Putin’s Annus Horribilis: the plots of the Russian secret service against Navalny unmasked
“ Hello, I'm Navalny. I know the names and surnames of those who wanted to kill me, I know where they live, where they work, their false identities, I have their photographs in my hand ”. Thus begins the video of almost an hour in which the most famous opponent of Vladimir Putin recounts in detail the poisoning he suffered last August during a business trip to Siberia. Its reconstruction is based on an astonishing investigation of two news sites, Bellingcat and The Insider , in cooperation with Der Spiegel and CNN , which identifies the perpetrators of the attack in a group of FSB (Russian secret service) agents. The investigative work is developed on the collection and comparison of data regarding telephone calls and the movements of service operatives on the trail of Navalny, starting from 2017, the date of the announcement of his presidential candidacy. A long journey, studded with errors and missteps, culminating in the administration of the chemical substance in an " undrinkable " Negroni (words of Navalny himself) in the restaurant of the Tomsk hotel (Siberia) where the activist was staying.
No official reaction from the Kremlin, which limited itself to canceling the two press conferences by spokesman Peskov scheduled for 15 and 16 December, in a clear signal of embarrassment. Same silence on Putin newspapers and on state televisions, while the international broadcaster Russia Today took it upon itself to discredit the video by defining it as the lament of " a schoolgirl who says she was raped by her stepfather ". It is likely that the next statements of the circle of opinion leaders and advisers close to the presidency will be of the same tenor, with the aim of attacking not so much the investigation (it would be difficult to do so) as the victim's credentials, according to a well-established script that lately, however, struggles to bear fruit at the level of public opinion.
Putin's annus horribilis ends with a tremendous blow to his personal credibility, whose presidency now shows clear symptoms of decline: Covid , the unresolved Belarus crisis, the Chinese grip, the war in the Caucasus recomposed under Turkish pressure and finally the clues of his direct involvement in the poisoning of an opponent with little internal following but whose international relevance continues to grow beyond its own merits, thanks to the dull persistence of a system now screwed on itself. Adding to Putin's concerns is the fact that it was easy for two independent and enterprising news sites to access sensitive data concerning FSB members involved in an operation of this magnitude: probably the walls of Lubyanka and the Kremlin fortress are not they are as impenetrable as we usually think.
That of the journalists of Bellingcat and The Insider is a rather linear investigation in the method but enormously significant in its results. In practice, it consisted in following the traces left by the members of a clandestine unit of the Russian secret service specially created to deal with Navalny since 2017: the internal flights that on 37 occasions accurately trace the movements of the activist, the telephone conversations among the members of the commando who intensify in correspondence with the decisive moments of the action, the internal communications of the agents with their superiors. A chain of command emerges that leads directly to the top of the Russian state. The team of poisoners consisted of at least eight permanent operatives, three of whom were in charge of organizational and practical tasks (shadowing, surveillance, contacts with chemical weapons experts). The names, as Navalny put it: Alexandrov, Osipov and Panyaev, all in their forties, the latter being a neighbor of the victim; above them Colonel Makshakov, army scientist and essential link between field operatives and chemical laboratories; Makshakov reports to General Vasilyev, director of the FSB's Institute of Criminal Studies, in turn under the orders of Bogdanov, who chairs the Secret Service Technology Center and reports directly to the organization's number one, Bortnikov. To get to Putin just knock on the door.
The investigation shows that there was a first attempt at poisoning in July, when Navalny and his wife Yulia were on vacation at a resort in Kaliningrad. On that occasion it was she who felt ill, accusing symptoms very similar to those of her husband a month later, but the crisis was resolved in one night. A first failed blow which would be followed by the decisive one on the Novosibirsk-Tomsk-Omsk section. Navalny, as known, goes to Novosibirsk for political commitments related to the electoral campaign. Alexandrov, Osipov and Panyaev book a one-way flight to the same location on 12 August. They have to wait five days to understand the next moves of the target, which decides to return to Moscow, but from Tomsk, on 20 August. Only then do the three buy the return tickets and settle down near the Navalny hotel.
All recorded, all reconstructable, incredible but true, also because Alexandrov makes the mistake of turning on his personal phone, allowing geolocation. On the night of 19 Navalny orders a Bloody Mary from the hotel bar. The waiter replies that he does not have the ingredients available and offers him a Negroni . But the cocktail is so badly made that he can't take more than one sip, and that probably saves his life. The rest is known, Navalny takes the plane to Moscow the next morning at dawn, he feels bad, the pilot lands in Omsk where the patient is given atropine, hence the transfer to Berlin. In the meantime, a continuous flow of telephone calls between the agents demonstrates their physical proximity to the scenario of the events and their direct involvement in the crime. Those involved, almost all with careers in the medical-scientific field, have as their base of operations the aforementioned Institute of Criminal Studies in the southwestern suburb of Moscow. Makshakov, on the other hand, the mission coordinator, worked for many years in the laboratories of the closed city of Shikhany-1, where the Soviets developed several generations of chemical agents, including Novichok .
Lavrov, the foreign owner, still insinuated a few weeks ago that Navalny had been poisoned in Germany. But yesterday Prime Minister Mishustin, in a meeting with the president of Rostelecom , asked for an intensification of the " protection of personal data " in the telecommunications sector. Curious coincidence on the day of the publication of the investigation that unmasks the plots of the FSB.
The post Putin's Annus Horribilis: the plots of the Russian secret service against Navalny unmasked appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/lannus-horribilis-di-putin-smascherate-le-trame-del-servizio-segreto-russo-contro-navalny/ on Wed, 16 Dec 2020 04:53:00 +0000.