Russia: Who poisoned Kremlin critic Navalny?
Like so many before him, Russia’s foremost Kremlin critic has been poisoned, said Yulia Latynina in Novaya Gazeta (Russia). Anticorruption activist Alexei Navalny was flying home to Moscow last week from Siberia— where he’d been campaigning for opposition politicians—when he fell agonizingly ill and passed out. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk and Navalny was rushed to a hospital, where for two days doctors refused to allow his wife or his physician to see him and blocked the activist from being airlifted to Germany. Believing traces of the poison had dropped to undetectable levels, Russian authorities finally allowed Navalny, 44, to be flown to a Berlin hospital. There, German doctors determined he had likely been poisoned with a cholinesterase inhibitor, found in pesticides and nerve agents such as sarin. He remains in a medically induced coma. German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared Navalny her “personal guest” and stationed police and federal agents at the hospital—a needless precaution, given that had the Russians wanted to kill Navalny, they would have “finished him off in Omsk”—but still a strong statement from the West.
The Kremlin has a long history of dosing its enemies with toxins, said Christoph von Marschall in Der Tagesspiegel (Germany). Some of them survived: Viktor Yushchenko, the leader of
Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, who was disfigured by dioxin in 2004; Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, who suffered organ failure in 2015 and 2017; former double agent Sergei Skripal, who was dosed with Novichok in England in 2018; and Navalny himself, who experienced poisoning-like symptoms in Russian custody last year. Others died, including former intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned with polonium in London in 2006. There’s no hard evidence that the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin did any of this—but “how long can we pretend to be blind and deaf without becoming an accomplice?” How predictable of the West to blame “the damned Kremlin,” said Pavel Smolyak in RT.com (Russia). They always howl poison with no proof, and now they have Navalny surrounded by guards, a “hostage.” Navalny is “not a person to them,” but “a card to be played against Putin.”
Navalny’s threat to the Kremlin lies in his “unorthodox, but highly effective, brand of investigative journalism,” said Ilya Lozovsky in OCCRP.org (Bosnia and Herzegovina). A lawyer by training, he started blogging in 2008, and his slickly produced videos have exposed “the corruption at the heart of the Putin regime.” Using “drone footage, high-quality animations, and wry humor,” Navalny traces the complex finances of oligarchs and top officials to reveal how they loot the state and launder their money. Some tie his poisoning to the democratic uprising in Belarus, said Tatiana Vasilchuk in Novaya Gazeta. If Belarusians can revolt against dictator Alexander Lukashenko, perhaps Russians could follow suit. “Russia has also been in a fever for a long time,” says opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov, with periodic anti-Putin demonstrations in Moscow and mass protests now occurring in the country’s far east. Navalny would be an obvious leader if those protests spread, which is why authorities want him silenced.