Top Putin critic Alexei Navalny poisoned, German doctors confirm

Alexei Navalny, the most outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is in a medically induced coma in a German-speaking hospital from what doctors said was poison – and his family and supporters claim Putin and his government are behind it.

On Monday, the Charité hospital in Berlin, where Navalny was taken for treatment, said in a statement that the long-time Russian political dissident had been poisoned with a “cholinesterase inhibitor.” However, the exact substance used is not yet known.

His prognosis does not look promising: “The outcome of the disease remains uncertain and long-term effects, especially in the area of ​​the nervous system, cannot be ruled out at this time,” the statement concluded.

Four days earlier, Navalny had been drinking tea at a Siberian airport before boarding a flight to Moscow. He got sick on the plane, with a video that almost showed the politicians and groaned and needed immediate medical attention.

The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, near Kazakhstan, where an ambulance was waiting to take it to a local hospital. But Navalny’s condition worsened, and he fell into a coma before arriving at the facility.

The Russian Omsk Emergency Hospital no. 1, where Navalny was first treated, became the site of a frustrating standoff between Navalny’s family and supporters and the doctors overseeing his care. The woman and the Navalny team claimed that the doctors were checked by the Kremlin and tried to cover up the poisoning instead of treating their patient properly.

Doctors at the time said Navalny was not poisoned but instead suffered from a ‘metabolic disorder’ that led to low blood sugar. “Toxins as traces of their presence in the body have not been identified,” Anatoly Kalinichenko, the deputy chief physician at Omsk Hospital, said Friday. “The diagnosis of ‘poisoning’ remains somewhere in the back of our heads, but we do not believe the patient suffered poisoning. ‘

Alexei Petrov TASS via Getty Images

But Navalny’s team – including his wife Yulia Navalnaya, who was prevented her husband from being seen in the Russian hospital, according to a spokesman – suspected of playing foul. They had good reason to believe so: The Kremlin has a long, sordid history of poisoning political dissidents, defectors, and other enemies of the state.

“The medics are completely controlled by the FSB and release almost nothing,” Vladimir Milov, a close associate of Navalny, told me last week, using the acronym for Russia’s Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB. for internal security, among others.

“Of course we can not trust this hospital and we demand that Alexei be given to us so that we can treat him in an independent hospital whose doctors we trust,” Navalnaya said at another press conference Friday.

A medical plane sent by the Berlin-based humanitarian group Cinema for Peace Foundation arrived in Omsk on Friday to take the opposition leader to Germany for treatment. The Russian doctors blocked the transfer first, saying that Navalny was not stable enough to travel before they finally allowed the German doctors to examine the patient’s condition.

Navalnaya wrote in letter to Putin, pleaded for him to allow the transfer, and EU leader Charles Michel raised the issue and expressed his concerns about the situation in a Friday call with Putin.

Later on Friday, Russian doctors ordered the transfer, and Navalny arrived in Berlin over the weekend. Clearly, he needs even more intensive care. He is currently being treated with atropine, the same drug that was used to treat a former Russian spy who was thought to have been poisoned by Russian agents two years ago.

Hanging over all the drama are two pressing questions: was Navalny actually poisoned? And if so, did Putin have anything to do with it?

At this time, we have no definitive answers to these questions – and we may never get them.

Apparently, that may just be the point.

Why Putin might be responsible for Navalny’s coma

Ask people familiar with how the Russian government treats dissidents, and they unanimously state that what probably happened to Navalny is part of a long-standing Russian government playbook – one that Putin follows.

“The killing or intimidation of ‘enemies of the people’ has been a staple of the Kremlin’s policy for over 100 years,” said John Sipher, who led CIA operations in Russia during his 28-year intelligence career before turning six. retired years ago.

“Putin has continued this tactic of assassinating his enemies at home and abroad, and has created a system where those who want to earn the Kremlin’s support should do so. [his] bid, ”said Sipher. “Whether Putin personally ordered the poisoning or not, he is behind any and all efforts to control it through intimidation and assassination.”

Poisoning people is kind of the Kremlin thing. In 2004, Viktor Yushchenko campaigned against Putin’s ally for the presidency of Ukraine. But then he fell ill, with his face mysterious and suddenly spotty and the left side paralyzed. He also suffers from major abdominal and back pain. He said he was poisoned – with dioxin, a toxic chemical, no less – but Russian officials have long denied having anything to do with what happened to him. (Oh, and Yushchenko won the presidency.)

