The Russian authorities may have attempted to poison late opposition leader Alexey Navalny as early as 2017, during his presidential campaign, the non-profit investigative outlet Dossier Centre revealed on Monday.
According to the investigation, the poisoning attempt could have occurred during Navalny’s court proceedings in the city of Kirov in western Russia in autumn 2016 and winter 2017, which ended in Navalny being handed a five-year suspended sentence for embezzlement and being barred from running in the 2018 presidential election.
At least seven Federal Security Service (FSB) agents were spotted in Kirov throughout the court proceedings and appeared to have been monitoring Navalny, the Dossier Centre wrote.
The group included agents from the FSB Criminalistics Institute, which was reported in an earlier investigation by Bellingcat to be running a poison-producing lab. The same agents were later implicated in Navalny’s poisoning with the nerve agent Novichok nerve agent in the Siberian city of Tomsk in 2020.
In a 2020 investigation by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund (FBK) into the poisoning attempt in Tomsk, Navalny recalled a flight “a couple of years ago” during which he had felt “very, very unwell” and as though he was “about to die”, but had felt better after washing his face in the restroom. Navalny told independent outlet The Insider at the time that the incident had taken place in 2017.
The Dossier Centre speculated that the FSB officers may have been waiting for Navalny in Kirov after that flight to remove traces of poison. However, Navalny’s spokesperson Kira Yarmysh was unable to recall the flight’s exact date and destination when asked by the Dossier Centre.
Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya said last week that his team had obtained biological samples from his body after his death in an Arctic prison on 16 February 2024. These samples were sent abroad for testing, and two laboratories in different countries both concluded independently that Navalny had been poisoned.
Although Navalnaya did not name the countries that conducted the tests, she urged the laboratories in question to publish their findings in full, and advised the international community against “appeasing” Vladimir Putin “for some higher political considerations”.
“As long as you remain silent, he will not stop. Perhaps right now, someone else is dying from the poison ordered by Putin,” Navalnaya said.