New evidence indicates that Russian President Vladimir Putin was responsible for the recent Novichok nerve-agent poisoning of investigative journalist and human rights activist Alexei Navalny.
Traces of Novichok were found on one of the water bottles in Navalny’s room at the Xander Hotel in Tomsk, Russia, according to a German laboratory. It was shortly after leaving that hotel room on Aug. 20 that Navalny fell ill as he flew to Moscow. After an emergency landing in the nearby city of Omsk, Navalny was detained in a hospital for 36 hours. The Kremlin’s FSB precipitated that detention, pressuring Omsk doctors into ruling out any poisoning and refusing a request from Navalny’s medical team that he be transported to a hospital in Berlin, Germany.
After international pressure grew, the Kremlin gave in and allowed Navalny to leave. Presumably, they judged it better to blame his condition on a Western conspiracy rather than to tip their culpability hand by refusing to release him even after his medical team requested so. The Berlin hospital then confirmed that traces of Novichok, a highly concentrated and lethal nerve agent, were found in his system. As I noted last week, intelligence reporting strongly indicates Putin’s culpability.
But why is the water bottle finding so important?
For one, because the smearing of the water bottle is exactly the same means by which Russia’s GRU military intelligence service poisoned former British intelligence agent Sergei Skripal. In March 2018, that GRU team traveled to Skripal’s home and smeared Novichok on his door handle. The modus operandi here is to maximize skin penetration while leaving no obvious sign of an attack. But as with the Skripal attack, we see a callous indifference for the health of others in the attack on Navalny. After all, anyone assigned to clean the room after Navalny’s illness might have touched the bottle and also fallen ill.
In Skripal’s case, the GRU casually discarded its weapon delivery device, a disguised perfume bottle, where an innocent woman later found it and sprayed herself. She died.
Second, we know that the FSB had Navalny under close surveillance from the moment he landed in Tomsk to the moment he departed. Presumably, an FSB officer was also on the plane with him. This surveillance in place, how did someone gain access to Navalny’s hotel room without the FSB noticing? You can bet they would have bugged the room in case Navalny decided to engage in some extracurricular extramarital activities, an opportunity to gather compromising material on the longtime thorn in the Kremlin’s side.
Could the hotel have been in on the act? Doubtful. Tomsk Oblast government records show that the hotel is owned by an entrepreneur, Alexander Petrovich Vazhenin. While Vazhenin has two contracts with the Tomsk government, both are small. That said, Russian independent media have reported the hotel has an advanced security system and that one of Vazhenin’s business partners — I’m led to believe a majority partner — has links to the security services and local politicians. Tomsk Gov. Sergey Zhvachkin is also a close ally of Putin. This is not to say that Vazhenin is culpable, but the available evidence makes it highly unlikely that the FSB would not have been able to access Navalny’s room covertly.
In short, it appears that FSB officers or other state security service actors entered Navalny’s room when he was out meeting supporters. They then poisoned the exterior of his water bottle, departed, and waited for the inevitable illness. It is possible that they hoped Navalny would touch the bottle before going to sleep, thus almost ensuring his death. Their plot failed. So now, the Kremlin is promoting the wild idea that one of his party members might have been responsible for his illness. That is, even though the Kremlin still insists that Navalny wasn’t even poisoned.
