![2[1].jpg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/5abadf_f310244424a443b29215dadb17bba49b~mv2.jpg/v1/crop/x_5,y_0,w_1069,h_1080/fill/w_101,h_102,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/2%5B1%5D.jpg)
By Sasha Brown
What happened?
Alexei Navalny fell ill onboard an internal flight in Russia on 20th August. Not long after taking off from Tomsk in Eastern Siberia and bound for Moscow, the flight made an emergency landing in Omsk where Navalny, by now in a serious condition, would remain for three days before being evacuated to Berlin, despite Russian medics’ initial refusal to allow his release on the basis that he was ‘too ill’. Navalny remains in Berlin where he has been placed in a medically induced coma while doctors treat him for what they now say ‘without a doubt’ to be the symptoms of a nerve agent poisoning. As of 7th September, Navalny is reported to have emerged from his comatose state and is now responding to the doctors treating him.
Who is Alexei Navalny?
Navalny rose to prominence in 2010, first as a blogger, then as a vociferous anti-corruption campaigner. In the past few years, he has become one of Putin’s most staunch and high-profile critics, branding members of the president’s ruling party as ‘crooks and thieves’. Between 2011 and 2013, Alexei Navalny organised several major anti-Kremlin protests, galvanising a youthful opposition movement and culminating in his candidacy in the 2018 election. However, he was barred from standing due to an embezzlement conviction for which he served less than a day’s house arrest before the conviction was met with angry protests in Moscow and overturned by the European Court of Human Rights. Navalny has since remained a fierce opponent of Putin and his Kremlin cronies who have dismissed Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation as a ‘foreign agent’. While he has been a key opposition figure in Russia for over a decade now, Navalny has been denounced by other critics of Putin for his apparently nationalistic rhetoric.
Why does this latest poisoning matter?
Navalny’spoisoning is the most recent attack in a long list of similar incidents in Russia, which have seen opposition figures hospitalised and some killed in attacks suspected to have been sanctioned by Putin himself. Most recently and perhaps most memorably, the Salisbury attacks saw former double agent for UK intelligence services, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter taken ill in the cathedral city of Salisbury, bringing the attacks against opposition figures to the UK.. A huge investigation ensued and concluded that the pair had indeed been poisoned and that the chemical agent responsible was Novichok, a nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union during the 1970s and ‘80s. Toxicology specialists have expressed great certainty that Novichok was the chemical used to attack Nalavny. Unsurprisingly, Russia vehemently denied involvement in these most recent poisonings in much the same way as it had distanced itself from the poisoning of ex-FSB (Federal Security Service) officer, Alexander Litvinenko over fifteen years before. An inquiry found that his poisoning with Polonium-210 was again likely sanctioned at the Presidential level. Like Navalny, Litvinenko was a prolific critic of Putin’s Russia. While Skripal, Litvinenko and now Navalny are perhaps the most memorable victims, they are just three names in an entire litany of suspected poisonings at the hands of Putin’s regime.
Why is poison the weapon of choice?
What binds each of the above cases is the near impossibility of tying the crime to the Kremlin. This element of ‘plausible deniability’ is almost certainly what makes using poison as a method of silencing opposition so appealing to Putin. For those who have come to believe that responsibility does indeed lie with the Kremlin, the poisoning of critics both at home and abroad has become a uniquely Russian way of doing politics. The suffering caused by the chemical agent is invariably public - who can forget the sight of a jaundiced and emaciated Litvinenko in his hospital bed a mere twenty-four hours before his death? There is a macabre theatre about this sort of political violence. Mysterious from the outset, the unfolding drama is Bond-esque and tantalising.
What’s next?
Navalny’s fate remains somewhat uncertain. The German medics treating him are now convinced he was indeed poisoned by the Novichok nerve agent and Kremlin critics around the globe are adamant Russia, and thereby Putin himself, is to blame. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, US Democratic candidate Joe Biden and the UK have called upon the relevant authorities to ensure a ‘full and transparent investigation’. But transparency is not Putin’s strong suit, and until Navalny began to show the earliest signs of recovery, this latest poisoning was as easily denied as before.
Comments