Navalny’s poisoning in Russia has all the hallmarks of state-sanctioned murder
The sight of Alexei Navalny, 44, stretched out on the floor of a Russian passenger plane, struggling for breath – and very possibly for life – is a scene of human pathos, and political menace. Navalny, the most vociferous and charismatic of Vladimir Putin’s opponents had been campaigning for next month’s elections in Siberia.
He had been taken ill on his return flight to Moscow. He had been poisoned by something slipped into a cup of black tea at Tomsk airport – according to his supporters. The plane diverted to Omsk, where the now unconscious Alexei Navalny was hooked up to a ventilator at the main hospital.
Within 24 hours, supporters backed by a medical charity, the Cinema Palace Foundation, had brought an air ambulance to whisk him off to Berlin for specialist care in the Charité Hospital. There they know a thing or two about such cases, having dealt with several Russian dissidents suffering from mysterious poisoning ailments.
The director of the Omsk hospital said it would be too dangerous to subject the unconscious patient to a five-hour flight to Germany. By now he had a senior state security officer camped in his office, and more police officers in plain clothes and uniform than medical staff on the wing.
Vladimir Putin hasn’t commented, though his spokesman has said he wishes Navalny a speedy recovery.
On the face of it, this seems to fit the pattern of poisonings and assassinations of dissidents and critics, since the Russian Federation was born – and well before. One famous dissident, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, of the Pussy Riot punk quartet, told BBC Radio this Friday she was reluctant to rush to judgment and pin the blame on the Russian President.
Her former partner, Piotr Verzilov, claimed to have been poisoned twice. The most spectacular occasion was after he had helped Pussy Riot stage a pitch invasion during the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia. Nadezhda said that elements of state security were probably involved, but she suggested elements of the agencies had gone rogue and were maybe doing their own criminal thing.
For Luke Harding of the Guardian, who has followed the Russian political assassination trail since the murders of Alexander Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, and before, the “not proven” argument doesn’t wash. He has traced the pattern of official state denial and displacement in a series of books, including “A Very Expensive Poison” about Litvinenko, made into a brilliant play performed at the Old Vic last year. This summer he has produced a new book, “Shadow State”, which covers the Skripal poisonings in Salisbury in 2018, and brings the story up to this year. It is a must read for anyone grappling with the whole concept of operations, scheme of manoeuvre, behind the state assassination strategy of Putin’s Russia.
“This would need to have been signed off at the highest level – from the office of the top man,” Luke told me barely 24 hours after Navalny had been felled. “They are going to keep in Omsk because they don’t want a German hospital to identify and analysis the agent used on him. It is likely of military grade – and that would point to the state at the highest level.”
One hypothesis is that the authorities in the Omsk hospital are hoping that the victim’s body over time will expel the toxin – leaving little or no trace.
But if this is the work of Putin’s security services, and the FSB is the most likely, why make this assault on a charismatic dissident so obvious in such a convoluted way? Why does Russian’s leadership feel so insecure that it has to carry out such a crude public hit?
The attack is full of symbolism, no doubt. As with killings of the various mafias, the true terms of the warning can only be absorbed by a select few of potential and actual future targets and victims. It is surprising that a regime that is so adept at information operations, cyber-attacks, deception and fake news – black arts they seem to have got all but wrapped up – is so thin skinned. The critics bother them.
Luke Harding traced the story of how the Kremlin silences its critics, however minor and remote, to as far back as the poisoning of the Bulgarian dissident Giorgi Markov in September 1978. He was felled by a ricin pellet shot from an umbrella as he crossed Waterloo Bridge on the way to work at the BBC World Service. That was his crime – brilliantly effective broadcasts which upset the Bulgarian regime no end, and even more their puppet master, Yuri Andropov, the long time KGB chief and briefly geriatric USSR leader. He arranged the whole hit.
This century there have been dozens of strikes against charismatic critics – sometimes several times over. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya recovered from a deliberate poisoning only to be gunned down at point blank range in a lift at her apartment block on October 7th 2006. A month and a half later, Alexander Litvinenko died a hideous, lingering death from Polonium poisoning. The man accused of killing him, Andrei Lugovoi, was later elected to the Russian parliament, the Duma.
Altogether 14 notables have been targeted in Britain alone over the past 20 years. The most interesting and important for today, are those who made a major contribution to political debate, and the cause of human rights. Among the most important were Litvinenko and Politkovskaya, because of what they said and stood for. Litvinenko was a secret agent who turned double agent and campaigned for democracy and human rights.
Navalny was an associate of Boris Beresovsky, the most powerful opposition politician in Russia of his time, who was found dead in his Berkshire home in 2013.
Most curious, perhaps, is the case of Vladimir Kara-Murza. Still only 38, this scion of an aristocratic Tatar family, is still with us, despite a poison attack which may shed important light on the current Navalny story. A Cambridge History graduate, Kara-Murza also assisted Boris Nemtsov. Three months after his friend’s murder, Kara-Murza was poisoned himself. His wife managed to get him to Berlin for treatment, only for him to suffer a similar attack in February 2017. His records appear to be with the Charité Hospital in Berlin.
He became coordinator of the Open Russia Foundation dedicated to education in democracy. One of his most significant contributions to democracy and rights was his role in helping the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Accountability Act (2012) get through Congress. It holds any Russian official connected to a major state crime such as targeted assassination as liable to prosecution under US jurisdiction. The architects want this to be extended throughout Europe.
The most eccentric element in these crimes of murder and mayhem, is the almost surrealist clownish aspect. Most are extremely clumsy. Take the Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in March 2018. Within days the two Russian GRU operatives were identified as Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga and Dr Alexander Mishkin. They had been unmasked by the Bellingcat investigative website, which also revealed that at GRU major general had been in UK at the time of the operation. More astonishing was the analysis by experts that the Novichok, a military nerve agent, had been used in battlefield concentration.
Why? The message to Skripal and his like who had moved to the West was obvious – your old state will get you. The Kremlin will get you.
Yet there is little Machiavellian cunning about the whole approach. The tragedy in Salisbury was followed by the farce of GRU agencies trying to hack the computers of the Office for the Prevention of Chemical Warfare – OPCW – in the Hague. They were caught with gadgets in an open car boot rammed against a fence adjoining the agency office. The agents had come in to the Netherlands on forged passports with sequential serial numbers.
Luke Harding believes that much of this is known at the top in Moscow, if not signed off at the top. It is surprising, in a way, that Vladimir Putin is so worried by the dissidents, who are relatively powerless in practical terms. Like other narcissistic leaders, perhaps, he has to show over and again that he really is the winner – as if somewhere a still, quiet inner voice might suggest impostor syndrome.
It is as if, in the terms of the most famous chapter of Machiavelli’s The Prince, he cannot decide whether he wants to be feared or loved. Waver, as the old Florentine knew, and you begin to lose respect.
For Alexei Navalny, it’s the diary of a hit foretold. As Luke Harding explains: “we have seen the gruesome movie before.”