Alexei Navalny on Monday released an audio confession from one of the men allegedly behind his near-fatal poisoning, following a sting operation in which he called the man up and posed as a Russian intelligence official.
The confession further adds to the acute embarrassment of the Russian intelligence community after an independent investigation into Mr Navalny’s poisoning came out last week detailing a full-fledged state-run operation to try to kill the opposition leader.
The 44-year-old Kremlin critic fell suddenly ill on a plane from Siberia to Moscow in August before it made an emergency landing at a nearby airport. Mr Navalny was eventually transferred to a hospital in Germany and lay in a coma for weeks.
Several European laboratories have since confirmed that he was poisoned with the Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent.
Mr Navalny on Monday published a staggering recording of his 49-minute sting call to Konstantin Kudryatvev, an alleged Russian intelligence agent, in which he introduced himself as an aide to the head of the FSB intelligence agency.
Mr Navalny said he made the call last week, a few hours before independent investigative group Bellingcat released its investigation, which identified Mr Kudryavtsev and several other agents as tailing the opposition leader for days before poisoning him.
The Russian opposition leader told the man – believed to be Mr Kudryavtsev, one of the FSB agents with medical training who were trailing him – that he needed to debrief him for a report for FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev.
The man described to Mr Navalny how he was sent to Siberia to make sure there were no traces of Novichok left on his clothes. He also confirmed that Mr Navalny would have been dead if the plane had not made an emergency landing.
“If he were in the air for longer, and they hadn’t landed in such an abrupt way, possibly, things would have not gone the way they did,” the man told Mr Navalny, whose voice was unaltered for the call.
The man insisted that he was not aware of all the details of the operation but said that they had been instructed to wash Mr Navalny’s underwear, which were supposed to have the highest concentration of the toxin.
His spokesperson Kira Yarmysh told the Telegraph on Monday that his team cannot categorically say how Mr Navalny was poisoned but that the conversation with the agent suggested the toxin may have been smeared on his underwear.
Alternatively, it may be that the toxin was introduced another way but is most easily detected in clothes around sweatier parts of the body.
The Russian opposition leader previously revealed that he was offered a cocktail at a bar of his hotel in Siberia that tasted funny the night before he fell ill, although he could not say for certain if that was the source of the poison.
Just before hanging up, the man believed to be Mr Kudryavtsev was heard asking the fake FSB aide if it was okay that they were speaking on an unsecured phone line.
Neither the Kremlin nor the FSB were immediately available for comment.
Mr Navalny’s team also released a video that showed the opposition leader talking on the phone while Bellingcat investigator Christo Grozev listened in, seen sometimes trying to suppress their laughter.
The video of the call got over 1 million views on YouTube in less than an hour after it was released and the facepalms that Mr Grozev made during the conversation were quickly turned into online memes mocking hapless Russian agents.
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, last week denied involvement in Mr Navalny’s poisoning, but confirmed that FSB agents were trailing him, claiming that he was a legitimate target as someone with alleged links to foreign intelligence.
There has not been a criminal inquiry into the incident in Russia.
Sergei Markov, a former lawmaker and a prominent pro-Kremlin commentator, conceded on the Ekho Moskvy radio on Monday that it was “a major weakness on the part of Russian authorities that they haven’t launched an inquiry into the poisoning”.
He said the Kremlin had put itself in a bind by not offering a plausible explanation why a young, fit man like Mr Navalny suddenly fell into a coma.
