A Russian agent sent to poison Alexei Navalny, Russia’s opposition leader and president Putin’s great rival, has revealed how he was poisoned in August – when it was revealed that the poison was buried in Navalny’s underwear, CNN reports today (Monday). Navalny himself, in collaboration with the American news channel, led to a disguised contact with one of the agents who poisoned him.
Navalny called Agent Konstantin Kudrivtsev, and identified himself as a senior member of the FSB, who allegedly asked him to conduct an investigation into the action. Last week, Putin admitted that agents of the government organization FSB did follow Nabalani, but denied that he had been poisoned and even said, “If Russia wanted him dead, he would be dead.”
An investigation from last week revealed that the team of agents who poisoned Nabalani numbered between six and ten agents who followed him for more than three years. After most of the agents were identified, CNN tried to contact them and their superiors.
The investigators were under the impression that none of the agents was interested in talking to them, after one of them even slammed the door of his house in front of them, so it was decided to contact one of them indirectly. Navalny, who is still recovering from the poisoning he experienced in August, contacted Kudryvtsev himself, pretending to be one of his operators, while his phone number was disguised and presented to Kudrytsev as the phone number of one of his operators.
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The photo posted by Alexei Navalny (Photo: screenshot)The two talked for 45 minutes on the phone, during which Navalny demanded to get an understanding from the team members what went wrong and why Navalny was not poisoned to death. During the conversation, it was apparent that Kodrivtsev feared that their phone line was insecure, but Navalny urged him to continue reporting immediately, as “a discussion in the highest Security Council awaits his answers.”
The agent was asked, among other things, how the poison got into Nabalani’s body, and he simply replied “through the underwear.” He further answered Navalny’s own questions that the poison had been injected into the internal sutures of Navalny’s groin area. According to toxicologists who took part in the journalistic investigation, attaching the poison to clothing and thus increasing exposure to large parts of the skin is one of the safest ways to poison, especially when the victim begins to sweat.
The investigation revealed that the attackers used the substance in its solid form, rather than the liquid as used to poison the former double agent, Sergei Scripps. The investigation did not unequivocally establish that Kudribev was himself in Tomsk, the city from which Navalny took off during the poisoning, but the nature of the conversation with him showed that he was a significant part of the team of agents who took part in the poisoning.
“We did not expect all this to happen, I’m sure everything went wrong,” Kudryvtsev said, thus reinforcing the early suspicions that the intent was to kill Navalny. When asked about the dose of poison used he said that “to the best of my understanding we have added some supplement”.
As you may recall, on August 20, Navalny felt ill during a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow, and was later hospitalized in a German hospital. Shortly after his hospitalization, his doctors determined that he had been poisoned using the “Novichuk” type of poison, which is known to be used by Russian security organizations to hit targeting targets.