The TLDR: Russia’s most prominent Opposition leader Alexey Navalny was poisoned with a deadly nerve agent called Novichok back in August. He survived and is now in hiding in Germany. A CNN investigation in tandem with a ‘sting’ operation by Navalny himself has now revealed an elite unit of poisoners—and the exact circumstances of the assassination attempt. This is a bizarre tale worthy of John Le Carré. Though his Russian spies were positively genteel compared to this new breed of assassins.

The background

Alexey Navalny: The 44-year old lawyer-turned-activist runs an organisation called Anti-Corruption Foundation, which has done several exposes on Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. He has also led massive protests against the government, starting in 2011. Navalny has been repeatedly arrested in the past. And he has been the target of several attacks—including a suspected poisoning during a prison stint in 2019. Earlier in 2017, he was assaulted with a toxic dye that nearly blinded him in one eye. (Our previous explainer has more on why President Putin is gunning for Navalny right now.)

The assassination attempt: 

• Navalny was in a region called Tomsk to support anti-Putin candidates. 
• On his way back to Moscow, he became suddenly and rapidly unwell on the plane—and started howling in pain (see clip here). 
• The pilot made an emergency landing, and Navalny was rushed off in a stretcher to the hospital.
• His aides managed to get him out of Russia to Germany—where he lay in a coma for weeks, but staged a near-miraculous recovery. 
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel later confirmed that lab results showed "beyond a doubt" that the poisoning was "an attempted murder with nerve agent”—and demanded answers from Moscow.
• Items taken by Navalny’s aides from his hotel room in Tomsk also showed traces of poison. 

Point to note: There was no evidence of the Russian government’s involvement. We only had a pattern: a string of similar and suspected assassinations of Putin’s critics—all involving the use of deadly poisons. We now know exactly how Navalny was poisoned and the team behind it.

The toxins team

• The FSB is the modern-day successor to the KGB, Soviet Union’s legendary intelligence agency.  
• Now, a joint investigation conducted by CNN and Bellingcat—an independent journalism team—has revealed that it houses a small team that specializes in toxins. 
• The six-ten member cabal of agents includes qualified doctors, toxicologists and paramedics. 
• And they are deployed to track and when needed kill high value targets. 
• This team followed Navalny on 30 trips to and from Moscow since 2017.

The poison: Novichok

• The name Novichok means "newcomer" in Russian. 
• It includes a group of lethal nerve agents developed as part of a secret Soviet project named Foliant in the 1970s and 1980s. 
• It works by blocking messages from the nerves to the muscles, causing a collapse of many bodily functions. 
• The poison can be stored as a gel or fine powder, and its effects can be felt anywhere between 30 seconds and two minutes. 
• A person can breathe it in or swallow it—if added to water, for example. But it can also be absorbed through the skin.
• Before Navalny, Novichok was used to target former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter—who were also poisoned in broad daylight in London.

Why Novichok matters: In September 2017, Russia officially destroyed all its stocks of chemical weapons in front of international officials. Its UN ambassador has insisted that development work on Soviet-era nerve agents stopped in 1992, and that existing stockpiles were destroyed in 2017. Most recently, the head of Russia's foreign intelligence service declared: "To say that on the territory of Russia, there is production or stocks of military-grade poisons is of course disinformation.”

Or maybe not: In a previous report, Bellingcat revealed that scientists who worked for the Russian Ministry of Defense were dispersed into three new institutes that carried on “a clandestine, distributed R&D program." Also this: The so-called toxins team is led by Stanislav Makshakov who worked at the Russian institute which developed Novichok. And he personally holds a patent for a product related to mustard gas. 

The mea culpa

After the CNN investigation was published on December 15, the Russian president responded at a press conference:

"Putin claimed without evidence that Navalny—whom he referred to as 'this patient in the Berlin clinic'—is being supported by US intelligence services, adding, 'if that's correct, then that's interesting, then of course [our] special services need to keep an eye on him.'

 

'But that doesn't mean he needs to be poisoned, who needs him anyway? If [they] wanted to, they would've probably finished it,' Putin added."

So it is highly inconvenient that Navalny has now managed to trick one of Putin’s men into confessing the crime.

The sting operation: In parallel to the CNN investigation, Navalny too was calling members of the toxin team. All of them refused to talk to him. So for the final call to a man named Konstantin Kudryavtsev, he posed instead as an official in Russia's National Security Council—disguising his number so it looked as though he was calling from the FSB headquarters. 

Navalny demanded "a brief understanding from the team members: what went wrong, why was there a complete failure in Tomsk with Navalny?" Kudryavtsev obligingly provided the following answers:

• The team managed to access Navalny’s underwear—likely through the laundry service at the hotel.
• They applied the Novichok in powder form on the inside of his underwear—so it would be absorbed into the skin as he began to sweat.
• Contrary to Putin’s claim, the aim was indeed to kill Navalny—but they were foiled when the pilot made an emergency landing: "The flight [to Moscow] is about three hours, this is a long flight… If you don't land the plane the effect would've been different and the result would've been different. So I think the plane played the decisive part."
• Oh, and Kudryavtsev personally went to the hospital to retrieve the clothes—to ensure no trace of Novichok will be found.

To sum up: Any use of Novichok that can be tied to Russia shows that its chemical warfare program is alive and well—which is a gross violation of its international treaties. Also this: 

"These [nerve agents] are really sophisticated—almost boutique—asymmetric weapons which though at the moment are targeted at assassinations could easily be adopted as weapons of mass destruction."

So what happens next is a big deal. 

The bottomline: The FSB has already dismissed the video of the phone call as a "fake" facilitated by foreign intelligence. Even Navalny doesn’t expect any investigation in Russia. But the revelation puts the EU—especially Germany which is hosting Navalny—in a difficult position. All this while the United States government is struggling to cope with the catastrophic revelation that its entire network has been hacked by Russia. 

Reading list

CNN has details of both their exposé of the toxins team and Navalny’s sting op. Read Bellingcat’s damning report on Russia’s chemical weapons program. Also: BBC News’ explainer on Novochik. Atlantic Council’s op-ed lays out Angela Merkel’s Putin dilemma. We did an explainer on the assasination attempt on Navalny, Kremlin’s long-standing affection for poison—and why Navalny is a thorn in Putin’s side.