I provided additional reporting to this Sunday Times article by foreign features correspondent Matthew Campbell, in addition to writing a panel detailing Russia's history with poison. Both are reproduced below from the original article available here: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2019-08-04/world/alexei-navalnys-poisoning-shows-its-a-dangerous-time-to-oppose-vlad-the-venomous-ncjpzrdq9
The alleged attempt on the life of a political activist is the latest in a long line of attacks that benefit Vladimir Putin
Just as the dust was settling in Moscow after a noisy anti-government protest last weekend, Alexei Navalny, Russia’s leading opposition figure, was rushed to hospital from his prison cell. He complained that he had been poisoned.
Navalny’s alleged poisoning coincided with a ferocious police crackdown on the opposition which continued yesterday with the arrests of more than 700 demonstrators staging a “peaceful walk” in Moscow in protest at the barring of opposition figures from local city elections.
Chanting “Shame”, thousands of Russian opposition activists defied the ban on unauthorised demonstrations to answer Navalny’s call to join the protests.
Some saw in the sudden illness of Navalny a warning that the government was prepared to play rough.
Few in Russia were surprised: the number of Kremlin critics — or “treacherous spies” — who have died or fallen ill after unwittingly ingesting toxic substances, and sometimes having heart attacks, could fill a telephone directory.
Navalny, jailed for a month in the run-up to last weekend’s protests, which he was accused of encouraging, has become President Vladimir Putin’s chief bugbear with well-made videos exposing mind-boggling corruption among the ruling elite.
Could Putin, a former KGB man suspected of authorising the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko — the Russian defector who suffered an agonising death in London in 2006 after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium-210 — have wanted to kill Navalny?
Political life has proved a dangerous obstacle course for Navalny. He has been assaulted, sued and vilified as a dangerous agent of the West. His home and office have been ransacked.
In the summer of 2017 while campaigning for the chance to run against Putin in elections — in the end he was barred from taking part — he said: “The question people most frequently ask me, rather annoyingly, is: why are you still alive?”
Just as in every other case of poisoning, from Sergei Skripal, the former Russian spy whose doorknob in Salisbury was smeared with a nerve agent, to Vladimir Kara-Murza, who survived not one but two poisonings, the Kremlin has kept silent — with the odd exception.
When asked about the Skripal case on the eve of a meeting with Theresa May, then the British prime minister, earlier this year, Putin reiterated his belief that “traitors must be punished” — while complaining that the Salisbury poisoning had not been worth “all the fuss”. It sounded like a tacit admission.
According to some experts, poisoning leaves the government with room for plausible deniability in dealing with enemies of the state.
“One of poison’s great virtues for the politically minded murderer is the capacity to combine easy deniability and vicious theatricality,” Mark Galeotti, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said last week in Foreign Policy magazine.
“Even while the murderer denies any role, perhaps with a sly wink, the victim dies a horrific and often lengthy death. A message in a poison bottle.”
Navalny survived. Anastasia Vasilieva, his doctor, said she saw him in hospital on Monday and was convinced that his swollen eyes and the rash on his face and arms were the result of poisoning by an unknown chemical agent.
“I know his medical history. He has never suffered from allergies of any kind,” she said. “Whatever agent it was, I suppose they put it in his bed or pillow.”
She added that the alleged attack had caused excruciating pain and put Navalny in a “dark mood”, from which he had now recovered. Rather than kill him, the poisoning, she believed, was an attempt to frighten him.
“But Alexei is a brave man,” she said. “He is not frightened at all. It’s so stupid of them to think that they can intimidate him.”
She noted that he had been attacked once before, doused with a green dye as he campaigned in Siberia in 2017. It caused lasting damage to one eye but has not stopped him becoming the most constant and painful thorn in Putin’s side.
Vasilieva has sent Navalny’s T-shirt to a Russian laboratory to be tested for poison, sceptical about the authorities’ announcement that no traces had been found. She has every reason to be suspicious.
“If you’ve got very basic laboratory equipment, your chances of finding something are limited,” said Alastair Hay, a professor of environmental toxicology at Leeds University.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was known to have developed poisons as a way of taking out its enemies.
One notorious example was Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident who died days after being shot with a poisonous pellet fired from the tip of an umbrella on Waterloo Bridge in London in 1978.
Some experts believe that the same research may be continuing today as Russia dispenses with trouble-makers from Moscow to Salisbury, where the novichok chemical was brazenly smeared on the door of Skripal’s home.
Among those arrested yesterday was the lawyer and anti-corruption activist Lyubov Sobol, one of the opposition figures barred from running for local office. Her taxi was stopped as she made her way to the rally and she was driven off in a police van.
Some 1,400 people were detained last weekend. Most were later released but 10 face charges of fomenting mass unrest and violence, even if the protests thus far have been peaceful. They could face prison terms of up to 15 years.
Once a low-key affair, the vote for Moscow’s city council in September has shaken up Russian politics. The Kremlin is trying to prevent any opposition figure gaining a foothold on the political ladder, even a seat on the 45-member Moscow council. Boris Yeltsin, the former president, had used this as a stepping stone to power.
Some analysts argue that it is also intended to intimidate the opposition ahead of what many predict will be an attempt by Putin, who has ruled over his country for almost two decades, to reshape Russia’s constitution, allowing him to stay in office indefinitely after his term expires officially in 2024.
The 66-year-old president is limited to two consecutive terms, a restriction he sidestepped in 2008 by becoming prime minister temporarily before returning to the presidency in 2012. His shenanigans then prompted the biggest anti-Kremlin marches in decades. By all accounts he is determined to prevent a repeat, particularly while Russia’s 143m people are growing discontent with the struggling economy: some 21m are below the poverty line, according to official statistics.
Putin and his Kremlin associates have long lived in fear of an Arab Spring-like revolt or a “colour revolution” like the ones that did away with governments in Ukraine and Georgia.
Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, called the protesters a riotous mob. “He who cries the loudest takes the power?” he asked in a television interview. “We’re not in Zimbabwe, are we?”
State media claimed American and Swedish spies had stirred up unrest or that protesters had provoked police with a hail of bottles, rocks and rubbish bins.
It was even reported that one female opposition candidate, frustrated at not being able to register for the election, had got drunk and beaten her daughter.
By Matthew Campbell
Additional reporting: Noah Vickers
Trail of poison leading to Russia
The Kremlin’s long history of poisoning enemies of the state dates back to Soviet times, but analysts believe research on developing toxins for maiming or killing opponents still goes on, writes Noah Vickers.
One of the most notorious cases was that of Ukraine’s pro-western presidential candidate, Viktor Yushchenko. His food was allegedly poisoned as he ran for election in 2004. Despite permanent scarring of his face, he recovered — and won.
In the same year, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist critical of the Kremlin, lost consciousness after apparently drinking poison from a cup of tea. She survived — but was shot dead two years later in the lift of her block of flats in Moscow.
Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian defector, drank tea contaminated with polonium-210 in 2006. He died in agony after three weeks. “You may succeed in silencing one man,” he said in his final statement, “but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.”
Vladimir Kara-Murza, an opposition activist, survived two poisonings, in 2015 and 2017, suffering sudden kidney failure both times. In September last year, Pyotr Verzilov, an opposition activist claimed to have been poisoned after running onto a stadium football pitch during the World Cup final. He had to be rushed to Berlin for treatment, where he recovered.
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