Navalny

Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future?

Dollbaum, Jan Matti, Morvan Lallouet, Ben Noble, Dollbaum, Jan Matti, Ben Noble

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781787385757
• eBook ISBN:
  9781787386747
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Who is Alexei Navalny? Poisoned in August 2020 and transported to Germany for treatment, the politician returned to Russia in January 2021 in the full glare of the world media. His immediate detention at passport control set the stage for an explosive showdown with Vladimir Putin.

But Navalny means very different things to different people. To some, he is a democratic hero. To others, he is betraying the Motherland. To others still, he is a dangerous nationalist. This book explores the many dimensions of Navalny’s political life, from his pioneering anti-corruption investigations to his ideas and leadership of a political movement. It also looks at how his activities and the Kremlin’s strategies have shaped one another.

Navalny makes sense of this divisive character, revealing the contradictions of a man who is the second most important political figure in Russia—even when behind bars. In order to understand modern Russia, you need to understand Alexei Navalny.

1

WHO IS ALEXEI NAVALNY?

‘Aren’t you afraid?’

Alexei Navalny faces this question as he boards Pobeda (‘Victory’) Airlines flight DP936 at Berlin Brandenburg Airport. It’s Sunday, 17 January 2021.¹

The plane is packed with journalists eager to accompany Navalny—the forty-four-year-old anti-corruption activist and opposition politician—on his journey home. Entering the cabin with his wife, lawyer, and press secretary, he encounters a sea of smartphones held up to capture and livestream the moment. The world is watching.

Navalny is upbeat and optimistic. But he clearly has reasons to be afraid. Russian law enforcement had earlier warned he would be detained upon his return to Russia, accusing him of violating parole conditions for a 2014 fraud conviction. He faced years in prison.

That Navalny was able to walk on to a plane at all was a miracle. The last time he’d boarded a flight on his own was in Tomsk, Siberia, on 20 August 2020, for what should have been a routine trip back to Moscow. He’d been working on an investigation into the business activities of officials and municipal politicians in Tomsk.² He’d also been campaigning with opposition forces in the run-up to regional and local elections on 13 September—polls in which he hoped to secure victories against candidates backed by the authorities.

But things started to go wrong during the flight. Navalny became ill, eventually howling with what appeared to be agonising pain.³ According to one passenger, Navalny ‘wasn’t saying any words—he was just screaming’.⁴ A flight attendant asked if there were any medical professionals on board. A nurse came forward. Along with the cabin crew, she administered first aid—and tried to keep Navalny conscious.

The pilot decided to make an emergency landing in Omsk—around 750 kilometres west of Tomsk, but still in Siberia—despite a mysterious bomb scare at the airport.⁵ Navalny was stretchered off the plane and taken by ambulance to an emergency hospital.

Navalny’s press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, said that the only thing Navalny had eaten or drunk that day was black tea from a plastic cup at the airport before his flight—and that this might have been laced with poison.⁶ Navalny was, it seemed, a fit man with no known health problems, who didn’t smoke and drank little—not the profile of somebody likely to become suddenly unwell.

Yarmysh’s fear was worryingly familiar to those following Russian politics. In previous years, personalities critical of the Kremlin had fallen ill—and suspicions were rife that they had been poisoned.⁷ At the same time, Navalny had made many enemies with his investigations into elite corruption—business-people, local politicians, high officials.⁸ The list of potential suspects was long.

On arrival at hospital, it was reported that Navalny received a preliminary diagnosis of ‘acute psychodysleptic poisoning’.⁹ He was put on a ventilator, placed into a medically induced coma, and administered atropine.¹⁰ His condition was described as ‘serious but stable’.¹¹ Normal medical processes were taking their course.

But then things took an odd turn.

The hospital began to fill with law enforcement personnel, some in plain clothes.¹² And they started confiscating Navalny’s personal belongings, Yarmysh said.¹³

When the plane Navalny had been on finally reached Moscow, law enforcement officials were waiting to board the aircraft. They instructed passengers who had been sitting closest to Navalny to stay put while others disembarked. This struck one passenger as puzzling: ‘At that point, the case did not look criminal … [and yet] security officials clearly thought the incident to be criminal all the same.’¹⁴

Back in Omsk, Navalny’s wife, Yulia, faced difficulties in getting to her husband—because, the hospital authorities said, he had not explicitly consented to her visit.¹⁵ And doctors became less forthcoming about Navalny’s condition with his team, who wanted to move him to Germany for treatment. On 21 August—that is, a day after Navalny was hospitalised—a plane ready to transport him to Berlin’s Charité Hospital landed in Omsk.

A strange incident was also reported by Ivan Zhdanov—a close associate of Navalny—and Yulia Navalnaya. They claimed that, during a conversation with the head of the hospital, a policewoman said that a substance dangerous both to Navalny and others around him ‘had been found’.¹⁶ But she declined to name it, as it was an ‘investigative secret’.¹⁷

On the same day, a national Russian newspaper published a sensational story. Citing anonymous sources, it claimed that law enforcement personnel had been trailing Navalny in Tomsk. Had he been poisoned? The sources reported that ‘no unnecessary or suspicious contacts that could be linked with poisoning’ had been seen.¹⁸ The story was widely interpreted to be a controlled leak from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) to distance itself from the incident.¹⁹

Meanwhile, doctors in Omsk revised their initial diagnosis.²⁰ They now said that Navalny was experiencing the effects of a serious metabolic disorder, not the effects of poisoning. The hospital’s chief physician said this ‘may have been caused by a sharp drop in blood sugar in the plane, which led to the loss of consciousness’.²¹ Doctors also now said that the substance found in samples from Navalny’s hands and hair was a common industrial component and could have come from a plastic cup.²² And yet, they now thought that Navalny’s condition was ‘unstable’, and it would be inappropriate to fly him to Germany.

