From the moment Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny abruptly fell ill, the top suspect in what immediately looked like a case of poisoning was President Vladimir Putin and his regime in Moscow. That suspicions quickly centered on a possible assassination attempt by the Kremlin is another damning indictment for a president who has sought to earn international respect.
A government whose critics routinely die mysterious deaths, or survive attempts on their lives, reveals itself to be outside the bounds of legitimate democratic behavior. That people suspect Putin orders the assassination of his domestic foes shows the grotesque image he has forged.
Navalny became severely ill during a flight from Siberia to Moscow, soon after it took off. He had drunk a cup of tea at the airport. The plane made an emergency landing in the Siberian city of Omsk, where he was admitted to a hospital. With Navalny in a coma, his family and supporters made arrangements to transport him to Germany. But Russian authorities interfered, delaying his movement and sparking accusations that their plan was to allow the poison to become undetectable. Sinister masked men kept guard not only over Navalny, but also over the doctors treating him in Omsk, ensuring they did not stray from the Kremlin’s script. Some doctors made dismissive statements about the possibility of poisoning, while the Russian news agency TASS, in an effort to smear him, suggested Navalny was suffering the repercussions of using hallucinogenic drugs.
Finally, he was allowed to leave on a special medical plane, arriving in Germany over the weekend. Doctors in Berlin concluded that Navalny was, in fact, poisoned, with a “cholinesterase inhibitor.”
To be sure, Navalny, who rose to prominence by uncovering and publicizing the vast network of corruption now plaguing Russia, is a man with many enemies. Putin is hardly alone in viewing him as a threat. He could have potentially been targeted by any of the people whose malfeasance he revealed. And yet, anyone who has paid attention to the fate of the Kremlin’s critics has reason to suspect Putin’s involvement.
Like so many of Putin’s most controversial actions—his invasion of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine, and interference in the 2016 U.S. election in favor of Donald Trump—poisoning has the advantage of creating a shroud of confusion and constant deniability. Poison is a bit like Russia’s infamous “little green men”, the unidentified soldiers in uniforms without insignias who led Russia’s takeover of Crimea. As it did initially there, the Kremlin, of course, now denies any involvement in Navalny’s woes, and is vowing to investigate. Previous assassination investigations during Putin’s rule have left much to be desired, to say the least.
There’s no question Navalny has become more than a burr in Putin’s saddle. In fact, back in 2017, when Navalny led the biggest nationwide anti-Putin demonstrations since the disputed 2012 elections, which had triggered the largest national protests since the fall of the Soviet Union, I wrote about the mystery of why Navalny was still alive. Many have wondered why a president who has allegedly gone as far as having his foes assassinated on foreign soil would tolerate Navalny, trying to manage him rather than eliminate him.
But things have changed, and maybe Putin wanted to finally silence Navalny. Why now? There’s a restlessness in the region. Belarus is convulsing with calls for democracy. In Russia’s far east, giant anti-Putin protests have erupted, while across Russia, Putin’s seemingly bullet-proof support may be faltering. A recent poll by the respected Levada Center in Moscow asked respondents to name which politician they trust the most. Only 23 percent chose Putin. That figure was 59 percent in late 2017.
It’s hard to know if whoever poisoned Navalny meant to kill him, cripple him or intimidate him. Last year, Navalny was apparently poisoned in a police station while under arrest, and before that, he was blinded in one eye when someone threw a toxic substance at him in Moscow.
The record of Putin critics suffering bizarre fates is vast. There was Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spy turned dissident, who was poisoned by radioactive polonium after having tea with Russian agents in London. He blamed Putin as he lay dying in a hospital; a British inquiry later agreed. There was the assassination attempt in Salisbury, England, against another dissident former spy, Sergei Skripal, along with his daughter, who both survived contact with a military grade nerve agent, Novichok, also traced to Russian agents. Several other Putin critics have been targeted in their own near-deadly poisonings. The journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza was poisoned twice, so badly that he had to learn how to walk again.
Several other prominent Putin critics have been poisoned, shot or fallen out of windows. Russian police have barely pretended to investigate their deaths. Boris Nemtsov, a charismatic liberal politician and Putin critic, was gunned down on a well-traveled bridge outside the Kremlin’s walls in 2015. He had been calling out Putin’s destruction of Russian democracy, his interference in Ukraine and the corruption he was enabling across the country. A court found several Chechens guilty of carrying out the murder for hire, without naming who ordered it.
Then there are the dozens of journalists who have died after revealing stories Putin found inconvenient. The most famous among them Anna Politkovskaya, was assassinated in 2006, after relentlessly reporting about the war in Chechnya in ways that clashed with the official version of events. The year before she was shot dead in the lobby of her Moscow apartment, she too was poisoned while flying from Moscow to Beslan to cover a school siege in which more than 300 people, mostly children, were killed.
We may never find conclusive evidence of who poisoned Navalny. Doctors in Berlin say his condition is grave, but he is now stable. His prognosis, however, is grim. A statement from Charite Hospital, where he is being treated, warns that “the possibility of long-term effects, especially in the area of the nervous system, cannot be excluded.”
Whoever ordered the attack against Navalny is likely to get away with it, whether it was Putin or not. But the verdict on Putin’s reputation was already clear.
*Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist.
September 2, 2020
