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Western security agencies have privately concluded that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned by the country’s FSB national spy agency, in effect singling out the Kremlin for ordering the attack.
The harsh conclusion has been shared among London, Berlin and Paris, among others, and backs this week’s decision by the UK and the EU to target FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov with sanctions.
European leaders have been quick to accuse the Russian state of being responsible for the Navalny poisoning in August, but they remain reluctant to explicitly blame the agency they believe is responsible or President Vladimir Putin himself.
Western security sources, however, are confident of indicting the FSB in private, although the claim is difficult to prove.
On Thursday, the European Commission dropped the strongest track yet, explaining the reasoning for sanctioning Bortnikov in an official statement. He said Navalny was being “closely monitored by the Federal Security Service [FSB] from the Russian Federation during his trip to Siberia in August 2020 ”.
Given that the Russian politician had been watched by the FSB and had been poisoned with novichok, which is only available to Russian state actors, the commission said it believed the FSB was responsible.
“In these circumstances and taking into account that Alexei Navalny was under surveillance at the time of his poisoning, it is reasonable to conclude that the poisoning was only possible with the participation of the Federal Security Service,” the official report said.
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied any involvement. He has offered various explanations for Navalny’s disease, including the claim that he poisoned himself as a publicity stunt.
Navalny collapsed on August 20 while flying from Tomsk to Moscow. He fell into a coma and the plane made an emergency landing in Omsk. He was flown to Berlin three days later for emergency treatment and has since made a partial recovery.
The opposition leader has accused Putin of being “behind the crime.” In a recent interview, he said that only two Russian agencies could have carried it out: Bortnikov’s FSB or the SVR foreign intelligence service, led by Sergei Naryshkin. “This was done, of course, absolutely, according to Putin’s orders,” he said.
Navalny said he was poisoned with the Soviet nerve agent novichok inside his hotel room in Tomsk and fell ill about three hours later. Traces of novichok were discovered in a bottle of water by the bedside, although Navalny said she didn’t know exactly how it was administered.
He said that only a state body could obtain the novichok, which was developed during the last years of the cold war in a secret Soviet laboratory. Bortnikov or Naryshkin should have submitted an order calling for “active measures,” and Putin approved it, Navalny said.
Two sources say they believe the poisoning was carried out by the FSB’s Second Service (SZKSiBT), responsible for addressing terrorism, extremism and internal political threats on behalf of the Kremlin. They suggest that the operation was not designed to kill Navalny, but to send him an unequivocal warning and force him into exile.
The sources, speaking with the Dossier Center, a London-based investigative unit, said the novichok’s choice was deliberate. The FSB presides over a wide variety of poisons, many of them unknown. If he had wanted to kill Navalny, he could have done so, they stressed.
Andrei Soldatov, an expert in Russia’s security services, said the Second Service’s involvement was “completely plausible.” It is led by General Alexei Sedov, a former KGB officer from St. Petersburg. He has known Putin since the 1990s and is said to be a longtime confidant.
The service closely follows the model of the KGB Fifth Directorate. In communist times, the ideological department supervised dissident intellectuals. These days, his mandate includes a department for the fight against terrorism, allegedly involved in extrajudicial executions in the North Caucasus.
In early October, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed that Navalny had been poisoned with novichok, which can cause a heart attack or suffocation if administered in a high enough dose.
The same poison was used against Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England. According to the British government, two undercover assassins working for the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU, stained novichok on the door handle of Sergei Skripal’s home. The Skripal, who survived, were treated with the antidote atropine, which was also used on Navalny.
A local woman, Dawn Sturgess, died two months later after spraying the poison, which had been hidden in a perfume bottle, on her wrists.
This week, the British Foreign Office said: “The UK and its partners have agreed that there is no plausible explanation for Mr Navalny’s poisoning, apart from Russian involvement and responsibility.”
The foreign ministers of France and Germany have repeatedly used nearly identical language, complaining this month that Russia had not carried out a full investigation and that “so far Russia has not provided a credible explanation.”
On Thursday, the EU and the UK announced sanctions against Bortnikov and five other people who said they were behind the “assassination attempt” against Navalny. Bortnikov’s assets will be frozen and he faces a travel ban.
They also target Sergei Kiriyenko, the Putin’s administration’s first deputy chief of staff; Andrei Yarin, another Kremlin official; Alexei Krivoruchko and Pavel Popov, both Deputy Defense Ministers; and Sergei Menyaylo, presidential envoy to the Siberian federal district, where Navalny fell ill.
Another entity, the Moscow State Scientific Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology, was blacklisted. The institute develops chemical warfare agents.
This is not the first time that measures have been imposed on the FSB, the service Putin led in 1998-99 before becoming prime minister and president. Following the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 with a radioactive cup of tea, the Tony Blair government cut off all cooperation.
A 2015-16 public inquiry into Litvinenko’s assassination concluded that Putin “probably approved” the operation along with then-FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev. The two men who carried out the poisoning, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, had no personal motive for killing Litvinenko and were following orders from the FSB.
