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The German government has said that toxicology tests at Berlin’s Charité hospital have yielded “unequivocal evidence” that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent.
Navalny, a strong critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, fell ill on a flight back to Moscow from Siberia on August 20 and was flown to Berlin two days later.
Steffen Seibert, a spokeswoman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said in a statement that tests by a special military laboratory had shown evidence of a Novichok group nerve chemical agent.
Profile
Who is Alexei Navalny?
Alexei Navalny, born in 1976 outside Moscow, is a lawyer-turned-activist whose Anti-Corruption Foundation investigates the wealth of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
He started out as a Russian nationalist, but emerged as the main leader of Russia’s democratic opposition during the wave of protests that led to the 2012 presidential elections, and has since been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side.
Navalny is banned from appearing on state television, but has used social media to his advantage. A 2017 documentary accusing Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of corruption received more than 30 million views on YouTube in two months.
He has been arrested and jailed repeatedly. The European court of human rights ruled that Russia violated Navalny’s rights by keeping him under house arrest in 2014. Election officials barred him from running for president in 2018 due to a conviction for embezzlement that he claimed was politically motivated. Navalny told the commission that his decision would be a vote ‘not against me, but against the 16,000 people who have nominated me; against 200,000 volunteers who have been campaigning for me. ‘
There has also been a physical price to pay. In April 2017, he was attacked with a green tint that nearly blinded him in one eye, and in July 2019 he was taken from jail to hospital with symptoms that one of his doctors said could indicate poisoning. In 2020, he was hospitalized again after suspected poisoning and taken to Germany for treatment. The German government later said that toxicology results showed that Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent.
Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent, was used to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain. It is a cholinesterase inhibitor, one of the class of substances that the Charité doctors initially identified in Navalny.
According to the German news magazine Der Spiegel, experts at the Charité sought the advice of Porton Down, Britain’s secret laboratory for chemical and biological weapons research, due to possible similarities to the Skripal attack of 2018.
The official German government statement described the attack on Navalny with a chemical nerve agent as an “astonishing act” and asked the Russian government to urgently provide an explanation.
Fast guide
What is novichok?
Novichok refers to a group of nerve agents developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s to circumvent international restrictions on chemical weapons. Like other nerve agents, they are organophosphate compounds, but the chemicals used to make them, and their final structures, are considered classified in the UK, the US, and other countries.
The most potent novichok substances are considered more lethal than VX, the most lethal of the familiar nerve agents, which include sarin, tabun, and soman.
Novichok agents work in a similar way, massively overstimulating the muscles and glands. Treatment for novichok exposure would be the same as for other nerve agents, that is, with atropine, diazepam, and potentially drugs called oximes.
The chemical structures of the novichok agents were made public in 2008 by Vil Mirzayanov, a former Russian scientist living in the United States, but the structures have never been publicly confirmed. It is believed that they can be manufactured in different ways, including as a powder spray.
Novichoks are known as binary agents because they only become lethal after mixing two otherwise harmless components. According to Mirzayanov, they are 10 to 100 times more toxic than conventional nerve agents.
Seibert said the German government will inform its partners in the European Union and NATO about the results of the tests. He said he would consult with his partners in light of the Russian response on an appropriate joint response.
Navalny’s allies in Russia have insisted that the country’s authorities deliberately poisoned him, accusations the Kremlin dismissed as empty noise.
Russian doctors who treated Navalny in Siberia have repeatedly challenged the German hospital’s conclusion, saying they had ruled out poisoning as a diagnosis and that his tests for poisonous substances came back negative.
