Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Monday said he had tricked a security agent into admitting that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) sought to kill him this summer and placed poison in his underwear.
In a blog post the Kremlin critic said that he had telephoned a man named Konstantin Kudryavtsev, who he said was a chemical weapons expert with the FSB domestic intelligence agency.
“I called my killer. He confessed everything,” Navalny wrote on Twitter, a claim the FSB later on Monday rejected.
Photo: AP
Navalny said he disguised his phone number and presented himself as an aide to Russian Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev, saying that he needed information for an official report on the attempted poisoning.
The opposition leader published an audio recording and a transcript of the phone call and released a video of him conducting the conversation.
He said that voice analysis “would demonstrate that it is indeed” Kudryavtsev speaking.
In the audio recording, the voice on the other end of the line initially sounds hesitant and cautious, but eventually tells the story and explains why Navalny managed to survive the poison attack.
The FSB described the phone call as a “provocation aimed at discrediting” the agency.
It said that the conversation “about the alleged actions against” Navalny would not have been possible without “the support of foreign intelligence services,” adding that the video the Kremlin critic published of the call was “fake.”
Navalny, 44, in August fell violently ill during a flight from Siberia to Moscow and was hospitalized in the Russian city of Omsk before being transported to Berlin by medical aircraft.
Experts from several Western countries concluded that he was poisoned with the Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent — a claim that Moscow has repeatedly denied.
A joint media report led by the Bellingcat investigative Web site last week revealed what it said were the names and photographs of chemical weapons experts from the FSB that had tailed Navalny for years.
In his blog post, Navalny said that last week he called the security agents identified in the report.
He said that nearly all hung up on him except the man he said was Kudryavtsev.
During that call the person believed to be Kudryavtsev said that his unit had not expected the pilot to make an emergency landing in Omsk.
He said that if the flight had been allowed to continue, Navalny would not have survived.
In the recorded comments, the agent said an attacker had placed the poison along the inner seams of a pair of Navalny’s underwear.
He detailed how he and another FSB agent had flown to Omsk after the poisoning and removed any trace of the poison.
However, Kudryavtsev never explained his exact role in the operation.
Navalny’s ally, Anti-Corruption Foundation lawyer Lyubov Sobol, on Monday went to a building on the outskirts of Moscow where the Bellingcat report said Kudryavtsev lives.
According to video she livestreamed on her Twitter account, police surrounded her vehicle and later detained her.
Journalists also arrived at the scene and rang the doorbell to Kudryavtsev’s reported apartment, but no one came to the door.
“I’ve been covering the FSB for years and never thought that they were great professionals, but Navalny’s prank comes as shock even for me,” Russian journalist Irina Borogan wrote on Twitter. “They are dumb and that makes them even more dangerous,” she added.
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