NYT, Dec. 15, 2020
Russian Officers Were Near Navalny When He Was Poisoned, Report Says
The agents, from a unit with poisonous chemicals expertise, were tracked
by their telephones, the Bellingcat investigative group said, the
strongest evidence of Moscow’s involvement in the nerve agent attack.
By Michael Schwirtz
Officers from a secret Russian spy unit with expertise in poisonous
substances trailed the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny for
years and were nearby at the time he was exposed to a highly toxic nerve
agent that almost killed him last summer, according to a report by
Bellingcat, a research group that specializes in open-source investigations.
The report, which involved an analysis of telephone metadata produced by
operatives from the spy unit together with flight information obtained
by Bellingcat, provides the strongest evidence to date that the Russian
government was behind the assassination attempt against its most
vociferous and well-known critic.
According to the report, three officers from the Federal Security
Service, Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, followed Mr. Navalny to
Siberia in August where the opposition leader was meeting with
supporters in preparation for local elections. They trailed him to the
Siberian city of Tomsk where, just after midnight on Aug. 20, telephone
metadata showed one of the operatives not far from the Xander Hotel,
where Mr. Navalny and his team were staying.
Hours later, shortly after taking off on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow,
Mr. Navalny was heard screaming in the airplane bathroom before
collapsing, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing. By the time
he arrived at a hospital in Omsk, another Siberian city, he was in a coma.
Bellingcat’s report, which was published together with the Russian news
outlet, The Insider, and in conjunction with reports from CNN and Der
Spiegel, also uncovered links between the spy unit and a broader
program to use chemical weapons in assassinations that is run by the
Federal Security Service, known as the F.S.B.
There was never any doubt that the Russian government was behind the
poisoning, according to Western security officials. Mr. Navalny’s
political activism, together with his extensive investigations into
corruption by the Russian leadership, has long rankled the Kremlin.
After initially preventing Mr. Navalny’s team from taking him abroad for
treatment, Russian officials eventually allowed him to be flown to
Berlin. He spent almost a month in a coma but survived.
In Germany, officials with assistance from Western spy agencies quickly
surmised what had occurred. German military scientists determined that
Mr. Navalny had been poisoned with a Russian-made toxin from the
Novichok family of nerve agents. Those results were confirmed by labs in
France and Sweden as well as by the Organization for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons, the global chemical weapons watchdog. Two years
earlier, Russian operatives traveled to England where they used a
similar substance in an assassination attempt against Sergei V. Skripal,
a former Russian military intelligence officer who for years had spied
for the British government.
Shortly after Mr. Navalny’s arrival in Berlin, representatives from the
Central Intelligence Agency and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service
provided members of the German government with details about the
poisoning, including the identities of the Federal Security Service
officers involved, that directly implicated the Russian government,
according to the senior German security official with knowledge of the
matter.
The Kremlin did not immediately comment on the report. In the past,
Russian officials have strenuously denied that the government had any
role in poisoning Mr. Navalny and have spun a series of outlandish
alterative theories, including that it was the German government that
was somehow responsible.
Mr. Navalny, who remains in Germany recuperating, released a 52-minute
video to correspond with the publication of the report. In it, he
directly accused President Vladimir V. Putin of using the security
services to murder political opponents, while abetting massive
corruption. But he also taunted the Kremlin for expending enormous
resources to kill him and failing.
“There is no reason to be surprised here,” he said. “After 20 years of
Putin’s leadership everything is degrading.”
“If for example the health care system is at such a level that people
are dying in hospital corridors,” he continued, “then the same thing is
happening in the sphere of secret operations.”
Since at least January 2017, around the time Mr. Navalny started a
campaign to challenge Mr. Putin in national elections, operatives from
the F.S.B.’s Research Institute — 2, also known as military unit 34435,
have trailed the opposition leader closely, according to Bellingcat.
Between 2017 and 2020, telephone metadata and travel booking information
shows that members of the unit followed him on 37 trips by plane or
train throughout Russia. They typically traveled in groups of two or
three, sometimes buying tickets under their own names, sometimes under
aliases.
Bellingcat obtained the data used in the report from caches of leaked
Russian databases of personal information.
As Mr. Navalny pursued his ultimately failed bid for the presidency in
2017, only once did members of the F.S.B. team trailing him take a trip
that did not overlap with his campaign. On April 27, Mr. Navalny had
planned to travel to the southern Russian city of Astrakhan, but
canceled the trip at the last minute because of an eye injury he
suffered when someone threw green antiseptic liquid in his face. The
sudden cancellation appeared to have caught two members of the spy unit
off guard, and they flew to Astrakhan without Mr. Navalny, according to
flight records.
Telephone data obtained by Bellingcat indicates that the Federal
Security Service unit operates out of a facility located at a Moscow
address, Akademika Vargi 2, which appears to be the same location of a
secret K.G.B. laboratory that specialized in the development of poisons.
In 2004, the former K.G.B. general Oleg Kalugin described the facility
in an interview with the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta as “one of the
agency’s most secretive sites.” Years later, Russian government
documents leaked to the news media indicated that the facility might
have been used to store the radioactive isotope, Polonium-210, that was
used in the 2006 murder of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former Federal
Security Service officer living in exile in London.
It is not clear when the Russian government decided to try to poison Mr.
Navalny, though in its investigation Bellingcat uncovered evidence of at
least one earlier attempt. Two months before Mr. Navalny was poisoned in
Siberia, he and his wife, Yulia, took a vacation to a spa-hotel in the
Kaliningrad Region, an island of Russian territory wedged between
Poland, Lithuania on the Baltic Sea. There, his wife suddenly became ill
with symptoms similar to those later experienced by Mr. Navalny, but
quickly recovered. Bellingcat determined that three members of the
Federal Security Service poison unit had traveled with them.
On Aug. 12 this year, three members of the spy unit purchased one-way
tickets on flights for the following morning to the Siberian city of
Novosibirsk, where Mr. Navalny planned to meet with supporters involved
in upcoming local elections, according to Bellingcat. One of them,
Vladimir Panyaev, who traveled under his own name, is registered as
living in an apartment in the same building as Mr. Navalny, according to
Bellingcat. The two others, Alexey Alexandrov and Ivan Osipov, both
medical doctors by training, traveled under aliases.
Though the operatives made a series of calls to their Moscow
headquarters in the hours before they departed to Siberia, the calls
stopped after their flights took off. Bellingcat suspects they switched
to different phones for additional security while the operation to
poison Mr. Navalny was underway.
But one of the operatives, Dr. Alexandrov, made an operational mistake,
according to Bellingcat. On two occasions, he briefly switched on his
personal cellphone, allowing Bellingcat researchers, armed with
telephone metadata, to pinpoint his location. The first time, on Aug.
14, showed him in the vicinity of the hotel in Novosibirsk Mr. Navalny
planned to check into later that day. The second time, on Aug. 19,
indicated that he was near the hotel in Tomsk where Mr. Navalny was
likely poisoned. His phone exchanged a single byte of data with the
local cellphone network at 12:58 a.m.
That morning, Mr. Navalny departed Tomsk on a flight to Moscow. He began
to feel the effects of the poison 30 minutes after takeoff.
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