Dissident: Russian confessed to poison plot
MOSCOW — Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader recovering from a nerve agent attack, has made a career of needling his country’s sprawling security establishment.
On Monday, he produced perhaps his most brazen move yet: a video that he said shows him phoning a Russian intelligence officer and tricking him into confessing to a plot to kill Navalny by planting poison on his underpants.
“The priority was maximum secrecy,” the man can be heard telling Navalny over the phone. “So that no one could record it, no one saw anything they didn’t need to see, and so on.”
Navalny and Bellingcat, the open-source investigative outlet that published a report on Monday alongside the video, identified the man as Konstantin Kudryavtsev, a chemical weapons specialist at Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, or FSB.
There was no independent confirmation that Navalny had indeed spoken to Kudryavtsev. The FSB, in a statement, called Navalny’s video a forgery, according to the RIA Novosti state news agency. His investigation was a “planned provocation aimed at discrediting the FSB,” the statement said, “which could not have been carried out without the organizational and technical support of international intelligence agencies.”
Still, Navalny’s video of a purported 49-minute call with his own would-be assassin inside one of Russia’s most secretive and powerful intelligence agencies jolted the Russian internet, drawing more than 7 million views on YouTube within hours. It was the latest episode to puncture the aura of power and professionalism of Russia’s spy services, a marked contrast to the news of a large-scale cyber intrusion in the United States attributed to Russian hackers.
Last week, Bellingcat published an investigation with a Russian news outlet, The Insider, that used leaked phone records to show that FSB officers with expertise in poisons had trailed Navalny for years and were nearby at the time he was exposed to the military-grade nerve agent that nearly killed him in Siberia last summer.
In response, Putin denied that he was behind the near-deadly poisoning of his most prominent political opponent, telling journalists with a laugh that if Russian agents had wanted to kill Navalny, “they would have probably finished the job.”