By clothing-bag, 10/03/2023

Navalni claims he has tricked an alleged Russian spy into telling him how the FSB poisoned him

Prominent Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalni claims he has set up one of the alleged Russian spies who poisoned him this summer in Siberia into confessing how the operation went. Navalni, who is recovering in Germany from the attack with a toxic substance for military use that almost cost him his life, has released the video of a telephone conversation with one of the alleged agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB, heir to the KGB) identified in a journalistic investigation as those responsible for the assassination attempt. In the talk, in which the dissident poses as an adviser to a senior Security Council official who asks for explanations about what went wrong in the operation, the supposed spy explains that they put the poison in the dissident's underwear and that everything could It would have ended differently if the plane in which Navalni collapsed had not made an emergency landing and the doctors who treated him had been slower. The FSB has assured that the video of the call is "false" and the investigation is false, "the work of anti-Russian foreign services."Navalni claims he tricked an alleged Russian spy into telling him how the FSB poisoned him Navalni claims he tricked an alleged Russian spy into telling him how the FSB poisoned him

Navalni has explained that, presenting himself as an adviser to Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council, he called two members of the clandestine FSB unit that allegedly tried to assassinate him, identified along with six other alleged Russian agents in a journalistic investigation led by Bellingcat. One of the men recognized Navalni or the caller as suspicious and immediately hung up, according to the opponent. The other, who is identified as agent Konstantin Kudryavtsev in the investigation published last week, does take the bait, assumes he is talking to a superior general, and gives Navalni all the details of the attack last August in the Siberian city of Tomsk, according to the video and transcript of the call posted by the opponent on his YouTube channel. The 45-minute conversation took place days before the investigation was published, to which El País had access.

When Navalni asked the supposed spy about the failures of the maneuver, he replied that the speed of the pilots to land in an emergency, when in mid-flight the opponent began to feel bad was key. Also the arrival of the ambulance to the track. “If it had been a little longer, then possibly everything would have ended differently,” says the alleged agent, who also explains that his colleagues applied Novichok – a Soviet-era neurotoxin also used against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in 2018 in the UK — on the “inside seams” of Navalni's underwear when the prominent opponent was in the Siberian city of Tomsk. That it was sprayed on his clothing may explain why it took several hours to take effect. Before doing so, a reconnaissance team went to the hotel where he was staying and turned off the closed-circuit cameras.

Navalni claims he has misled an alleged Russian spy to tell him how the FSB poisoned him

The alleged agent also recounts that his superiors sent him five days later to Omsk, the city where the plane in which Navalni was traveling made an emergency landing and the first place where he was hospitalized before being transferred to Berlin, to recover and disinfect the opponent's clothing and remove any trace of the poison.

The FSB has dismissed both the Navalni video and the journalistic investigation. “The so-called investigation published by A. Navalni into the alleged actions against him is a planned provocation aimed at discrediting the Russian FSB and employees of the federal security service, the implementation of which would not have been possible without the organizational and technical support of special services. foreigners," the Russian intelligence service said in a statement to the state agency Tass.

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Putin accused Washington on Thursday of being behind the journalistic investigation that reveals the keys to the attack against the prominent opponent, well known in the West for his political facet and in Russia for his investigations into elite corruption . The Russian president acknowledged that his agents were following Navalni and argued that it was because, as he assured, the opponent collaborates with the US "That does not mean that it is necessary to poison him," he said. "If it had been necessary, it would have been carried out to the end," said the Russian leader at his marathon annual press conference.

Laboratories from France, Germany and the Organization for the Control of Chemical Weapons confirmed that the opponent was poisoned with a substance from the Novichok family. The European Union has imposed sanctions against several officials close to Putin for the poisoning. In its report, Brussels points out that the poisoning with a substance as specific as Novichok could not have been possible without the knowledge of the Kremlin, especially when Russian intelligence agents were following the opponent, who has assured that he plans to return to Russia when he recovers. .

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