Navalny poisoningNavalny Poisoned with Nerve Agent Novichok

Germany says scientists have “proven beyond doubt” that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with the chemical nerve agent novichok. Navalny was poisoned ten days ago by operatives of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, in the Siberian city of Omsk.

He is now being treated in a Berlin hospital.

Germany’s defense minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said yesterday (Wednesday, 2 September 2020) that the results of the toxicological tests carried out by specialists at a military laboratory on samples taken from Navalny are “incontrovertible.” The test had “proven beyond doubt” that he had been poisoned with a “chemical nerve agent of the novichok group,” she said.

Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union, was also used by GRU agents in the 4 March 2018 Salisbury poisonings that targeted former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

On 12 September 2018, Russia agents used nocichock to poison Pyotr Verzilov, the husband of Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.

The German government said it “strongly condemned” the poisoning and demanded the Kremlin provide an explanation “as a matter of urgency.”

The BBC notes that the poisoning of Navalny comes against a backdrop of worsening German-Russian relations. Last year Russian agents killed a Chechen rebel in a Berlin park, and the German intelligence services had released a report earlier this year with evidence that Russian government hackers, in a massive hack in 2015, managed to break into the Bundestag computer system and gain access to the most secret government documents for a period of months.

Navalny, Russia’s leading anti-corruption activist and a critic of President Vladimir Putin, fell ill on 20 August on a flight from Siberia city of Tomsk, after drinking a cup of tea at the Tomsk airport. He was initially treated in the nearby city of Omsk after his plane made an emergency stopover there.

The hospital did not allow his personal physician or his wife to see him until late Saturday. Experts say that three days is typically the time it takes for traces of the poisons the Russian intelligence services use against Putin’s critics to wash out of the victims’ bodies.

The Russian doctors claimed that they found no traces of poison in his system, and diagnosed him with a metabolic disorder and acute pancreatitis. They also refused to let him travel for medical treatment abroad. The Kremlin finally relented, and on Sunday 23 August Navalny was flown to the Charité hospital in Berlin where he has been treated ever since.

Last week, after an initial series of toxicological tests, Charité announced that Navalny had been poisoned with a cholinesterase inhibitor and was being treated with the antidote atropine. Experts said that nerve agent such as novichok, sarin or VX are cholinesterase inhibitors.