Putin poisoned me but I’m going back, says Navalny

ALEXEI NAVALNY yesterday accused Vladimir Putin of personal responsibility for his attempted murder with Novichok, and pledged to return to Russia to continue his political struggle.

“I accuse Putin of being behind this crime, and I can see no other possible version of events,” the opposition leader told Germany’s Spiegel magazine in his first full-length interview since his recovery from being poisoned with the nerve agent in August. “Not going back to Russia would mean that Putin had won. My task now is to remain the guy who isn’t afraid. And I am not afraid … I will not give Putin the gift of not returning to Russia.”

The Kremlin denies any involvement in Mr Navalny’s poisoning.

Mr Navalny, who was discharged from a Berlin hospital last week and is currently staying in the city, gave a chilling account of his Novichok poisoning.

He said: “It’s hard to describe because you can’t compare it to anything. You don’t feel pain, but you know you are dying. Right now.” The 44-year- old described watching a mobile phone recording of his collapse on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow.

“It’s circulating on the internet as ‘Navalny screams in pain’. But it wasn’t pain, it was something else, something worse,” he said. “Pain makes you feel you are alive. Here you simply understand: this is the end.”

He described how he went from feeling unwell to collapsing unconscious in just half an hour. “I feel something is wrong, I have a cold sweat. I ask Kira [his spokesman], who is sitting next to me, for a handkerchief and say, ‘Talk to me. I need to hear someone’s voice’.” He went to the aircraft lavatory and washed his face.

“I leave, I turn to the steward, and instead of asking for help, I say, to my own surprise, ‘I’ve been poisoned. I’m dying’. And then I lie on the floor in front of him to die … I hear voices getting quieter. Then it’s over. I know I’m dead. Only it turns out I was wrong.”

Novichok, a nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union in the Seventies, is one of the most lethal chemical weapons ever made. Mr Navalny spent three weeks in a medically induced coma and is still weak. “The doctors say I can recover 90 per cent, maybe 100 per cent, but nobody really knows,” he said.

He believes the poison was left on something he touched in the hotel where he stayed in Tomsk.

Mr Navalny believes he only survived because the plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, where he was injected with atropine.

“It was a clever plan. I would have died on the flight and ended up in a morgue in Omsk or Moscow. No one would have detected Novichok: after all, there are no mass spectrometers in the morgue.”

Mr Navalny says he only survived because of the intense international pressure on Mr Putin to allow him to be flown to Germany for treatment.

“German politicians and Angela Merkel, of all people, saved my life,” he said.

‘I hear voices getting quieter. Then it’s over. I know I’m dead. Only it turns out I was wrong’