Outspoken Putin critic ill after suspected poisoning
ALLEGED POISONING
• Alexei Navalny, Russia’s main opposition figure, was in a coma Thursday after drinking a cup of tea that his spokeswoman suspected was deliberately laced with poison — a method used before in plots linked to Russian agents by Western intelligence and others.
Kira Yarmysh said on Twitter that Navalny, 44, started to feel ill during a flight to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk, leading the pilot to make an emergency landing in Omsk, where he was taken to a hospital and was on a ventilator.
Navalny’s possible poisoning is the latest in a series of similar fates suffered by high-profile Kremlin critics, stoking speculation of the regime’s involvement. Yarmysh asserted on Twitter, “This is (Russian President Vladimir) Putin.”
“Whether he personally gave the order or not, the blame is entirely with him,” she added.
In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former spy and prominent dissident, died of polonium-210 poisoning in London, identifying Putin as responsible while in his hospital bed. The polonium was in his tea.
More recently, Sergei Skripal, a former double agent, and his adult daughter, Yulia, were poisoned in 2018, after they came into contact with a deadly Soviet-era nerve agent known as Novichok.
“If (Navalny) was actually poisoned, if certain statements are made, and if law enforcement agencies adopt other decisions, an investigation will be opened,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday.
The chief doctor for the Omsk Emergency Hospital No. 1, where Navalny is in the intensive care unit for toxicology patients, told the state-run Tass news agency that Navalny is in serious condition. Another physician at the hospital, Anatoli Kalinichenko, told local reporters that “there is no certainty that the cause of Navalny’s condition is poisoning.”
“Doctors are working to save his life,” Kalinichenko said, adding that Navalny is “stable.”
Yarmysh, Navalny’s spokeswoman, said she suspects a poisonous substance was slipped into Navalny’s tea because it “was the only thing Alexei drank this morning,” she wrote on Twitter.
The manager of the Tomsk airport coffee shop where Navalny drank the tea told the Interfax news agency that he is “looking into all circumstances and studying (security camera) footage.”