Almost ten months ago, something happened that will remain in Russian history forever. It split Putin’s rule into a before and an after. You know exactly what that event was: the president of Russia ordered the poisoning of his main political opponent with a banned chemical weapon — Novichok.
In the months since then, we have heard countless versions and statements. Those statements kept changing, piling on top of one another, contradicting each other, but the stream never stopped. There was no poisoning. Navalny poisoned himself. Navalny was poisoned by his associates. Navalny was poisoned by Western intelligence services. Germany is not giving us the biological samples. It is all a provocation.
That raises an obvious question. You have to admit, it is a strange situation: fifty countries, the UN, the OPCW, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (all organizations of which Russia is a member) recognized that Navalny was poisoned with Novichok. And only one country — the very country accused of carrying out the poisoning — denies it. Even the most biased person would start to wonder whether something is off here. How did it happen that the whole world says one thing and Russia says another? A conspiracy? The biggest anti-Russian campaign in history? Maybe we should believe Russian officials when they say things are not so clear-cut?
No. It is exactly that clear. Throughout the ten months since the poisoning, we have followed the situation closely, gathered documents, gone to court, filed complaints, and, of course, investigated. We managed to uncover a great deal of new information and prove a great deal as well. We will show you all of it and, we hope, answer every question once and for all.
If you follow Russia’s national TV channels, then you know the main message state media keep pushing: that the “fact of Navalny’s poisoning has not been proven.” “Give us the evidence and we will investigate.” “We want to get to the truth, but the Germans and the Americans are preventing us.” This is the key position everything rests on. Versions multiply, accusations are thrown around. Whether there was a poisoning at all is presented as if it were still an open question.
We state with complete confidence that the Russian authorities know, and have always known, that Navalny was poisoned with a military-grade toxic agent. And it is not only those directly involved in the assassination operation who know this — everyone does. The FSB knows, from regional operatives all the way up to the generals and Bortnikov. The police know, having either covered up the traces of this crime or simply done nothing. The courts know, having issued dozens of unlawful rulings and refusals. The Foreign Ministry knows, and is now deliberately misleading the entire world. And the propagandists know too — they have been lying on television for months, fully aware that they are covering for a murderer.
Navalny’s real diagnosis was known from the very beginning. And knowing exactly what had happened, ministries and agencies, officials, diplomats, and Putin himself unleashed the full power of the state machine to conceal it. But they failed.
Every person has the right to access their medical records. If you went to a clinic or stayed in a hospital and received treatment, then of course afterward you can go and ask for your file: what was tested, what the results were, what diagnosis was made. Alexei Navalny has that right too.
Navalny was hospitalized in Omsk. He was taken from the airport by ambulance to Emergency Hospital No. 1. He spent two days there, receiving treatment, undergoing the first and most important tests, while doctors tried to determine why he had fallen into a coma. Crucial medical records remained there. They should have been handed over upon discharge — that is, on August 22, before he was loaded onto the medical evacuation plane. But nothing was given to him.
Our attempts to obtain those documents began as soon as Navalny regained consciousness. We made repeated requests — and nothing. Silence. The requests were simply ignored.
Then, on November 2, our lawyers Ivan Zhdanov and Vyacheslav Gimadi simply went to the Omsk hospital. No invitation, no warning.
The element of surprise did its job. At first our lawyers spoke to the hospital administration, and they were told that the medical file was in the archive and would be released later — in a week or so — after they discussed it with the chief physician and retrieved it from storage. Procedure, you understand. Ivan and Slava were not satisfied with that answer, so they went to the archive themselves and asked for the file. They had the most powerful weapon available in their hands. They said everything had been cleared with management. Permission had been granted. And thanks to that magic phrase — the password that opens every door in Russia — they were allowed to photograph everything that was in the archive that day. That is how we obtained copies of all of Navalny’s medical documents stored in the Omsk hospital. And until today, no one knew we had them.
A month later, we were given the same medical file, but this time officially. In the presence of a notary, the chief physician solemnly handed over the documents. “Here you go, we have nothing to hide.”
You can imagine our surprise when we discovered that the two sets of documents differed from each other. The medical file we received officially had been edited, altered, and stripped of key documents.
Let’s take a closer look. We compiled a table of discrepancies so we could determine exactly what had been added to the official version and what had been removed from the unofficial one.
We asked three independent, highly qualified Russian doctors to solve this medical puzzle — to figure out why all these manipulations had been carried out, and what logic lay behind them.
