Kremlin critic releases audio in which the agent appears to acknowledge the plot.
Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny said he cheated a Russian intelligence officer by accidentally admitting the role of his and other officers in Navalny’s nerve agent poisoning this summer.
Navalny posted online audio Monday of a 49-minute phone call with the alleged officer, in which Navalny poses as a senior Russian official.
In the audio, the man appears to confirm that he was part of a team of agents from Russia’s domestic intelligence agency FSB who poisoned Navalny and suggested they exposed him to the Novichok nerve agent through his underwear.
The call was taken up by the independent investigation group, Bellingcat, which released a highly detailed investigation last week that identified several FSB agents who were allegedly part of a squadron that tracked Navalny for years and was present in the Siberian city of Tomsk when he was poisoned.
Russia has denied any involvement in Navalny’s poisoning, and last week President Vladimir Putin tried to dismiss the Bellingcat investigation, insisting it was invented by US intelligence agencies.
Navalny and Bellingcat said they tried to call two of the alleged agents, including the man in this conversation, identified as Konstantin Kudryavtsev, a member of the FSB trained at a military biochemical academy and previously worked at a biological warfare institute within the Ministry of Defense. They said the call took place last week, hours before the new Bellingcat study was published.
In the audio, Navalny introduces herself as ‘Maxim Ustinov’, a fictional assistant to the powerful head of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev. Navalny claims he is calling on the members of the FSB team at Patrushev’s request for an after-action report to understand why they did not kill the opposition leader.
Kudryavtsev, who responds when Navalny calls him by name, is very cautious at first and repeatedly asks Navalny if they should speak on a secure line, but over the course of the conversation he slowly answers questions about the operation.
Kudryavtsev suggests that his job was to make sure that no traces of the nerve agent were left on Navalny’s clothes seized by local police after he was rushed to hospital in Omsk. Kudryavtsev says he traveled there twice to “process” Navalny’s belongings so that there would be no traces.
He suggests that his colleagues had applied the nerve agent to Navalny’s underwear and told him he had been instructed there to focus on cleaning.
“They said we had to work on the inside of the underpants,” he says.
Asked by Navalny why they didn’t kill him, Kudryavtsev said he believes it was because the plane in which he fell ill had crash-landed and airport paramedics quickly gave him atropine, which counteracts nerve agents.
“The situation developed in a way that… not to our advantage, I think,” he said. “If it had been flying a little longer and they hadn’t landed it somehow abruptly and so on, maybe it would have all been different,” he said.
Kudryavtsev makes several references to officers named by Bellingcat as part of the operation, unsolicited and unsolicited, including Colonel Stanislav Makshakov, a chemical weapons expert who Bellingcat says has repeatedly spoken to the other FSB officers chasing Navalny.
He tells Navalny more than once to “call Makshakov,” who can tell him more about the doses of the nerve agent.
Bellingcat said Navalny had also managed to speak briefly with another FSB officer, referenced in the call of Kudryavtsev, Mikhail Evdokimov, the head of the Omsk local anti-terrorism branch of the service. Evdokimov confirmed to Navalny – again posing as a civil servant – that he had received Navalny’s clothes from Kudryavtsev, Bellingcat said, but refused to talk about an unsecured line.
The FSB on Monday dismissed the call as “bogus”, claiming it could only have been produced by “foreign security forces”. In a statement, it said it was investigating and suggested there could be ramifications for the publication.
In his denial last week, Putin tacitly acknowledged that the FSB agents had tracked Navalny, but said that if they had wanted to poison him, they “would have done the job.”
Journalists and one of Navalny’s colleagues Lyubov Sobol tried to visit the apartment listed as that of Kudryavtev on Monday. Later a bus with escorted police arrived and detained Sobol and removed the journalists from the building.