Twelve days after his arrival in Germany, Berlin finally announced Wednesday that Alexey Navalny would have been poisoned with the famous neurotoxic poison Novichok, already mentioned in the Skripal case. Except that as in the Salisbury affair, the official story about what happened to “Mr. 2%” defies the laws of chemistry, biochemistry, and logic.
I won’t go back to the absurd appellation of “main opponent of Vladimir Putin” that the entire Western press sticks to Navalny despite common sense. It is enough to see his ridiculous level of support among the Russian population (2% according to the latest Levada poll) and to see that Zhirinovsky is far ahead of him, to realize that this dear Alexey does not represent a threat to the Russian President.
Once this obvious fact, which, it seems, should have been stated given the number of people who continue to swallow this nonsense, is said, let’s move on to the latest delirium to date concerning “Mr. 2%”.
Navalny and FBK in financial turmoil after losing libel suit
Alexey Navalny may be adulated in the West, in reality this guy is a swindler, convicted several times in Russia (among others in the Yves Rocher case). Moreover, in 2019, a court found him guilty, along with Lyubov Sobol and the organization he has set up, FBK (Fund for the Fight against Corruption), of defamation against a company supplying school canteens in Moscow (Moskovski Shkolnik). As the company lost its contract because of these defamations, the court ordered Navalny, Sobol and FBK to pay 88 million rubles in damages to the Moskovski Shkolnik company.
In order not to have to pay, Navalny and Sobol decided to liquidate FBK, while planning to recreate the structure under another name. But the debt related to the damages was bought back by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch, who said he was ready to put Navalny (in case he survived) and Sobol “naked” so that they would pay back what they owed. In response to a question asked by Strany Sovetov online, Prigozhin even made a rather ole-ole joke when he said that some people suggested taking Sobol as a sex slave to pay off her debts.
“I really hope Navalny stays alive. If not, there won’t be anyone to “cut a pound of flesh off” on. We’ll make a deal with Lyubov Sobol, although some suggest that she be taken into sexual slavery 🙂. As for FBK, of course, I will take all legal steps in which the world will see how Navalny and his supporters obtained their information, how they distorted and falsified it. And also who was the client of his pseudo-investigations, including his Western masters. I can say separately that Konkord’s press service has recently received a lot of information about the illegal activities of the FBK,” Prigozhin said.
And since Navalny is still in a coma, Prigozhin has already launched the collection of 34 million rubles in debts from Sobol, taken from his bank accounts. The young woman complained about this on Twitter, posting a screenshot of the state of her bank account, which now stands at -34,019,871 rubles. We can say that Prigozhin didn’t waste a second to get his property back.
When you have this in mind, what happened to Navalny at the end of August takes a completely different turn. In view of his debts and the multiple investigations launched into the dubious financial schemes of FBK, it is better for Navalny to disappear from the scene or at least from Russia.
Navalny’s poisoning with Novichok arrives just at the right time
Indeed, as Prigozhin pointed out, the Russian authorities have no interest in getting rid of Navalny, who is not a threat to Putin, and is a poor opponent who has done more to discredit the opposition than anyone else, including the Kremlin.
“The [Russian] government needs an opposition like Navalny. He is a possessed man, mentally unstable, who could not agree with anyone. Navalny’s death is not profitable either to the authorities or to his political enemies. He is a person who has lost his authority even with his colleagues. Navalny’s death or injury benefits only his comrades-in-arms and his masters, who understand that he will no longer be useful,” said Prigozhin.
In this context, on August 20, 2020, Navalny and his secretary Kira Yarmych returned to Moscow from the city of Tomsk by plane, after a several-day visit to Novosibirsk and Tomsk in support of local candidates for the upcoming elections.
While he waits for his plane at the airport, 40 to 60 minutes before takeoff, Navalny is having tea, which is brought to him by his secretary as we can see on this video surveillance of the airport :
Then at 8:01 a.m. his plane takes off. Navalny feels bad, goes to the bathroom at about 8:30 a.m. and at 8:50 a.m. the flight crew finds him unconscious. The captain then decided to make an emergency landing in Omsk. Strangely enough, 5 minutes after the request for an emergency landing in Omsk, a false bomb threat occurs at the airport where the plane carrying Navalny is to land.