Most of the changes are minor. It is strange that they were made at all, since the medical file had long since been archived and should already have been in its final, complete form. In both versions, according to the doctors, there is already enough data to make a diagnosis with complete confidence: organophosphate poisoning. All the conclusions about metabolic disorders, pancreatitis, and other natural health problems are absurd. It is not even clear why they are being considered. But the most important point is something else. The version officially given to us is missing one very important document. Here it is:
This is Navalny’s blood biochemistry report from the Sklifosovsky Institute in Moscow. The crooks in Omsk simply threw it out, hid it from us, as if it had never existed. But it did exist, and it recorded a critical drop in cholinesterase levels. Together with the other symptoms described in the medical file, that confirms a diagnosis of poisoning by cholinesterase inhibitors with complete certainty.
The test is dated August 25, 2020. That means that after Alexei was discharged, and the day after Charité announced that Navalny had been poisoned, Russian specialists carried out the exact same test. And they found the same thing. It was added to the medical record, sent to Omsk, and almost certainly reported to the Health Ministry, the security services, and everyone else who could be informed. With the caveat that the Germans later identified the specific substance as Novichok, the clinical picture before both Russian and German doctors was the same: poisoning.
To appreciate once again the sheer level of brazenness, lying, and eagerness to please superiors, look at this photograph, taken in November (you can watch the full footage in our video). It shows Alexander Sabaev, the chief toxicologist of both the hospital and the Omsk region, holding Navalny’s August test results from the Sklifosovsky Institute.
This is the very man who, over and over again for months, without batting an eye, assured everyone that he ruled out Navalny’s poisoning. That it was a metabolic disorder. It was Sabaev who said that Navalny fell into a coma because he was overtired, or had drunk too much, or overheated, or simply had not eaten breakfast. He said those words on September 4 — by which point he had already had the Sklifosovsky test results showing a critical drop in cholinesterase for two weeks.
We therefore state the following:
First. Navalny’s medical records were falsified before being handed over in order to conceal the real picture. And we have proof of that falsification.
Second. Right now, in Omsk, there is enough material — test results, records, examination findings — to make an unequivocal diagnosis: poisoning by an organophosphate substance. These tests were conducted by Russian specialists, in Russian laboratories, on biological samples taken from Navalny while he was in Omsk. And nothing else, not a single additional piece of paper, is needed to open a criminal case.
Medical records are far from the only evidence of Navalny’s poisoning that Russia possesses.
First, the hotel surveillance footage. Where is it? This is the first and most obvious thing the Tomsk police should have been interested in. If you want to verify a report of a crime, you look at what was happening in the hotel at the time. But the footage somehow disappeared. Propagandists were given all kinds of exclusives: external surveillance footage, street camera data, medical documents — anything at all, except the hotel video. We were told that Navalny had been drinking, using drugs, that he was not alone in the room. The surveillance cameras — and there were several in the corridor outside Navalny’s room — contain the answers to every possible question. Where are the recordings?
And there is another obvious issue that has received far too little attention. Where are Navalny’s clothes? The clothes he was wearing on the plane when he fell ill? This topic seems to have vanished from the agenda, which is strange — because those clothes could be key evidence of the poisoning. Or of the staged incident the authorities keep talking about.
Alexei’s clothes on the day of the poisoning were taken by the Omsk transport police. They came to the hospital and drew up a report and an inventory of the items they were taking.
On September 21, Alexei Navalny demanded that his clothes be returned. His lawyers filed a motion: the preliminary inquiry period had expired, so return them. We got no answer, we went to court, and this happened over and over again. We were told that the inquiry was ongoing and the clothes could not be released. Now the inquiry is over, and by law they MUST return them. But they do not. They have disappeared. Strange, isn’t it?
