The Kremlin critic makes a sound where the agent seems to admit the plot.
Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny said he tricked a Russian intelligence officer into accidentally admitting his and other officers’ roles in poisoning Navalny with a nervous agent this summer.
Navalny posted a 49-minute call online on Monday with the alleged officer, in which Navalny introduces himself as a senior Russian official.
In the audio, the man seems to confirm that he is part of a team of agents of the Russian internal intelligence agency FSB who poisoned Navalny and suggested that they exposed him to the nervous agent Novichok through his underwear.
The call was recorded by the independent investigation group, Bellingcat, which last week published a very detailed investigation that identified several FSB agents who it said had been part of a team that had been following Navalny for years. and that she was present in the Siberian city of Tomsk when he was poisoned.
Russia has denied any involvement in Navalny’s poisoning, and last week President Vladimir Putin tried to dismiss the Bellingcat investigation, insisting it was invented by US intelligence agencies.
Navalny and Bellingcat said they tried to call two of the alleged agents, including the man in the call, identified as Konstantin Kudryavtsev, a member of the FSB trained at a military biochemistry academy and who had previously worked at the ministry’s biological warfare institute. defense. They said the call took place last week, hours before the publication of the new Bellingcat investigation.
In the audio, Navalny introduces himself as “Maxim Ustinov”, a fictional assistant to the powerful head of Russia’s security council, Nikolai Patrushev. Navalny claims that he is appealing to members of the FSB team at Patrushev’s request to draw up an action report to understand why they failed to kill the opposition leader.
Kudryavtsev, who answers when Navalny calls him by name, is initially very cautious and repeatedly asks Navalny if he should speak on a safe line, but during the call, he slowly answers questions about the operation.
Kudryavtsev suggests that his mission was to ensure that no traces of the nerve agent were left on Navalny’s clothes, which were confiscated by local police after he was rushed to a hospital in Omsk. Kudryavtsev says he traveled there twice to “process” Navalny’s belongings “so that there would be no traces.”
He suggests that his colleagues put the nervous agent on Navalny’s underwear, telling him that he had been ordered there to focus his cleaning efforts.
“They told us to work on the inside of our panties,” he says.
Asked by Navalny why they failed to kill him, Kudryavtsev said he thought the plane he had taken had made an emergency landing and paramedics at the airport quickly gave him atropine, which counteracted the nerve agents.
“The situation has developed in a way that … not in our favor, I think,” he said. “If it had flown a little longer and not landed suddenly somehow and so on, maybe everything would have gone differently,” he said.
Kudryavtsev, several times unforeseen, refers familiarly to officers appointed by Bellingcat as part of the operation, including Colonel Stanislav Makshakov, a chemical weapons expert whom Bellingcat says phone records show have repeatedly spoken to others. FSB officers following Navalny.
He tells Navalny several times to “call Makshakov,” who can tell him more about the doses of the nerve agent.
Bellingcat said Navalny also managed to have a brief discussion with another FSB officer, mentioned in the appeal by Kudryavtsev, Mikhail Evdokimov, head of the Omsk agency’s local anti-terrorism branch. Evdokimov confirmed to Navalny – posing again as an official – that he had received Navalny’s clothes from Kudryavtsev, Bellingcat said, but refused to speak on an unsafe line.
On Monday, the FSB rejected the call as “false” and claimed it could only have been produced by “foreign security services”. In a statement, he said he was investigating it and suggested it could have consequences for the publication.
In his denial last week, Putin tacitly admitted that FSB agents put him on Navalny’s tail, but said that if he wanted to poison him, “he would be done.”
Journalists and one of Navalny’s colleagues, Lyubov Sobol, tried on Monday to visit Kudryavtev’s listed apartment. A crowd of police-driven buses arrived later and detained Sobol and took journalists out of the building.