The Master and Margarita - Political murders

Aleksey Navalny on the phone

English > Context > Historical and political > Aleksey Navalny

After having beenpoisoned with the highly poisonous novichok on August 20, 2020, Navalny himself unmasked the perpetrators of the assassination attempt on him. The research websites Bellingcat [1] and The Insider, in collaboration with the news channel CNN and the German weekly Der Spiegel, had found the names of the perpetrators for him. With this information, Navalny set to work himself.

He recorded a telephone conversation with Konstantin Kudryavtsev, one of the FSB agents who had to retrieve Navalny's clothes after the poisoning to remove the traces of the novichok before they could be tested by independent experts. Navalny used caller ID spoofing software to impersonate the call from an FSB office. During the phone call, he pretended to be an assistant to the secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolay Patrushev and said he needed to investigate why the mission had failed.

Kudriavtsev unsuspectingly confessed that the novichok had been applied to Navalny's underwear while he was staying at the hotel in Tomsk, and that the poison had, apparently been absorbed too slowly by his body. He said the pilots diverted the flight to Omsk too soon and the doctors in Omsk administered an antidote «almost immediately».

The recording of the phone call was released on December 21, 2020.

[1] Bellingcat is a Netherlands-based investigative journalism group that specialises in fact-checking and open-source intelligence. It was founded by British journalist and former blogger Eliot Higgins in July 2014. They revealed, for instance, how Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down while flying over eastern Ukraine On 17 July 2014. It was officially concluded that the missile that shot down MH17 was from the 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade from Kursk in the Russian Federation.

On Friday, July 15, 2022, Russia designated the Bellingcat investigative outlet as an undesirable organisation, outlawing its operations inside the country. Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office accused Bellingcat and its Russian partner The Insider of posing a threat to the security of the Russian Federation. Any Russian who cooperates with the outlets or cites their work now faces criminal prosecution.