Navalny is then taken to the hospital in a serious state, and he falls into coma. The poisoning thesis is immediately launched by his secretary, who says that he did not eat anything that day, and that he only drank this tea at the airport.
Very soon Navalny’s family and supporters demand that he be sent to Germany, saying that they have no confidence in the doctors in Omsk (thus showing a total lack of respect towards those who did everything to save him, and who did so by being harassed every 5 minutes to get a diagnosis).
On August 22, 2020, Navalny is finally transported by plane to Germany. There, the German doctors remained completely silent for two days, and then came the statement that Navalny had been poisoned with a cholinesterase inhibitor. Except that it is vague. Cholinesterase inhibitors are found in drugs against Alzheimer’s, in pills to boost the functioning of his brain, in the treatment of glaucoma, in that of myasthenia gravis, in insecticides, chemical weapons (including sarin, VX and the famous Novichok).
Problem, the doctors in Omsk then asked their German colleagues for proof of Navalny’s poisoning, as they found alcohol and caffeine in his urine, but no poison. Anastasia Vasilieva’s pathetic attempt to make people believe that Navalny does not drink alcohol at all in order to discredit the doctors in Omsk ended in a bitter failure, since it was discovered that he did drink alcohol until two in the morning in the village of Kaftantchiki in the Tomsk region, and that on his arrival at the hospital he did have alcohol in his body.
Moreover, in October 2019, in conversations of Navalny’s daughter published by RIA FAN, she tells that her father takes drugs, thus confirming the suspicions of some people that Navalny is a cocaine addict.
So to try to make people believe, like Vasilieva, that Navalny is a paragon of virtue who only drinks water and tea is nothing more than mocking the world.
Meanwhile, Navalny’s entourage stands out for its silence in the face of the initial lack of a clear diagnosis from German doctors. Where Russian doctors were called names if they didn’t make an official statement every 5 minutes, in Germany, on the other hand, the music has changed.
On August 28th, the Charity Hospital where Navalny was admitted announced that he is still in an artificial coma and connected to a respirator, but that his life is no longer in danger. The hospital requests the assistance of the Bundeswehr and the laboratory at Porton Down (you know the one not far from where the Skripal incident took place).
And then what a “surprise”, on September 2 the German government announced that the Bunderswehr laboratory had found traces of Novichok in Navalny’s body. The same poison as in the Skripal case. How strange.
All the more strange since Russian doctors had kept samples of Navalny’s body fluids (blood, urine) before letting him go to Germany, just to keep evidence in case. And a Russian institute equipped with an American mass spectrometer with a database of 240,000 substance references analyzed these fluids and found absolutely nothing. The various laboratories that have analyzed Navalny’s body fluids are all unanimous on the absence of poison.
Novichok, the ultra-deadly military poison that doesn’t kill many people
In this dossier, the level of inconsistencies is very well served, as Karine Béchet Golovko underlined in her article on this case. First of all, if the Russian authorities really wanted to poison Navalny, why hand him over to Germany for treatment, at the risk that the poison used would be found. It doesn’t make sense.
And then especially if it was Novichok that had been used, Navalny should be dead. I won’t go back over the inconsistencies of the Skripal case which are so numerous that an encyclopedia would have to be written to cover them all, I refer you to the article on the alternative scenario that I translated last year on this subject.
Let’s take a closer look at what Novichok is. In reality, several substances, seven in total, are hidden under this name, which refers to chemical weapons developed by the USSR. According to its designers, these chemical weapons are even more deadly than VX (which was discovered in Porton Down, no, no, this is no joke).
VX is a nerve agent that causes neuromuscular blockage, paralysis of all muscles including the diaphragm and death by asphyxiation. This stuff is so dangerous that it is classified as a weapon of mass destruction by the UN and has been banned by the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. It works so fast that it is very difficult to save the person affected. The lethal dose is in milligrams (10 mg is enough to kill half of the 70 kg adults who receive such a dose of this poison).
Now let’s look at Novichok. Where 10 mg is enough to kill half of the guinea pigs, 1 to 5 mg (depending on the molecule of the group of seven that are grouped as Novichok) is enough to achieve the same result! Clearly Novichok is 2 to 10 times more lethal than VX! And like VX, Novichok acts very quickly, in a few minutes maximum, as one of its creators recalled. Its mode of action is similar to VX and causes death by contraction of all the muscles of the body leading to asphyxiation.