The answer to what is going on comes from an FSB officer, Konstantin Borisovich Kudryavtsev. Early in the morning on December 14, we called him on his mobile phone. Using special software, we spoofed the number so it appeared the call was coming from the landline of the FSB reception office. Alexei Navalny introduced himself as Maksim Sergeyevich Ustinov, an aide to Security Council Secretary Patrushev. No such person exists. But Kudryavtsev spent 50 minutes reporting to what he thought was senior leadership, never realizing he was speaking to Navalny. We did not know this at the start of the conversation, but Kudryavtsev himself said that his job was to conceal the traces of the poisoning. He explained very clearly exactly what he did:
A torn bag. Wet clothes. Underwear, socks, a T-shirt, a mask — that is what Kudryavtsev says. Now let’s look at the seizure report:
An opened bag. T-shirt. Underwear. Socks. Mask. The items are WET. So there is absolutely no doubt that Kudryavtsev is describing the very same bag of belongings that was in police custody. Now let’s continue recalling his conversation with Alexei:
So. Konstantin Kudryavtsev flew to Omsk twice to treat Navalny’s clothes with chemical solutions. To wash them down, as he puts it. So there would be no traces left. He knows exactly what was in the bag of belongings. He explains it in such detail that we even learn exactly how he treated the seams of the clothing:
We learned that Navalny’s clothes were washed and specially cleaned so that no traces of Novichok could be found. And this was done by an FSB officer. Then he goes on to explain where he got the clothes and where they went afterward:
So the transport police handed the clothes over to Kudryavtsev. And after the treatment, the transport police took them back. The very same police force that was supposedly investigating the poisoning. The same police who later examined those items. They themselves, like a courier service, delivered the clothes for cleaning and picked them up afterward. And then they found no traces of poison on them. I wonder why.
We have established that medical documents were swapped out. We know that Navalny’s real diagnosis was known from the very beginning. We have missing personal belongings that the authorities refuse to return. We have a detailed account from the FSB officer who cleaned those belongings of traces of chemical weapons. This is more than enough to understand that there is no room for interpretation here — Navalny was poisoned, and what needs to be investigated is who did it. But for some reason, Russian law enforcement is not doing that.
That did not stop us — as you know, we conducted our own investigation. On December 14, Navalny’s YouTube channel released a 50-minute video, the result of joint work by Bellingcat, us, Der Spiegel, and CNN. If you have not seen it, or have forgotten the details, watch it again, because now there are new details.
At the time, we described in painstaking detail a group of FSB officers from the Criminalistics Institute who, for several years — since 2017 — had been following Alexei wherever he went. Work trips, family trips — they followed Navalny everywhere, including to Tomsk in August. We showed their faces and named their positions and identities, both real and false.
Several months have passed, and now we understand that there was one key mistake in that video. Right in the title. At the time, we did not know all the people who had tried to poison Navalny. And we did not fully understand how this system worked. More than that, we did not even know it was a system.
The failure of the operation to poison Navalny shed light on a long-running secret department within the FSB — a department for political assassinations that literally carries out executions. Regularly. It eliminates people the regime considers undesirable. Many of them are names you know well.
Take another look at this famous image.
These are the FSB officers we identified in December 2020 by cross-referencing data on their flights, phone calls, and the geolocation of their mobile devices. More than 30 times, in different combinations, these men traveled alongside Navalny, precisely mirroring even his most complicated itineraries.
And as we know from FSB officer Kudryavtsev’s account, each time they deliberately took different flights close in time, changed clothes, turned off cameras, and did everything they could to remain unnoticed.
But we did not find everyone. And we did not immediately understand the full scheme of how they worked. One important figure was missing: Valery Nikolayevich Sukharev, a senior FSB officer. He traveled around Russia alongside Navalny at least 15 times.
In the two-week period before and after the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, Sukharev was in constant phone contact with the poisoning team we already knew about. He spoke 47 times with Oleg Tayakin, the coordinator of the operation. He called Makshakov 11 times, and spoke dozens of times with Alexandrov, Osipov, and Kudryavtsev.
So this Sukharev turned out to be a crucial member of the assassination team, but at first we overlooked him — we did not know his alias and assumed he was someone insignificant. In the same way, we did not understand that he was not part of the Criminalistics Institute team (where all the poisoners we had identified worked). He serves in the FSB Service for the Protection of the Constitutional Order and the Fight Against Terrorism — specifically, in the directorate for the protection of the constitutional order. You can read more about this service here.
Our list of people involved in Navalny’s poisoning needs to be split into two parts. These are people from two different branches that work together. Some work at the FSB Criminalistics Institute, and some in this directorate for the protection of the constitutional order — for simplicity, we will call it the “UZKS.”
Officially, the UZKS deals with political matters — that is clear even from the name: protection of the constitutional order. They are supposed to monitor and track the activities of radical groups and extremists who pose a threat to state security. That is easy enough to imagine: some underground group, under radical slogans, decides to carry out a terrorist attack, kill someone, or take hostages. Should that be fought? Of course. But that is not what is actually happening.
In reality, within this directorate there is another secret department that handles killings. Depending on how exactly they want to kill a person — shoot them, throw them out of a window, or poison them — they find the necessary operatives. Because you cannot always kill the regime’s enemies in the same way; that would be too obvious.
