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An undercover assault squad working for Russia’s FSB spy agency poisoned opposition activist Alexei Navalny in August, after following him on multiple previous trips, investigative website Bellingcat has claimed.
Citing “voluminous” telecommunications and travel data, Bellingcat reported that the squad had secretly tracked Navalny since 2017. The operation apparently began after he announced plans to face Vladimir Putin in the presidential election.
The FSB surveillance team followed him to more than 30 destinations on overlapping flights, Bellingcat said. He may have first tried to poison him in July this year, when Navalny traveled to Kaliningrad for a romantic break with his wife, Yulia, he suggested.
During the trip, Yulia suddenly felt ill. He sat at a beachside cafe and managed to scramble back to his hotel. “I felt sicker than I have ever felt in my life,” she recalled. The next morning he had recovered.
A month later, Navalny flew to Siberia as part of his campaign to get voters to back anti-Kremlin candidates in the Duma elections. Collapsed on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, where Navalny was treated in hospital before being transferred to Germany.
German doctors confirmed that Navalny had been poisoned with novichok, the same lethal nerve agent used by two Moscow assassins against Sergei and Yulia Skripal. The Salisbury poisoning was the work of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, Downing Street said.
The Navalny plot, by contrast, was carried out by the FSB, Bellingcat claimed, an opinion shared by Western governments and agencies. He alleged that Russia had not terminated its chemical weapons programs, as it has claimed, but had hidden it under the guise of state institutes.
Three FSB officers traveled from Moscow to Novosibirsk with Navalny and then followed him to Tomsk, Bellingcat reported. At least five other FSB employees supported the mission. Some went to Omsk, where Navalny lay in a coma with a hospital ventilator.
Members of the unit communicated with each other throughout the trip, he said. There were sudden spikes in activity shortly before the poisoning, when Navalny left his hotel early in the morning Moscow time and headed for Tomsk airport. Novichok was later identified in a bottle of water in his hotel room.
Citing telecommunications and travel logs, Bellingcat said it believed the August poisoning had been approved “at the highest echelons of the Kremlin.” He suggested that Russia operated an internal assassination program, used against Navalny and other possible victims.
In 2016, a public inquiry concluded that Putin and the then FSB director had “probably” approved the polonium killing of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko. Litivnenko died after ingesting radioactive tea, delivered in London by two FSB agents.
One of the institutes implicated in Litvinenko’s poisoning is the Moscow Institute of Scientific Research No. 2, NII-2. It is also known as the FSB Criminalistics Institute or more colloquially as the KGB poison factory. Eight members of Navalny’s assault squad were based at the institute, Bellingcat said, citing data from the cell phone tower.
The officers were operating from a secure facility inside the institute, a squat, bleak beige building in southwest Moscow, it was claimed. The phone metadata placed the FSB unit at two additional sites, including a “secret and highly secure” FSB compound in the northern suburb of Mytishchi.
Bellingcat claimed that a senior military scientist, Colonel Stanislav Makshakov, oversaw the secret program. Makshakov had previously worked at a chemical institute in the closed city of Shikhany-1. It was here that Soviet scientists developed a new generation of lethal nerve agents, including the novichok.
Makshakov could not be reached for comment. The other members of Navalny’s suspected poison team came from various backgrounds. Some had medical degrees, others were experts in chemical weapons and special operations. They traveled using real and covert identities, depending on the task, Bellingcat found.
The Kremlin is likely to dismiss the latest Bellingcat scoop, which was published on Monday with the Russian website The Insider, as well as Der Spiegel magazine in Germany and CNN. Moscow says there is no evidence that Navalany was poisoned and adds that there is nothing to investigate.
Last month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suggested that Navalny may have been poisoned on the plane to Germany, or once he arrived in Berlin. Navalany, who has not yet returned to Moscow, has previously said that only the FSB or its foreign equivalent, the SVR, could have carried out the attack.
Despite official denials, the investigation is deeply embarrassing for Moscow, which in recent years has seen hundreds of its undercover operatives discovered. In 2018, Bellingcat identified the Salisbury killers as Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin. The couple flew from London to Moscow using real passports under false names.
Russian spies appear not to have embraced the 21st century digital information landscape, making their movements easy to follow. Navalny’s assault squad used burner phones, Bellingcat reported, but sometimes in conjunction with normal phones, which were traceable.