In other words, if Navalny had really been poisoned with Novichok in the tea he drank, he should have died in the airport of Tomsk! He wouldn’t even have been able to get on the plane 40 to 60 minutes later!
And not only him. As indicated by one of the creators of the compounds called Novichok, and as shown in table 2 of this scientific article, the molecules of the Novichok group have a relatively low boiling point (74 °C maximum for the molecules studied). For those of you who have missed the physics-chemistry courses, this is the temperature at which a molecule or an element turns into gas!
And at what temperature is water heated to make tea? For those who may have forgotten, water boils at more or less 100°C depending on the altitude of the place. In short, Navalny’s tea was well above the boiling point of Novichok, which should have turned into gas (whether in the tea or on the cardboard cup).
But once transformed into gas, it would have killed all those who were near Navalny, like this gentleman visible on the table next door, as well as his secretary who went to get his tea, etc!
And if, as some imply, the product was on the cup, the person who took the previous or next cup from the stack of cardboard cups should have died too, not to mention the waiters at the coffee shop. But all these people are fine, as well as the passengers on the plane, the flight crew or the doctors who took care of him in Omsk without special protection!
As one of its creators recalled, like the VX, the Novichok is a weapon of mass destruction made to kill a large number of people at once. It is by no means a suitable weapon for targeted assassination. There are many other molecules much more discreet and adapted for this kind of objectives.
Moreover, the symptoms of Navalny do not correspond at all to those of Novitchok, which are close to those of VX.
If it’s not in his tea, then the poison would have to be somewhere else in contact with his skin. And there some media with the help of one of the creators of Novichok, went into a total delirium, going so far as to say that Navalny’s underwear could have been impregnated with Novichok.
But normally the underwear of a married man is handled by only two people: the man and his wife. So either Navalny made mischief with another during his trip to Siberia, or someone will have to explain to me how the “killer” was able to apply the poison on his underwear…
And the inconsistencies don’t stop there. As Alexander Rogers pointed out, given that the Novichok failed to kill the Skripal, if one were to assume that it was the Kremlin that was behind the assassination attempt in both cases, why not have changed weapons in view of the obvious ineffectiveness the first time? Why not have used something more effective and discreet?
In addition, Russia’s chemical weapons stockpiles have been totally destroyed (destruction ended in 2017) under OPCW control! So where would this rotten Novichok that does not kill its target come from? To believe as some ironically say that the Russian secret service got its hands on the last expired vial from the USSR and that they have nothing else on hand.
More seriously, if it was the Kremlin that wanted to get rid of Navalny, there is no lack of discreet, targeted and cheap poisons (no, I will not provide the list, no need to give ideas to some people), it is ridiculous to imagine the Russian authorities resorting to such an inconspicuous poison (especially after the Skripal affair), and it seems to be as ineffective given the low percentage of deaths on the ground.
The other strange point is that despite multiple requests from the doctors, the General Prosecutor and the Russian authorities, the German doctors and authorities refuse to transmit their elements to Russia, while demanding a transparent investigation from the latter. This is called double standards and an obvious willingness to hide something.
And while the waltz of hypotheses on the correct diagnosis continues (some suggesting a potential pancreatitis that would explain many of the symptoms and is compatible with his alcohol and drug use), some in the West are of course calling for new sanctions to be applied to Russia, and even calling on Merkel to stop the Nord Stream 2 project. Well, well, well…
As they often say, look for who benefits from the crime. This incident is ideal to try once again to block the Nord Stream 2 project and justify new sanctions against Russia. And what better sacrificial victim than a political opponent who is now more of a burden to his Western bosses (because completely burned out in Russia) than a real threat to the Russian authorities?
In the meantime, Lukashenko, the Belarusian President announced that his secret service had intercepted a conversation between Germany and Poland on the falsification of the poisoning of Navalny at Novitchok. He transmitted the recording to Russia quickly, and the Russian secret service is analysing it. If what he says is true, it promises an interesting twist in the case. More to follow…
Christelle Néant
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