In cases of poisoning, the Directorate for the Protection of the Constitutional Order uses the FSB Criminalistics Institute, under whose cover there is a clandestine laboratory working with chemical weapons. They are the ones responsible for Novichok.
You are probably thinking by now: this sounds like a fairy tale. A state cannot possibly have a special department for murdering inconvenient citizens. To prove to you that it can, we will show you how this department operated in other cases.
At some point, Vladimir Kara-Murza — a public figure, politician, and journalist — was deemed an enemy of Russia and a threat to the constitutional order. Why? How exactly could this man harm Putin? Kara-Murza lobbied for sanctions against officials — the Magnitsky Act sanctions.
Vladimir Kara-Murza was targeted for assassination twice, both times by poisoning. For several weeks before each attempt, the poisoning team from the Criminalistics Institute, together with the team from the secret department of the Directorate for the Protection of the Constitutional Order, followed him around Russia. Exactly as they did with Navalny. The same people. Kudryavtsev, the man we spoke to on the phone, accompanied Kara-Murza three times. Two attempts were made to poison him — in 2015 and 2017. Kara-Murza survived.
For reasons unknown to us, Nikita Isaev, the leader of the New Russia movement, ended up on the list of threats to Russian statehood. Isaev was not a particularly prominent figure, or even really an opposition one. He was a regular on television talk shows and seemed like a moderate, system-loyal critic of the regime. It is still unclear why they decided to kill him. But they did.
Poisoners followed Isaev on at least seven trips — to Sochi, Magnitogorsk, and Nizhny Novgorod. The same “dual” system was in place: first, the familiar team from the Criminalistics Institute — Alexandrov and Osipov (the same men who were also in Tomsk with Navalny) — and second, the team from the Directorate for the Protection of the Constitutional Order. From the UZKS, the same man who followed Kara-Murza followed Isaev. But unlike Kara-Murza, Isaev was successfully killed. He was on a train and died before doctors could reach the next station.
However, the UZKS assassination department does not limit itself to politicians. It eliminates anyone it considers dangerous to the state order. The same people who took part in poisoning Navalny also tried to kill the writer and poet Dmitry Bykov.
Dmitry Bykov fell seriously ill in April 2019. At the time, no one noticed — in fact, Bykov himself was not sure whether he had been poisoned or not. After all, maybe it was simply a health problem.
Despite the absence of an official diagnosis, doctors told Bykov that he had most likely been poisoned. But with what, where, and how remained unknown until yesterday.
And yesterday, Bellingcat and The Insider published a joint investigation into Bykov’s poisoning. Journalists found that for a year, the same FSB officers who followed Navalny had also been following the poet. They were the ones who accompanied Bykov to Novosibirsk in April 2019, where he was on tour with his literary lectures.
Investigators established that, most likely, on one of the days when Bykov was away from his room at the Domina hotel for a long time, his clothes were treated with a military-grade toxic substance. A couple of days later, Bykov put on some of those clothes, and soon afterward he fell ill. The symptoms fully matched those of Navalny after Novichok poisoning. The authorities’ response matched as well. They also refused to transfer Bykov to a hospital in Moscow, and his medical data and diagnosis were concealed.
Navalny’s poisoning and everything that followed is probably the biggest crisis in the history of the Russian security services. Not Salisbury, not Litvinenko, not the downed Boeing. This is the largest scandal of all, one that will absolutely end up in the history books. They tried to kill Navalny, and as a result it emerged that, under the banner of “protecting the constitutional order,” a state agency funded by taxpayers employs murderers. They are not killing spies or terrorists. They are killing Russian citizens on Russian soil. That is genuinely terrifying. We can see that anyone can end up on the regime’s threat list — an opposition leader, a regional journalist, a poet. If you do not support Putin, if you do not praise him at every opportunity, the Russian security services may decide that you need to be killed. That is a fact we all now have to live with.
And if this realization is only gradually reaching us, if we are only now beginning to understand the full scale of what is happening, then for people in power — officials, especially high-ranking ones like Lavrov, Volodin, or, all the more so, Foreign Intelligence Service chief Naryshkin — this is not news. They cannot not know about the secret execution department inside the FSB and about the fact that Putin’s personal enemies are being killed by the security services. And they make a conscious choice — to keep supporting Putin anyway. To do everything they can to make the Putin regime last forever.
In the case of Navalny’s poisoning, the effort to save Putin is being fought on two fronts. The strategy is mediocre, but well-practiced. On the one hand, they say there is no evidence and it is not our fault, that enemies are preventing us from getting to the truth. On the other hand — and this is just as important — they simultaneously put forward a million alternative versions, creating parallel realities in which anything at all could have happened to Navalny. Whatever their imagination can come up with.
