Alexey Navalny’s team was at breakfast in the Siberian city of Tomsk when they received word that the opposition leader had fallen violently ill on his flight home to Moscow.
The activists raced to the room in the Xander hotel he’d left hours before and scrambled to collect evidence. “It was obvious to us that Navalny hadn’t just gotten a bit sick,” they recalled in an Instagram post Thursday. “We decided to take everything that might be of use.”
A plastic Svyatoi Istochnik (‘Holy Source’) water bottle they picked up would weeks later be found by a German military lab to have traces of Novichok, the weapons-grade nerve agent first developed by the Soviets. The use of a banned chemical weapon in the Aug. 20 attack has left German authorities with little doubt that the operation was ordered from the highest levels of the Russian government, according to three officials in Berlin familiar with the findings.
Quick action by the pilot of his flight to make an emergency landing and the medical personnel that first treated him likely saved the 44-year-old’s life, German officials and his colleagues said. The sloppiness of his would-be assassins left a trail of evidence pointing to the Kremlin that Berlin could not ignore.
What Western officials call a botched attempt to kill a leading opposition figure has triggered a new downward spiral in Russia’s ties with Europe, and above all with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose patience had already been tested by President Vladimir Putin. Her government was grappling with how to respond to a 2015 cyberattack on the Bundestag and a 2019 killing in Berlin, both of which were ordered by Russian state actors, German prosecutors say.
Even against the Kremlin’s track record of malfeasance, the brazen targeting of a chief critic would be devastating to Putin’s already low standing in the West, a European diplomat said.
The Kremlin says it found no proof Navalny was poisoned and has rejected Merkel’s calls to open a criminal investigation. Russian officials have presented a variety of conflicting accounts of what may have happened, ranging from claims Navalny was merely sick to suggestions he was poisoned after he was taken to Germany in a medically induced coma for treatment days after the attack.
Western officials dismiss those claims. Calling on Moscow to answer for the attack, the European Union and others are weighing a response that could range from expelling Russian diplomats to more painful economic sanctions. Merkel has suggested she could even take action against the 9.5-billion-euro ($11 billion) Nord Stream 2 pipeline to carry Russian gas to Germany.
From his Berlin hospital room, Navalny has begun posting Instagram shots.
Known for his YouTube videos exposing official corruption and targeting the ruling party, Navalny has long been a target for Kremlin ire. Putin and other top officials go to elaborate linguistic lengths to avoid saying his name in public. Putin’s spokesman calls him “the Berlin patient.”
But while over his years of activism, he’s been repeatedly jailed for weeks at a time and attacked on the streets by opponents — at one point nearly losing sight in one eye — the poisoning attack marks the first clear attempt on his life.
The Kremlin has a long and deadly history of using such weapons to go after those who fell out of favor, with mixed success. The…
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