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Amid the confirmed reports of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death in prison, the US Embassy in Georgia on 16 February claimed that he was poisoned with Novichok – a military-grade nerve agent developed by the former Soviet Union.
According to the press release, issued by US Embassy in Tbilisi on 18 April 2022, Navalny became severely ill during a flight to Moscow from Tomsk on August 2020. Following this, he was taken to a hospital in Omsk after an emergency landing. Two days later, Navalny was flown to a hospital in Berlin, where he recovered.
German laboratory technicians in September 2020, concluded Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent from the Novichok group.
They said that the poison was similar to the one the Russian military intelligence service (GRU) used against Sergei Skripal in a 2018 assassination attempt in the United Kingdom, where Skripal was living as a citizen. That attack landed Skripal, his daughter Yulia, and a British officer in the hospital and resulted in the death of another British citizen months later.
In Navalny’s case, independent national labs in Sweden and Finland and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed the German lab’s findings.
An investigation team of independent journalists in December 2020 implicated Russia’s Federal Security Service in the poisoning. The team consisted of Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based investigative journalism group, The Insider, Der Spiegel of Germany, and CNN. This finding was later confirmed by the United States and others.
When the reports revealed of poisoning, Russian authorities began an aggressive disinformation campaign to deny the Russian government had a role in the attack, access to Novichok, or a motive to poison Navalny.
Falsehoods:
The Omsk hospital technicians said Navalny could have become ill because of alcohol use, fatigue, or poor diet. Putin loyalists and state-controlled media widely repeated that false theory.
Not only this, Russian officials and state-run media spread several false claims after the incident, including Navalny drinking ‘village moonshine’ before his flight, poisoning occurred in Germany and not in Russia, and Western governments were attempting to smear Russia by fabricating the account.
Between August 2020 and January 2021, according to EUvsDisinfo, pro-Kremlin media outlets published more than 200 false items about the poisoning.
ALSO READ: Vladimir Putin critic passes away in Russian prison — Who was Alexei Navalny?
Even allowing Navalny to travel to Germany was presented as evidence that Russia’s government was not involved in the poisoning, claimed the US embassy.
“If [the security services] wanted to poison him, they would have, most likely, carried it through,” the US Embassy quoted Putin as saying in December 2020.
Navalny’s arrest:
As he returned from Germany, Navalny was arrested on 17 January 2021 and was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for parole violations. In March 2022, he was sentenced to nine years in a maximum security prison on charges of fraud and contempt.
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Published: 16 Feb 2024, 07:47 PM IST
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