And the first part of it — demanding evidence that Russia supposedly does not have — is especially outrageous. We have just gone through the evidence point by point, fact by fact. Can it really be that the Foreign Ministry, for example, does not know this? Who would believe that Lavrov does not know what happened to Navalny? Of course he knows. So they simply steel themselves and start lying. Shamelessly, brazenly, openly. Otherwise the Putin system will not hold. And without Putin, none of them remain either. The calculation is simple: if you lie enough, someone is bound to believe it.
The evidence is demanded first and foremost from Germany. This is designed to make people who are not deeply familiar with the issue wonder: are we being deceived? Are Western partners hiding something? If Russia needs the evidence so badly, why not just hand it over? It creates the impression that Russia is being mistreated, denied something it is entitled to.
This is a completely fabricated construct.
Germany did not investigate Navalny’s poisoning. It does not know, and by definition cannot know, the circumstances of this case. The crime took place on the territory of the Russian Federation. German police were not in Tomsk. German intelligence services did not inspect the crime scene. Germany has nothing to do with this case except that a man in a coma was evacuated to its country, they ran tests, and found Novichok in his blood. That is all Germany knows. And that is exactly what it says!
Pay attention to this trick. Lavrov and the Foreign Ministry constantly refer to some supposed obligation on Germany’s part (and that of other countries) to provide materials at Russia’s request. The Prosecutor General’s Office even claims that Germany is completely violating the convention on mutual legal assistance.
Now let’s look at that convention.
It is enough just to read the title and everything becomes clear: the “European Convention on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters.” This mechanism works only when the requesting party has opened a criminal case and is conducting an investigation. Russia did not open a criminal case into Navalny’s poisoning. So all these loud statements, insinuations, and snide comments directed at Germany are based on nothing. Germany cannot investigate a crime committed on Russian territory, and still less can it provide evidence for such a case.
Fully understanding how groundless and absurd their requests are, the Russian authorities keep making them anyway. Back in the fall, the Prosecutor General’s Office sent four requests: we demand that you Germans provide us with a list of Navalny’s chronic illnesses, tell us whether he has diabetes, what his glucose and ketone levels are. The prosecutors demanded copies of forensic examinations, that biological samples be taken from him and sent to Russia, that doctors from the plane and from Charité be questioned, that ACF’s head of investigations Maria Pevchikh, Navalny himself, and Yulia Navalnaya all be questioned. They sent 15 procedural demands, fully aware that Germany was under no obligation to provide them with anything. This was done simply so that later, on Russian television, they could say: the Germans are hiding something from us. The Prosecutor General’s Office literally writes exactly that: Germany is concealing the true circumstances of what happened.
Television also tells viewers that even the Germans themselves have doubts! And that too is part of a broader campaign aimed at sowing distrust.
There are several pocket pro-Kremlin deputies in the German parliament. These are left- and right-wing radical politicians who carry out especially valuable foreign-policy tasks for the Kremlin. For image purposes, for future splashy headlines — go to Crimea, defend Putin. In the case of Navalny’s poisoning, this mini-division deployed at full strength, which is why it is important to mention them. They send the German government formulaic inquiries: who was on the plane with Navalny? Was Novichok definitely found, or only a substance similar to Novichok? Was it on one bottle or two? And who brought them? Here are a couple of examples:
The German government is forced to answer these questions, and the obedient deputies send the information to RT and the Russian Foreign Ministry even before it is officially published. Clearly, maintaining such pocket deputies is not cheap for the Russian budget. But what will they not do for the sake of headlines?
With no less fury, Russia demands evidence from the OPCW. Those who watch television know for certain: the OPCW is deceiving us too, cheating, hiding something, and withholding data that rightfully belongs to Russia.
That is a lie. Completely, from beginning to end.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is an international body that includes 193 countries, Russia among them. More than that, Russia was there at the very beginning of the OPCW and was among the first to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention on which the organization was founded. So this is not some separate foreign institution — Russia is part of the OPCW.
The whole point of this organization is that it is independent. OPCW experts — the so-called Technical Secretariat — do not represent the interests of any particular country; they represent the interests of the organization as a whole. The mechanism works like this: any member state that needs something investigated requests the Technical Secretariat. Come, collect the samples yourselves, conduct your own tests and analyses in your own laboratories, and determine the facts. The point of the procedure is that the OPCW effectively puts its seal of approval on the findings and provides an impartial opinion. The full investigation report is given to the party that requested it, while the general conclusions are published openly.
