Putin gave “direct orders” to kill me, says Russian Alexei Navalny

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has described how he thought he would die after a poisoning attack he says was ordered by President Vladimir Putin.

On August 20, Navalny collapsed on a flight between the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow, resulting in an emergency landing and his hospitalization in the city of Omsk. German investigators had been evacuated to Berlin and said he was the victim of poisoning from Novichok, a nerve agent developed in the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

A report this week by investigative website Bellingcat has identified a group of agents from the Russian secret service FSB who were allegedly involved in the attack after tracking Navalny on more than 30 trips.

In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais Before publishing Bellingcat’s findings, Navalny said that after his discharge from Charite Hospital in the German capital: “I had no doubt that it was a direct order from Putin. It was based on a very simple fact: Novichok is the most poisonous substance invented by humans. And to make it you need a state laboratory, you need enormous efforts from the state to produce Novichok. “

Navalny felt fine boarding, but in flight the poison attacked his nervous system and his ability to breathe. “The feeling is absolutely horrible. People have not made up words to describe what happened to me … I had the total understanding that I was dying.”

Moscow denies any involvement and its delegation to the Intergovernmental Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has accused Germany and its allies of “unleashing a massive disinformation campaign against Russia”.

The incident further soured diplomatic ties between Europe and Moscow, which were subject to sanctions. As the leader of the Progress Party and the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Navalny is the scourge of the Russian elite and has millions of followers on social media.

“Putin wants to be the Tsar of Russia. He doesn’t like anyone who opposes him. He sees our organization as dangerous, just as he sees anyone who denounces corruption as dangerous,” said Navalny. El Pais.

He believes killing me will destroy our organization. It’s difficult for me to understand exactly what’s going on in his head. I’m not the first to be poisoned, and I certainly won’t be the last. 20 years on the power. It’s been too long, 20 years in power would spoil and drive everyone crazy.

Navalny said his group’s focus would be to ease the hold of Russia’s ruling United Russia party in the 2021 parliamentary elections, although he expects his party’s candidates to overcome significant hurdles.

“We will use other political forces for one purpose only, the demonopolization of power,” he said.

“We try to bring as many people together as possible under a very simple slogan: that the poverty we have is the result of Putin’s twenty years in power. He’s destroying the country.”

The image below from Statista outlines the time when President Vladimir Putin was in power.