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Navalny speaks up
Alexander Navalny, Russia’s foremost opposition leader, has been giving a flurry of interviews since surviving an apparent attempt to kill him with a nerve agent in an operation that is assumed to have been ordered by Vladimir Putin – despite denials from the Kremlin.
Navalny runs a network of anti-corruption activists and is said to be the critic President Putin fears most. He is still recovering in Germany after falling ill on a flight to Moscow from Siberia on 20 August. The plane was forced to make an emergency landing and he was briefly treated in a hospital in Omsk before being evacuated to Berlin after a standoff between his family and Russian doctors.
Several European laboratories have since confirmed that he was poisoned with a nerve agent from the novichok group, the type of chemical used against the former intelligence agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in the UK in 2018. Earlier this month the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) also concluded that novichok had been used.
The German chancellor Angela Merkel, who visited Navalny in a Berlin hospital, said he was “meant to be silenced.” Merkel, however, has played down the possibility of halting the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.
But Navalny’s determination was partially rewarded last week by the imposition of sanctions by the EU, targeting Putin’s inner circle. The assets of Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB, the successor to the Soviet KGB, will be frozen, and he will face a travel ban, along with Sergei Kiriyenko, the first deputy chief of staff in Putin’s administration. Four other senior officials will also be targeted. The UK has also imposed sanctions on the same officials.
“Bortnikov …..must have come up with an order calling for the application of ‘active measures’, with Putin signing off on it,” Navalny said in one interview. He is convinced that the reason for his attempted murder was venturing beyond Moscow to Siberia, where he was campaigning against Putin’s ruling United Russia Party.
This is familiar territory for Putin, a KGB veteran who ran the FSB in the late 1990s before becoming Russia’s prime minister and president. Following the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 with a radioactive cup of tea, Tony Blair’s government severed all cooperation.
Moscow has strenuously denied any involvement and dismissed claims it targeted Navalny as “absurd”. Russian officials have suggested variously that western intelligence agencies orchestrated the poisoning, Navalny poisoned himself, or that he was not poisoned at all.
In his public statements –designed to protect himself by raising his profile before he returns home – Navalny has insisted that Putin “enjoyed” using poison as a means to silence dissenting voices. The Russian president was using chemical weapons to “both kill me and, you know, terrify others”, he said.
In yet another interview he said that EU action was good, but that his main goal was to prevent corrupt members of Russia’s elite from smuggling their ill-gotten gains to the West. “As for sanctions or blacklists, my position has always been that if developed countries want to help Russia and its citizens and themselves, they should put a roadblock in the path of dirty money leaving Russia. You do not need those …people – those people who invented novichok or used it as a weapon – to block this flow of money that is stolen from our citizens.”
Navalny’s “viral videos have done more than anything to expose the luxurious lifestyles of the Kremlin’s elite,” in the words of one veteran Russia-watcher.
Navalny was also mentioned the other day by a presumably well-informed source - the new head of Britain’s domestic security service, MI5. Ken McCallum revealed in a rare media briefing that the UK is facing a “nasty mix” of national security threats, from hostile state activity by both Russia and China to fast-growing right-wing terrorism – although jihadist plots form the bulk of investigations.
Britain faced threats “up to and including assassinations, as the Navalny case reminds us; threats to our economy, our academic research, our infrastructure and, much discussed, threats to our democracy,” he said. In July the UK accused Russia of trying to steal coronavirus secrets by hacking into research labs in the UK, Canada and the US.
McCallum’s remarks came after UK spy agencies were criticised for failing to take the threat from states like Russia seriously enough. Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee accused MI5 and others of “taking their eye off the ball” and failing to scrutinise Moscow’s attempts to influence UK elections. The director-general said MI5 had investigated the possibility of Russia interfering in the 2016 Brexit referendum and not found anything of “significance”. He acknowledged, however, that there were “questions to be posed” about whether British agencies had dedicated enough resources to the threat from Moscow in the early 2000s. “The Russians did not create the things that divide us — we did that.”
Looking to the future, McCallum also said ominously: “You might think in terms of the Russian intelligence services providing bursts of bad weather, while China is changing the climate.”
IAN BLACK