That is exactly the procedure Germany followed in September. It asked the Technical Secretariat to come to Charité. A whole delegation arrived, verified that the man in a coma before them was Alexei Navalny, collected the biological samples themselves, and transported them to their own laboratories for analysis. As a result of that visit, the OPCW confirmed that Navalny had been poisoned with a substance from the Novichok group. Germany, which initiated the procedure, received the full report, while a shorter version was provided to all OPCW member states.
Forty-four countries immediately issued a joint statement demanding that Russia investigate Navalny’s poisoning. And how did Russia respond? By saying that Russia owes no one anything. An organization of which Russia is a key member says: we found traces of chemical weapons use on your, Russian, territory. Investigate it. And what does our representative say? That the OPCW is degenerating. That it is whipping up hysteria. That Germany has launched a political campaign against Russia. That the accusations are baseless, and that Navalny’s poisoning — by that point already confirmed by the OPCW itself — is merely “so-called.”
This is not a clip from a Solovyov or Kiselyov TV show. This official document, published on the OPCW website, is the position of the Russian Federation. Nothing substantive — only accusations that the whole world has turned against Russia. There is also a special section on the OPCW website devoted to Alexei Navalny. There you can find an interesting document, 70 pages long — correspondence between the OPCW leadership and the Russian side. If you read those letters in chronological order, it becomes absolutely obvious: Russia is doing everything possible to prevent the poisoning from being investigated.
So what happened? Germany suspected that Navalny had been poisoned with a chemical weapon. As an OPCW member, it called in the Technical Secretariat and requested an independent examination. The tests found Novichok.
Russia claims that Navalny was not poisoned, that his tests were clean. What is the most logical thing to do? Call in the Technical Secretariat and, using exactly the same procedure, conduct an examination. Which — if we are to believe the Russian side — would surely show that there was no trace of Novichok in Navalny’s blood in Omsk.
And, surprisingly enough, on October 1 the Russian side did in fact invite Technical Secretariat experts to come to Russia to conduct an investigation. Approval was received the very next day, and the procedure was launched:
Obviously, this was done purely for nice headlines. Because once you study the official correspondence, it becomes immediately clear: Russia never intended to request an independent investigation at all. In this letter, the Russian representative explains: you at the OPCW should simply come, and then we will go TOGETHER to St. Petersburg, to Laboratory No. 62 of the Research Institute of Hygiene. And there, in that specific laboratory, we will TOGETHER examine Navalny’s biological samples left over from his hospitalization in Omsk.
In other words, a joint investigation — OPCW representatives come to Russia and carry out the examination right there on site, under supervision and control.
But no such procedure exists. And the OPCW says so directly: we do not conduct joint investigations; the whole point of the Technical Secretariat is that it is independent — the party requesting the investigation does not take part in it. The experts conduct the analyses themselves, choose the laboratories themselves, and examine everything themselves, wherever and however they deem appropriate, in accordance with OPCW regulations. What kind of absurdity is this? What sort of joint investigation could there be on the territory of the very country accused of carrying out the poisoning? The OPCW leadership writes: we are ready to come, give us access, we will do everything ourselves and provide you with the results. Exactly as was done for Germany.
But no. Russia was not satisfied with that. In a December letter whose essence can be summed up as “whatever, enough already,” Russia’s representative writes that everything taking place is a conspiracy. That it is not even certain Navalny was poisoned at all. That this conspiracy is based on “the notorious Euro-Atlantic solidarity,” and that its goal is sanctions against Russia. And therefore the visit of the Technical Secretariat to Moscow is no longer needed.
And to demonstrate its mortal offense one more time, Russia bans the following people from entering the country:
- Jacques Maire — PACE’s special rapporteur on Navalny’s poisoning, whom PACE (of which the Russian Federation is also a member) sent to Russia to investigate.
- Berlin prosecutor Raupach — apparently because he responded “poorly” to the “requests for legal assistance” in the Navalny case.
- Swedish military chemist Åsa Scott — apparently she works in the very laboratory that found and confirmed Novichok in Navalny’s samples. She upset the Kremlin, which had been sure it was impossible to detect.
What conclusions can be drawn from this?
First, that Russian diplomacy is disgracing Russia. It is shameful to read how Russia’s representative writes to the head of the organization that found Novichok in Navalny’s samples that there is no evidence. How, in response to a request to follow procedure or a demand to investigate the Navalny case, he starts shouting like a market hag about conspiracy and Euro-Atlantic solidarity.
