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Putin calls the data “dirt”
Of: Oskar Forsberg, Sophie Tanha
Published:
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Alexei Navalny was overshadowed by Russian agents for at least three years before the August poisoning.
It shows a new investigation, but President Putin dismisses the information.
If Russia wanted to kill him, they would have “completed the job,” he says according to the AP.
Popular opposition blogger Alexei Navalny announced in January 2017 that he would run against Putin in next year’s presidential election.
According to the organization Bellingcat, which together with The Insider, Der Spiegel and CNN examined data from telecommunications networks and air traffic, it was then that the Russian intelligence service FSB caught their attention.
Photo: Pavel Golovkin / TT
Alexei Navalny.
Shaded all over Russia
Bellingcat has identified 15 men who work for a secret subgroup of the FSB, the business that has come to replace the Soviet KGB. Together, they are said to have followed Navalny on at least 37 different flights around Russia.
During most of Navalny’s domestic trips since he announced his participation in the presidential election, men have followed him. On some occasions, there are indications that the FSB even tried to poison him before the August attack.
Three of the officers were in Kaliningrad, among other places, in July 2020, when Navalny’s wife Yuliya suddenly fell ill in what she describes as “the worst illness I have ever felt in my life.”
Navalny has also testified himself about how in July 2019 he contracted an acute skin condition after being jailed in connection with organizing a demonstration. Doctors then said that the disease probably occurred after external contact with some toxic substance. Similar phenomena caused Navalny to change his travel routines. His team started booking flights at the last minute, but agents always booked trips to the same city shortly after.
Navalny tells CNN that he is 100 percent certain that President Vladimir Putin was aware of the persecution and the attempted poisoning.
Photo: passport photos
Alexey Alexandrov, 39, Ivan Osipov, 44, and Vladimir Panyaev, 40, are said to have traveled after Navalny to Tomsk, where he was poisoned.
Errors disclosed to agents
However, one of the agents, Alexandrov (who often traveled under the false name Frolov), made several mistakes during the three years he investigated Navalny. He used his private phone, if only for a second, which allowed Bellingcat to record his positions and correspondence. It turns out that he and other members of the FSB team came into contact with several major laboratories and chemists working with chemical weapons and neurotoxins in Russia during their travels.
A great deal of correspondence between FSB agents and these neurotoxin experts took place on the day Navalny was poisoned, causing him to collapse during a flight between Tomsk and Moscow in late August.
He was taken to Germany to recover on neutral ground. The clothes she was wearing were taken from her at the Russian hospital, which Navalny sees as a way for Russia to hide her traces.
Several countries have accused Russia of being behind the Navalny poisoning. Russia itself has not investigated the poisoning. The Kremlin and the FSB have consistently denied their involvement.
But Bellingcat writes that his post shows an “unlikely series of coincidences” and that it is now up to the Kremlin to prove otherwise.
President Vladimir Putin does not give anything for the investigation and says it had nothing to do with the events.
Instead, he claims that Navalny’s assassination attempt was an attempt by intelligence services in the West to dirty Russia.
Putin claims that Navalny is an unimportant person and no one whom Russia would make an effort to poison or otherwise access.
The Reuters news agency reports.
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