Anatoliy Medzyk / Sergei Supinsky / AFP via Getty Images

In 2006, two Russian agents placed polonium-210 – a highly radioactive chemical – in former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko’s tea at a London hotel bar (he had defected to the United Kingdom). It took weeks for Litvinenko to die, and he blamed Putin for orchestrating the attack.

“You can succeed in silencing one man,” Litvinenko said from his hospital bed, “but the cry of protest from all over the world will falter, Mr. Putin, for you for the rest of your life.” Russia continues to deny any involvement in Litvinenko’s death.

In 2018, the United Kingdom determined that Russian operatives had poisoned a former Russian double agent and his daughter in Britain with Novichok, one of the most deadly nerve agents in the world (which happens just as evolved by the Soviet Union), killing both victims in the hospital in serious condition. They have both recovered from the attack and are now in an unknown location – hiding out of fear of another potential attack.

And while poison is one of the most widely used killing tools, the Kremlin is not above using more prosaic methods. Boris Nemtsov, for example, was shot in February 2015. at the Kremlin. Nemtsov had been digging dirt on the government’s crimes, which may have put Putin’s allies to death. A man has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for the murder, but many critics believe the whole process was a shame and a cover-up by the president’s team.

The common thread among all these episodes, as Sipher already points out, is that it is unclear exactly how directly Putin may or may not have been involved. Plausible negligibility is baked into the cake of his authoritarian system. Anyone who works in government knows what Putin wants without having to ask explicitly. That means Kremlin operatives have the green light to pursue some of those goals – such as knocking out a political rival – while officially keeping Putin out of business.

That, in a sense, is how he gets what he wants without his fingerprints on the dirtiest actions of the government.

That Putin could have ordered Navalny himself dead, but it is equally possible that someone who wanted to make Putin happy did so on his own initiative. “Navalny has a lot of enemies,” said Judy Twigg, a Russian expert at Virginia Commonwealth University.

He has been jailed several times for protesting against Putin and was attacked twice with an antiseptic green dye in 2017. “It seems funny, but it hurts like hell,” Navalny tweeted about the attacks.

And last summer, while Navalny was serving a 30-day prison sentence for leading protests against anti-government, he was taken to hospital with symptoms of swelling, itching, and a rash. As the Guardian reported at the time, doctors at Navalny Hospital said they experienced an allergic reaction to something but did not say anything that was something.

However, one of Navalny’s personal doctors examined him, saying she was suffering from “the result of harmful effects of undefined chemicals … induced by a ‘third person.’

Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP via Getty Images

In other words, poison. There is still no official evidence for foul play (of course).

But beyond this highly suggestive history, there are two other potential clues to context that point the finger in Putin’s direction in this latest incident.

First, if the FSB did indeed put pressure on the Omsk hospital, as Navalny associate Milov claimed, it would mean that Putin, as someone close to him, is deeply concerned about how Navalny’s situation is being handled.

Twigg told me that it is certain that the FSB was involved. “The FSB would certainly be very involved in a situation where there is contact with foreigners,” Twigg said, especially since state employees – who include most Russian medical personnel – have to report their contacts with international visitors, such as the German doctors.

Of course, any state security officials involved could simply have followed protocol by putting themselves in a situation that would clearly receive worldwide attention. But her suspicious role in keeping the German doctors from seeing Navalny at first, as true, could mean that they were trying to hide something – like, say, all evidence of poisoning by the vein of the opposition figure.

Second, things are not looking too great for Putin at the moment. He oversees one of the world’s worst outbreaks of coronavirus, facing protests that cast doubt on his leadership, and observes how his ally in Belarus is making national calls to resign. With all that instability, Putin may want to direct his main political rival to send a strong message.

“This is an escalation and a sign that the regime is fearful and eternal to stress once and for all,” said Alina Polyakova, president of the Center for European Policy Analysis.

If that was the plan, it is unclear whether it will really work. If Navalny recovers, he may have even more credibility to form a larger opposition movement against Putin as a result of the suspected attack, experts say. Instead of losing his biggest political rival, Putin (or whoever was in charge) could have just made him more powerful.

Whether Navalny jumps back and is able to exercise that power when he does is something many in and outside Russia – and certainly many in the Kremlin – will be waiting to see.

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