Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s apparent poisoning by a chemical weapon amounts to “an act of domestic terrorism against citizens of Russia,” according to a senior U.S. ambassador in Vienna.
“Such incidents of violence against government critics have the chilling effect of silencing independent voices, which is the intention of an attack like this,” Ambassador Jim Gilmore, who leads the U.S. Mission to Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said, though without explicitly blaming the Russian government for the attack.
Russian officials have denied responsibility for Navalny’s condition after German officials reported that the anti-corruption activist was targeted with a poison from the same class of nerve agents used in the 2018 attempt to assassinate former Soviet double agent Sergei Skripal in London. Russian officials and allies such as Belarusian autocrat Alexander Lukashenko maintain that the controversy has been orchestrated by Western powers, but Gilmore suggested that Russian authorities have a clear motive.
“My Russian colleague rhetorically asked, ‘Who is to gain?’ And the answer is, anyone who doesn’t want to see the rise of freedom and civil society and wants the end of independent political activity in Russia gains from this act of domestic terrorism against citizens of Russia, who have the courage, even after prior attacks, to engage in Russian civic society,” Gilmore said.
Navalny fell ill on an airplane after traveling in Siberia, where his team has been chronicling corruption allegations against local members of the ruling party of the Russian legislature, which is aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin denied responsibility for the incident on Thursday. “I would choose words carefully when speaking about accusations against the Russian state because there are no accusations at the moment, and there is no reason to accuse the Russian state,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, per state-run media. “I cannot answer your question who could benefit from that person’s poisoning. As a matter of fact, I don’t think that anyone could stand to gain from that, if one just takes a sober look at things.”
Lukashenko, who has turned to Putin for aid in managing the mass protests that erupted after he claimed an overwhelming victory in an Aug. 9 presidential election widely deemed fraudulent, lent his voice to Kremlin denials as well by claiming to have evidence of a conspiracy involving German and Polish officials.
“As far as we can understand, it was a chat between Warsaw and Berlin,” Lukashenko said. “This proves that it is a fabricated story. Navalny was not poisoned.”
Navalny is in an induced coma at a hospital in Berlin, where he was transferred after Russian caregivers claimed that he suffered from “a sudden drop in blood sugar levels.” That anodyne assessment is at odds with the Russian doctors’ separate statement that they gave him two doses of atropine, a nerve agent antidote, according to a chemical weapons expert who investigated the Skripal case.
“If they gave him atropine, there must have been a reason to give it, and I think they have not yet explained why they gave him atropine,” biochemist Marc-Michael Blum told a Latvian media outlet.
