‘This is a real terrorist act’ Navalny’s latest interview with ‘Ekho Moskvy’ about who poisoned him, in brief
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Yesterday, Bellingcat and The Insider, in cooperation with Der Spiegel and CNN, released a joint investigation revealing that a secret sub-unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) were responsible for poisoning opposition figure Alexey Navalny in August. While Russian state media and officials have had little to say about the report, Navalny himself has spoken out. Here’s what he said during a radio interview with Ekho Moskvy, in a nutshell.
I have no doubt that Vladimir Putin was in charge of the poisoning. We are seeing an operation involving dozens of people and several generals. FSB chemists and doctors, who are in communication with the producers of “Novichok,” followed me for four years. This is a real terrorist act, FSB director Alexander Bortnikov wouldn’t have done this without Putin’s order. They didn’t want to scare me, they wanted to kill me, they simply didn’t calculate the right dosage. Because it’s impossible to do this outside of a laboratory, it’s Russian roulette — there’s always a danger in putting more, then the person dies on the spot and others may suffer. I have an idea of where I was poisoned but so far the investigation continues. One theory is a cocktail at a bar. The FSB’s murder department is much bigger than this group that followed me — the Skripals weren’t poisoned by another group, these were different structures. We aren’t assuming — we know that the FSB is behind this, because we know how the FSB works. And we know that Putin operationally manages the FSB. I will still return to Russia. When this will happen depends not on me, but on the doctors.
You can listen to Alexey Navalny’s full interview with “Ekho Moskvy” in Russian here.
Summary by Grigory Levchenko
Translation by Eilish Hart
Cover photo: Sergey Fadeychev / TASS / Scanpix / LETA
(1) Navalny’s poisoning
Alexey Navalny was on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow when he fell violently ill on August 20. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, where he was hospitalized in a coma; two days later he was transferred to Germany for treatment. On September 2, German officials confirmed that Navalny was poisoned with a substance from the Novichok group of nerve agents. Navalny was discharged from the hospital on September 23. Russia denies any involvement in the poisoning.
(2) The Skripal poisonings
In March 2018, former GRU colonel Sergey Skripal — who was convicted of spying for Great Britain — was poisoned with a Novichok-type nerve agent in Salisbury, England, along with daughter Yulia. According to the British authorities, Russia’s intelligence services organized the assassination attempt. Moscow categorically denies any involvement in the incident. While both Skripals survived the attack, a woman named Dawn Sturgess died several months later after coming into contact with the poison accidentally.