The chief physician who treated Alexei Navalny was clear yesterday: the Russian opposition leader and critic of President Putin has not been poisoned. Navalny had been in a coma in the hospital in the Russian provincial town of Omsk since Thursday after becoming unwell on board a plane. He was transferred early this morning to a hospital in Berlin; there he is expected later today.
According to Russian doctors, Navalny suffers from a rare metabolic disease caused by low blood sugar. But critics, including Navalny’s own entourage, dispute that statement. They are convinced that the tea he drank before boarding was poisoned.
Giflaboratorium
That suspicion did not come out of the blue. Russian security forces have a long history of using poison. As early as 1921, then Soviet leader Lenin ordered a special laboratory to be set up, in which scientists were looking for ways to efficiently eliminate enemies of the state.
The lab, officially Scientific Research Institute Number 2, continued to be used even after the fall of the Soviet Union. Little is officially known about what is happening now. The British newspaper The Guardian writes that sources at secret services assume that the function of the lab has hardly changed since its inception.
The Russian intelligence service FSB, the successor of the KGB, is also known for regularly using poison against political opponents of the Kremlin. Consider, for example, the attack in 2018 on double agent Sergei Skripal in Great Britain, with the agent novichok. Or the murder of dissident Alexander Litvinenko in 2006; he died from a few sips of radioactive tea.
Below we list more examples:
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