KREMLIN CRITIC NAVALNY SAYS RUSSIAN OFFICER ADMITS PUTTING POISON IN UNDERWEAR

Tue 22 December 2020:

One of the operatives allegedly involved in the attempt to kill Alexei Navalny has confessed to his role in the plot, and has revealed that the Russian opposition leader was apparently poisoned via his underwear.

Navalny phoned two members of the team from Russia’s FSB spy agency, which allegedly tried to murder him. One recognised him immediately and hung up. The second operative, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, was seemingly duped into thinking he was talking to an aide working for a top FSB general.

Germany has said he was poisoned with a Soviet-style Novichok nerve agent in an attempt to murder him, an assertion many Western nations accept.

Navalny declared his poisoning case solved earlier this month when a joint media inquiry said it had identified a team of assassins from Russia’s FSB security service.

In a video published on his website on Monday, Navalny said he had phoned up some of his alleged poisoners before the joint investigation was released and posed as an aide to the secretary of Russia’s Security Council.

The call was made hours before the investigative website Bellingcat published details last week of the eight FSB officers who allegedly poisoned Navalny.

One of the men, named by Navalny as an employee of Russia’s FSB security service, spoke to him for 49 minutes and appears to have been part of the clean-up team, he said.

Navalny published a recording and transcript of the conversation in the video, in which he can be heard asking a voice on the phone.

Posing as “Maxim Ustinov”, a fictional aide, Navalny asked Kudryavtsev for details of the operation and demanded to know what had gone wrong.

Unaware that he was being spoofed, Kudryavtsev apparently confirmed the FSB was behind the poisoning. He said his colleagues had applied novichok to the “inner seams” of the opposition leader’s boxer shorts, when Navalny was staying in the Siberian city of Tomsk.

A reconnaissance team had previously visited the Xander hotel and switched off the CCTV cameras, Kudryavtsev said. Once the all-clear had been given, operatives deployed the poison. It had been previously thought Navalny may have been exposed to the nerve agent through a cup of tea or a cocktail.

It now appears likely the novichok was administered in the form of a spray or an ointment, either via the hotel’s laundry service or by FSB officers sneaking into Navalny’s hotel room. Navalny said he could not recall if the boxer shorts were among a delivery he got back from the laundry on 18 August.

When asked why Navalny survived, the voice says it was probably because the plane he was on at the time made an unplanned emergency landing and he was treated professionally and quickly by Russian medics.

“If it had been a bit longer, then it’s possible it would all … have ended differently,” the voice says.

“The video clip with the phone call is fake,” the FSB said, according to the state TASS news agency, calling Navalny’s investigation into his alleged poisoning a “planned provocation”.

Putin last week dismissed media reports about Navalny’s poisoning, saying they were made up of information provided by US intelligence services and were an attempt to smear Putin himself and make Navalny seem more important than he really was.

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