‘I called my killer and he confessed’

Alexey Navalny says he fooled one of his FSB assassins into detailing the Kremlin’s poisoning operation

Opposition figure Alexey Navalny says he’s managed to fool one of the federal agents who tried to kill him into a confession. Using a spoofed telephone number and posing as an assistant for Russian National Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, Navalny himself called Konstantin Kudryavtsev (a chemical-weapons specialist, according to Bellingcat) and spent nearly an hour questioning him about the failed attempt to poison him in August. In a video shared on YouTube, Navalny says the call took place on December 14, hours after a multinational team of journalists and researchers published investigative reports detailing an assassination plot by Russia’s Federal Security Service. Navalny pretended to be gathering information in order to report back to Patrushev about why the operation failed.

During their conversation, Kudryavtsev told Navalny that the dose used to poison him would have been fatal if the plane’s pilot hadn’t made an emergency landing in Omsk and if paramedics on the ground hadn’t acted as quickly as they did.

Kudryavtsev also named another figure allegedly involved in the operation against Navalny: Vasily Kalashnikov. According to The Insider, Kalashnikov is an expert in detecting nerve-agent metabolites in biological samples. Phone records show that FSB officer Stanislav Makshakov contacted Kalashnikov after Navalny collapsed into a coma and the assassination mission became a cover-up.