Tag: russia

This investigation has unearthed large volumes of data implicating Russia’s preeminent security agency, the FSB, in tailing Navalny over a long period of time using operatives that have specialized training in chemical weapons, chemistry and medicine – a skillset inconsistent with regular surveillance practices. These operatives were in the vicinity of the opposition activist in the days and hours of the time-range during which he was poisoned with a military-grade chemical weapon. They were in the vicinity of Navalny on at least one other occasion when a family member felt inexplicable symptoms consistent with a non-lethal, accidental dosage of the same toxin. They had previously tailed the opposition figure on over 37 trips in the last four years. Given this implausible series of coincidences, the burden of proof for an innocent explanation appears to rest purely with the Russian state.

Perhaps the most macabre proof of the dysfunction in Tomsk came when, according to local media, a family picked up the body of their beloved aunt, who, as they had been told, died at Medical-Sanitary Unit Number Two. Just before burying her, they wanted to say a last farewell, and opened the lid of the casket—only to see that it was not their aunt at all but, rather, the body of an elderly woman whom they did not recognize. They rushed back to the city morgue, where administrators argued with them that a person can change in appearance after death—before eventually admitting their mistake. The family’s aunt was alive and being treated back at Medical-Sanitary Unit Number Two. They found her in a room, flipping through some magazines.

Because you think rationally. There are a million ways to isolate someone or kill them, but this is like some trashy thriller. I find myself living inside of a James Bond movie. If you told me that they planned to kill me using Novichok and administer it in such a way that I would die on an airplane, I would say that’s a crazy plan, because there are so many ways for it to fail. It’s like if someone asked me if I believe that I’m at risk for being beheaded with a lightsabre. I’d say no, even if I saw that someone I know is missing an arm and it looks to have been lasered off.

For all their uncertainty about the exact origins of the case, U.S. officials understood perfectly how the Kremlin wanted it resolved. Russia’s Ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, was “unbelievably explicit” in meetings with White House officials, according to the former U.S. official. Initially, Antonov proposed trading Whelan for three Russians in U.S. prisons: Maria Butina, a woman who had grown close to Republican operatives and National Rifle Association officials, and was convicted of acting as an unregistered Russian agent, in April, 2019; Viktor Bout, a notoriously prolific arms trader who was apprehended in a sting operation in Thailand, in 2008, and convicted by a U.S. court three years later; and Konstantin Yaroshenko, a pilot serving a twenty-year federal sentence for a drug-smuggling plot.

In the killing of Nemtsov, the trail appeared to lead to security forces and officials close to Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman ruler of Chechnya who makes a demonstrative performance of his loyalty, regularly calling himself Putin’s “foot soldier.” A Moscow court convicted a handful of Chechen men for the murder, but prosecutors declined to follow the chain of culpability any higher. Similarly, when Verzilov was poisoned, he had been looking into the killings of three Russian journalists in Africa, who themselves had been investigating the private army of Evgeny Prigozhin, a powerful businessman close to the Kremlin and the defense ministry.