Second, it is enough to understand the procedure to see that Zakharova’s and Lavrov’s endless complaints that the OPCW is not providing them with something are empty noise. The OPCW provided the results of its investigation. What Foreign Ministry officials are demanding is the full report commissioned by the Germans. On what grounds, exactly? Order the same thing yourselves and use it. The Technical Secretariat was ready to begin work half a year ago.
The third conclusion, and the most important one: as recently as December, Russia was ready to invite the OPCW in and have Navalny’s biological samples — collected back in Omsk — examined in a St. Petersburg laboratory. In other words, Russia does have Navalny’s biological samples. So what, exactly, have we been demanding from Germany all this time?
The second front of the Russian authorities’ efforts is the creation of a parallel reality. And it is important to note here: the goal is not to offer any coherent alternative version of Navalny’s poisoning. First and foremost because that is impossible. The task is to throw out as many disconnected facts as possible on any subject at all. They may have nothing to do with each other, they may contradict one another. But that is exactly the point — to confuse people, especially people in Russia, and make them doubt.
Lavrov, for example, claims that he has reason to believe Navalny was poisoned in Germany or on the way there, on the plane. What reason? Unknown. He just does. On the plane, besides the doctors, were Yulia Navalnaya and Maria Pevchikh. Then the next stage begins — Lavrov says: “Pevchikh has surrounded herself with some kind of incomprehensible mystery.”
What mystery? Pevchikh went through Russian border control, where her departure was stamped and her belongings were inspected. But the same pattern is at work here. No one will learn any details, but someone will watch and remember: there is a mystery.
At the same time, another idea is floated: Yulia Navalnaya is a German citizen. Designer Artemy Lebedev publishes a document. It does not matter that three minutes later it turns out to be fake. Everyone will still discuss it, and then the pocket German deputies will ask the German government: is it true that Navalnaya has a German passport? Eight out of ten people will figure it out and laugh, but two will simply remember: there is something fishy about the Navalnys. That is how it works.
Another magnificent example. In January of this year, a certain Dr. Kozak appears on Solovyov’s YouTube channel, claiming to have analyzed a medical article about Navalny in The Lancet and found inconsistencies in it. Well, “appears” is a strong word... They simply show a photograph of some man while a voice is heard.
The point is that some doctor looked at an article published online and noticed that, among other things, lithium had been detected in Navalny’s tests. It does not even say how much.
And that was enough to set everything off. Lithium is used to treat psychiatric disorders. Vladimir Solovyov, TV doctor Myasnikov — they all start discussing how Navalny must surely have bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. They lament and gloat over something they invented themselves.
But then it gets even worse. This Dr. Kozak — let me remind you, just some random person — writes a letter to Lavrov. A remarkable letter, with questions like: “Why did Navalny recover so quickly?” and “Why are his pupils like that?” It also states that Navalny is a traitor, a scoundrel, a political pedophile.
Lavrov somehow happens to notice this appeal among thousands of others and responds to Dr. Kozak with an open letter in Rossiyskaya Gazeta. At this point, the madness of it all makes you want to scream. In his letter, Lavrov says Kozak’s message is so important that he is obliged to send it to the OPCW leadership and to the governments of Germany, France, and Sweden. Maria Zakharova, right on cue, asks: “Why aren’t you responding? Do you need a reminder? The whole world is intrigued by Kozak’s letter. Let’s get to work.” Those are direct quotes from the official spokesperson of the Foreign Ministry.
We found what the OPCW replied. They wrote: thank you for letting us know, but we will not comment on the opinion of some person from the internet.
And yes, Mr. Lavrov, if you have forgotten, let us remind you that the OPCW found Novichok in Navalny’s samples, so it is not entirely clear what there is left to discuss.
And of course, the queen of all conspiracy theories — the bottle.
How many times have you heard something about the bottle? Thousands? At some point, talk about the bottle pushed aside discussion of the poisoning itself. Hours of debate on national TV channels, comments from officials, footage from the airport, X-ray images of Maria Pevchikh’s luggage, dozens of questions from pro-Kremlin deputies in the Bundestag. And all of it — over nothing.
Law enforcement agencies seriously analyze and add to the case file this footage: Pevchikh buying a bottle of water at Novosibirsk airport.
This is presented as almost key evidence that Navalny was not poisoned. And it is obvious what they are hinting at: that Pevchikh herself bought the bottle and smeared it with Novichok.
