxication. After a couple of tense days, the Russian authorities allowed Navalny to be transferred to the Charité hospital in Berlin. There, doctors discovered that Navalny had been poisoned with a nerve agent, which was later confirmed by several other independent laboratories and the OPCW, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Navalny has recovered after a period in a coma and intends to return to Russia as soon as possible.
Several governments have accused Russia of the Navalny poisoning, both because over the years the Russian government has repeatedly imprisoned and opposed the famous opponent, who is also an investigative journalist who has uncovered several cases of corruption, and because The nerve agent he was poisoned with was identified as a new variant of Novichok, the Russian-made toxin that, among other things, was used to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, UK. The Russian government has always denied any responsibility.
– Read also: How Navalny changed the opposition in Russia
The investigation by the international newspaper team, however, manages to reveal several important news: it claims that FSB agents who were part of a clandestine group specialized in the use of toxins and poisonous substances that followed Navalny since 2017 have been implicated in the poisoning. . ; that there may be other poisoning attempts, including one a few weeks before August; and that the group would be organized and led by high-level FSB officers, only two orders of command under Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Second Bellingcat and others, the operation against Navalny had been managed by a clandestine unit within the FSB’s Institute of Criminology, a criminal medicine center founded in KGB times that, according to Bellingcat, would continue to experiment and develop toxins and possible chemical weapons. At least 15 people would be part of this unit, and among them seven have been identified who have followed Navalny on his travels for years. Among these seven people are doctors and chemical weapons experts.
The FSB allegedly began harassing Navalny in January 2017, just months after the announcement of his candidacy in the 2018 presidential election. Bellingcat and the others analyzed the domestic air travel that Navalny made during the 2017 election campaign, 20 in total, and found that in each of them at least two or three members of the FSB team traveled to the same destination in the country. Same period. Sometimes FSB agents traveled a day earlier or took flights at slightly different times. In some cases they traveled using their real name, in others they used a pseudonym, slightly changing their date of birth and adopting the surname of their wives or girlfriends. In any case, whenever Navalny traveled outside of Moscow, team members followed him at a distance.
In December 2017, the Russian Election Commission prevented Navalny from participating in the elections. He interrupted the electoral campaign and considerably reduced his travels. The shadow of the FSB also ended, but it resumed in February 2019 and continued with greater intensity in 2020, after Navalny had spent a period in prison. The agents followed Navalny and his wife, Yuliya Navalnaya, also on a pleasure trip to Kaliningrad, a Baltic Sea city located on Russian territory between Poland and Lithuania, in July this year. During the holidays, Navalny’s wife would feel ill and Bellingcat he suspects, without being able to prove it definitively, that he was the victim of an attempted poisoning. Bellingcat had access to the phone call records of the three agents who were following Navalny in Kaliningrad in those days, and all three reportedly made many phone calls to their superiors in Moscow just at the time when Yuliya Navalnaya was ill, also involving some officers who are experts in chemical weapons. . General Vladimir Bogdanov, one of the main leaders of the FSB, flew to Kaliningrad that same day. Yuliya Navalnaya recovered in one day.
We arrived in August, when Navalny was poisoned on his return from a trip to Siberia. Even in that case, using air travel data, mobile phones and smartphone geolocation, Bellingcat was able to verify that three FSB team agents landed in the city of Novosibirsk together with the arrival of Navalny and his team and that at least one of them (and probably the other two) followed Navalny to the city of Tomsk, the second stage of his trip to Siberia. During the operation, the three agents used disposable non-traceable phones, but one of them, Alexei Alexandrov, on two occasions in those days turned on his personal phone, which was connected to Tomsk’s cell phones. Bellingcat He also verified that among the agents and the FBS leadership in Moscow there would be a sharp increase in phone calls and messages during the time window of the possible poisoning of Navalny.
As in the case of Kaliningrad, among the leaders involved in the phone calls is General Bogdanov, who reports directly to Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB, who in turn reports directly to Putin.
It is unclear how Navalny was poisoned, the Novichok could have been put on the bedding in his hotel room or in the shampoo bottle. In an interview, Navalny said that around 11:15 p.m. he ordered a Bloody Mary cocktail at the hotel bar. The waiter told him he didn’t have the ingredients to make it and offered him a Negroni instead. Navalny said he only took one sip, because “it tasted like the most disgusting thing I’ve ever had in my life.” After fifteen minutes, Navalny went to bed. Shortly after, Alexei Alexandrov turned his phone back on, locating him a few minutes’ drive from the Navalny Hotel. The next day, on the plane back to Moscow, Navalny felt ill and fell into a coma.
– Read also: Navalny said Putin is behind his poisoning
The work of Bellingcat and other warheads do not irrefutably prove that the FSB poisoned Navalny, but it comes very close, showing how a team of chemical weapons experts had been tracking him since 2017, and were within close range of him when he was poisoned. This kind of detailed investigation, with phone records and smartphone geolocation, is only possible in Russia, where privacy laws are very flexible and data from citizens, including FSB agents, is apparently for sale in a large and accessible black market, as explained Bellingcat in an additional and interesting article that tells of the survey methodology.
To find out the identity of the FSB agents following Navalny, Bellingcat He began by analyzing the passenger lists of flights which, on days compatible with Navalny’s, had booked a round trip from Moscow to Novosibirsk and back from Tomsk to Moscow; the work was facilitated by the fact that, due to the pandemic, flights are few and passengers few. In this way they came to the names of the three agents who followed Navalny in Siberia. Two of them had used pseudonyms, but one, Vladimir Panyaev, had booked the flight under his real name. Slowly Bellingcat began to reconstruct Panyaev’s air travel in recent years, verified that they matched Navalny’s, and identified his frequent travel companions, rebuilding the team from the Institute of Criminology.
To do this, he used a huge amount of personal data available on the Russian market, collected by unfaithful officials and employees of the state or private companies and marketed at a good price. Bellingcat uses as an example another famous investigation, the one that revealed the identity of the agents involved in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, including Anatoliy Chepiga: “Within 2-3 minutes, after entering Chepiga’s full name and card number credit through Google Pay or a payment system such as Yandex Money, a fairly popular Telegram bot will provide us with Chepiga’s date of birth, his passport number, his criminal record, his license plate number, the number identification of the car, the cars you previously owned, the fines you have received and the places where you frequently park in Moscow. ”All for the equivalent of 10 euros. For a slightly higher amount, around 100 euros, you can Acquire telephone records and Internet communication data corresponding to a telephone number With these data and more, Bellingcat He was able to identify the FSB agents and trace their movements while tracking Navalny, in a way that would have been impossible in any European country.
While writing Bellingcat, the investigation reveals an “implausible number of coincidences” suggesting that the FSB is involved in the Navalny poisoning. The Russian government has always denied any involvement.
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