Navalny’s personal doctor saw a clear motive: ‘[T]hey are waiting three days so that there are no traces of poison left in the body.’²³ Yulia Navalnaya appealed directly to Vladimir Putin for permission to fly her husband abroad.²⁴

After facing initial resistance, German medics were allowed access to Navalny—and said he was in a suitable state to be flown to Berlin. And Russian doctors gave their consent, too, saying that his condition had ‘stabilised’. The plane took off from Omsk with Navalny on 22 August.

Two days after arriving in Berlin, German doctors said that they believed Navalny had been poisoned with a cholinesterase inhibitor—a substance that interferes with the nervous system.²⁵ The source could have been an everyday pesticide—or a weapons-grade nerve agent. This news, therefore, increased suspicions relating to the Russian state.²⁶

But Russian officials pushed back against the increasing number of fingers pointing at them. ‘WHY would we do it? And in such a clumsy inconclusive way?’—so tweeted one of Russia’s top diplomats at the UN on 24 August.²⁷ In early September, the speaker of the State Duma—the lower chamber of the Russian parliament—claimed the reaction of the West to the ‘alleged’ poisoning was a ‘planned action against Russia in order to impose new sanctions and to try to hold back the development of our country’.²⁸

Meanwhile, police authorities in Russia seemed in no hurry to investigate the incident. The regional transport police—far from a top law enforcement body—carried out a ‘preliminary investigation’.²⁹ The hotel where Navalny had stayed in Tomsk was inspected by police and FSB officers, but the local press mentioned this lasted only a ‘couple of days’. To Navalny’s associates who were questioned by the police, everything pointed to inaction—or worse, a cover-up.³⁰

On 2 September, German Chancellor Angela Merkel asserted it was ‘beyond doubt’ that Navalny had been poisoned with a nerve agent of the Novichok group—a finding later confirmed by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.³¹ This was the same type of nerve agent used against Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England, in March 2018—an attack the British government said was ‘overwhelmingly likely’ to have been ordered by President Putin.³²

As with this earlier poisoning episode, the international reaction to Navalny’s case became increasingly loud and critical of the Russian state. Merkel claimed the poisoning raised ‘very serious questions that only the Russian government can answer—and must answer’.³³ In response, the Russian authorities said that the alleged proof of the poisoning had been found in Germany—and it was, therefore, for the German authorities to cooperate with Russia and produce the corroborating evidence.³⁴

In addition, a number of narratives emerged on state-aligned Russian media to contest the international accusations. Some questioned whether there was any poisoning at all—one Russian journalist wrote a whole book on the topic.³⁵ Others said that, while Navalny might have been poisoned, Novichok was not used. So claimed the chemist Leonid Rink, who had worked on the Novichok programme himself—and had even, according to his own testimony, sold doses of the substance to criminal groups in the 1990s.³⁶ Navalny couldn’t have been poisoned by the nerve agent because, if he had, Rink argued, Navalny would be dead.³⁷ However, another chemist who had participated in the creation of Novichok found the symptoms Navalny experienced to be consistent with poisoning by the nerve agent.³⁸

Yet another theory was that, although Novichok might have been used, it was not administered in Russia but in Germany. This version was voiced by Andrei Lugovoy—a member of the Russian parliament and a prime suspect in the 2006 assassination of a former FSB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, with polonium-210 in London.³⁹

By 7 September, Navalny was out of a coma, making an incredibly speedy recovery. He was discharged from hospital on 23 September and then spent time rehabilitating in the Black Forest.⁴⁰

Months passed. Navalny built up his strength, one push-up at a time. Elsewhere, others were busy investigating his poisoning. How was it carried out—and by whom?

On 14 December, Bellingcat—an online investigative journalism collective—released the findings of its investigation carried out with a Russian partner, The Insider, and in collaboration with CNN and Der Spiegel.⁴¹ Navalny, it claimed, had been poisoned by an FSB assassination team—a ‘clandestine unit specialized in working with poisonous substances’—which had been tracking him for years, and had possibly tried to poison him previously.

Drawing on leaked phone records and flight manifests, the investigation tracked the movement of these FSB operatives—which often mapped uncannily onto the movements of Navalny himself.

If things had been sensational up to this point, they soon became surreal. On 21 December, Navalny released a video of a phone call that took place just before the Bellingcat investigation was released.⁴² In it, Navalny spoke to somebody the investigation claimed was involved in the attempt on his life—Konstantin Kudryavtsev. Pretending to be an assistant of the former head of the FSB, Navalny managed to get Kudryavtsev to reveal operational details. ‘The underpants … the inner side … where the groin is’—that’s where the Novichok was placed, said Kudryavtsev.⁴³

Even more fingers now pointed to the Kremlin. In response, Putin quipped on 17 December that, i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Who is Alexei Navalny?
• 2. The Anti-Corruption Activist
• 3. The Politician
• 4. The Protester
• 5. The Kremlin v. Navalny
• 6. Navalny and the Future of Russia
• Notes
• Index