We are telling this story once again — hopefully for the last time. As soon as our team that had remained in Tomsk learned that Navalny had fallen into a coma, they went up to his room and, in the presence of the administrator, took three bottles. They packed them, brought them to Omsk, and then, together with the rest of Navalny’s luggage, the bottles were flown to Germany, where they were handed over to the doctors at the hospital. Later, in the laboratories, it was established that traces of the exact same substance found in Navalny’s blood were present on the bottle — specifically on the spot where a person would normally hold it to take a drink. Novichok. Navalny touched a poisoned object and then picked up the bottle with that same hand. Moreover, traces were found not on one but on two bottles from the hotel. Pevchikh really did buy water at the airport — for herself.
As you may recall, for six months Russia conducted a preliminary inquiry into what happened to Navalny. At the end of it, the transport police stated that there was no evidence of a crime and therefore they would not open a criminal case.
We are showing you the result of that six-month investigation. This is an official document issued by law enforcement, and therefore it represents the final position of Russian justice. We are publishing it in full not because it is especially valuable, but because it is historical.
The scale of the work is striking at first glance. Five hundred and forty-two items were seized and examined, 262 people were questioned, and 94 locations were inspected. But what did they actually find? The first seven pages are mostly a description of Navalny’s movements with his team around Novosibirsk and Tomsk. Navalny’s clothes are mentioned — it turns out that on September 4 (that is, after Kudryavtsev’s visit), a forensic physical and chemical examination was conducted. No traces of anything whatsoever were found.
The climax comes on page eight. The conclusion of the months-long investigation: Navalny’s poisoning was staged. Its purpose was political provocation.
The participants in the staging are identified as follows: a “group of persons” who took the water bottles from the hotel room. They did not merely take the bottles, but carried out a “demonstrative act of entering the room.”
And the accomplices, of course, are Alexei and Yulia Navalny, who concealed his nonexistent illness and thereby misled the investigating authorities.
That is all. Refuse to open a criminal case.
Navalny’s poisoning could have become just another unsolved mystery. Yes, something happened, some people believe it, some do not. Everything is very ambiguous, as is so often the case with the most high-profile crimes of the Putin era. The mind of an ordinary, normal person almost rejects the possibility that the state itself kills: that those who order it sit in the highest levels of power, while the perpetrators and organizers are officials in government offices, drawing salaries from the budget and receiving awards and commendations in the name of the Russian Federation. That simply cannot happen — this is the 21st century, not the Middle Ages. Russia cannot have an official agency that kills its own citizens.
It can. It does.
The Russian authorities knew from the very beginning that Navalny had been poisoned. All the necessary tests were carried out. The fact of those tests and their results were concealed, and they lied to our faces — and continue to lie — about metabolism.
They are covering up the traces of the crime. Surveillance footage from the hotel disappeared or was stolen, as did Navalny’s clothes bearing traces of Novichok. Medical documents were falsified.
There was simply no investigation in Russia. Not formally, and not in substance. Instead, all efforts were thrown into confusing everyone by inventing a foreign conspiracy. They demand evidence from Germany and the OPCW while having all of it right under their noses. They demand Navalny’s biological samples even though those samples are in Russia. They try to inflate minor details, cloud the overall picture, sow doubt: something is being hidden from us, Navalny was actually ill, but what about the lithium? And then there are the bottles too — now that is a trump card! Let’s discuss that at the international level instead of discussing how Putin kills his personal enemies.
Obstruction of justice, criminal conspiracy, lies, document forgery. A huge number of people — from the top leadership issuing orders to provincial doctors and investigators carrying them out — are all taking part in this special operation. A special operation to save Putin. To preserve his regime.
People often say that situations are never black and white, that there are always shades and nuances — that there may be things we do not know or do not fully understand. But that is not true here. Navalny’s poisoning and everything that followed it is state terrorism in its purest form. Every act of terror has goals. The goal of this one was to eliminate Putin’s main enemy, the man who prevents him and his gang from stealing and ruling forever. And there was another goal, no less important — to intimidate all of us, to make us tremble before the very real prospect of murder and repression, so that we would stay silent. But of course we will not do that.
Freedom for Alexei Navalny.
P.S. The attempted murder of Alexei Navalny is not being investigated because all power in the country belongs to one man: Vladimir Putin.
In September 2021, elections to the State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament) will take place. Putin’s party, United Russia, wants to win all the seats once again.
Let’s not let them do that.
Take part in Smart Voting. Register on the website. In September, we will publish a list of candidates with the best chance of defeating United Russia candidates in each district.