I laced your undies with novichok
What duped Kremlin agent admitted in phone call with poisoned Putin rival
RUSSIAN opposition l eader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with novichok nerve agent applied to his underwear, one of his Kremlin hit squad unwittingly revealed.
Mr Navalny, one of President Vladimir Putin’s most outspoken critics, fell ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow in August.
Now recovering in Germany, he posed as a senior official from Russia’s FSB security service as he called members of the alleged assassination team, he revealed yesterday.
One put the phone down on him, telling Mr Navalny: ‘I know exactly who you are,’ but another, alleged to be part of the ‘clean-up crew’, spilled the beans for
‘They are dumb and dangerous’
nearly 50 minutes, apparently thinking he was talking to a superior.
Mr Navalny posted a video on his YouTube channel called ‘I called my killer. He confessed’ which showed him speaking on the phone to one of the alleged Russian hit squad.
The man was Konstantin Kudryavtsev, a chemical weapons specialist, who had been identified by investigative website Bellingcat last week as one of a number of agents r e portedly i nvolved in hi s attempted murder.
Mr Navalny said he called Kudryavtsev from a disguised phone number and claimed he was as an aide to Moscow’s Security Council chief Nikolai Patrushev.
He told Kudryavtsev he needed information for an official report on the attempted poisoning – and where i t had gone wrong.
Kudryavtsev claimed he was part of a clean-up operation that was sent to Omsk, in Siberia, where Mr Navalny was initially in hospital, to remove any trace of the poison from his clothing.
He also detailed how the agents applied most of the toxin to Mr Navalny’s underwear.
When asked where exactly, Kudryavtsev said: ‘ The i nner, where the groin is... The crotch, as they call it. There is some sort of seams there, by the seams.’ Mr Navalny asked who had instructed the agents to apply the poison to ‘the codpiece’, to which Kudryavtsev replied: ‘We figured this on our own. They told us to work on the inner side of the underpants.’
It is thought the nerve agent – the same as that used in the 2018 Salisbury poisoning – was administered in the form of a spray or ointment, either with FSB agents sneaking into his hotel room while he was out or getting to his clothes while they were being laundered.
It had been thought that the poison was in a water bottle in Mr Navalny’s room or in tea he drank before boarding his flight.
Bellingcat, CNN, German newspaper Der Spiegel and Russian website The Insider were given access to Mr Navalny’s account and published reports yesterday.
Russian journalist Irina Borogan wrote on Twitter: ‘I’ve been covering the FSB for years and never thought that they were great professionals. But Navalny’s prank
comes as shock even for me. They are dumb and that makes them even more dangerous.’
Bellingcat said of Kudryavtsev: ‘From his own account, it appears he was primarily involved with the evidence clean-up and not the poisoning itself.’ In the 49-minute call – which Mr Navalny claims shows that his ‘poisoning story is cooler t han a Hollywood movie’ – Kudryavtsev explained why the politician managed to survive the poison attack.
Mr Navalny collapsed on a flight from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow in August. The aircraft made an emergency landing at the city of Omsk. Kudryavtsev said ‘it would have all gone differently’ if the plane had not landed at Omsk and ‘if (it had) not (been) for the prompt work of the ambulance medics on the runway’.
Mr Navalny was flown to Germany and spent weeks in a coma. German doctors said he had been poisoned with novichok – after Russian doctors claimed he had been l eft f i ghting f or his life because of ‘low blood sugar’.
Last night the FSB said ‘the video clip with the phone call is fake’, according to the state TASS news agency. The agency called Mr Navalny’s investigation a ‘planned provocation’.
Earlier this month, Russian officials brushed off the investigation by Bellingcat and other media outlets. Mr Putin claimed last week that if he had wanted his opponent dead, he would be. He laughed during a national press conference as he said it.
It is the latest in a long line of suspected poisonings of Kremlin opponents and comes two years after ex-Russian double agent Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, survived being attacked with novichok in Salisbury.
Mr Navalny, leader of the Russia of the Future party and an anti- corruption campaigner, has been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side for years.
He was returning from business meetings in Siberia when he fell ill, screaming in pain as he collapsed on the three-hour flight.
It was initially thought he was poisoned through a cup of black tea he was seen drinking at the airport before suspicion fell on the water in his hotel room. He even thought it may have been a cocktail he was served the previous night, saying it was ‘the most disgusting thing I’ve had in my life’.
The married father- of-two was airlifted to Berlin, where he is recuperating, by a charity.
‘A planned provocation’