‘This is a real terrorist act’

Navalny’s latest interview with ‘Ekho Moskvy’ about who poisoned him, in brief

Yesterday, Bellingcat and The Insider, in cooperation with Der Spiegel and CNN, released a joint investigation revealing that a secret sub-unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) were responsible for poisoning opposition figure Alexey Navalny in August. While Russian state media and officials have had little to say about the report, Navalny himself has spoken out. Here’s what he said during a radio interview with Ekho Moskvy, in a nutshell.

I have no doubt that Vladimir Putin was in charge of the poisoning. We are seeing an operation involving dozens of people and several generals. FSB chemists and doctors, who are in communication with the producers of “Novichok,” followed me for four years. This is a real terrorist act, FSB director Alexander Bortnikov wouldn’t have done this without Putin’s order. They didn’t want to scare me, they wanted to kill me, they simply didn’t calculate the right dosage. Because it’s impossible to do this outside of a laboratory, it’s Russian roulette — there’s always a danger in putting more, then the person dies on the spot and others may suffer. I have an idea of where I was poisoned but so far the investigation continues. One theory is a cocktail at a bar. The FSB’s murder department is much bigger than this group that followed me — the Skripals weren’t poisoned by another group, these were different structures. We aren’t assuming — we know that the FSB is behind this, because we know how the FSB works. And we know that Putin operationally manages the FSB. I will still return to Russia. When this will happen depends not on me, but on the doctors.

You can listen to Alexey Navalny’s full interview with “Ekho Moskvy” in Russian here.

Summary by Grigory Levchenko

Translation by Eilish Hart

Cover photo: Sergey Fadeychev / TASS / Scanpix / LETA