Is Vladimir Putin really behind the poisoning of Alexei Navalny?

Alexei Navalny (left), who has survived a poisoning attempt, is a high-profile critic of Russian President Vladmir Putin (right). Pictures: File

German, French and Swedish medical experts all agree: Alexei Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s highest-profile domestic critic and founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, was poisoned with the Soviet-era nerve agent novichok. He has survived. Russia’s relationship with Europe may not — which is not necessarily a bad outcome.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has declared Navalny to be the “victim of a crime intended to silence him”. The case, in her view, raises “very serious questions” that “only the Russian ­government” can — and must — answer. “The world,” she averred, “will wait for an answer.”

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny sits on a bench in Berlin. Picture: Instagram / @navalny

Merkel has called on Russia to launch an independent, transparent investigation into Navalny’s poisoning. Britain and the EU have echoed that call. If such an investigation were to expose the Russian state as the culprit, the European Commission suggests, new sanctions may be in order. After all, according to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the poisoning qualifies as use of a banned weapon.

This is not the first time Russia’s government has been implicated in the use of novichok against Putin’s supposed enemies. In 2018, former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned in Salisbury in Britain. Both survived the attempt and are in hiding.

Ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal (right) and his daughter Yulia. Picture: File

The Kremlin denies involvement in either case. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov insists there are “no grounds to accuse the Russian state” of being involved in the Navalny case. Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, argued that Western intelligence agencies may have poisoned him to discredit Russia.

That’s far-fetched, even if the attack on Navalny does Russia more harm than good. The decision to poison a high-profile political opponent immediately before local elections — with a ­Soviet-developed nerve agent, no less — defies political logic. And with protests against August’s fraudulent presidential election engulfing neighbouring Belarus, the timing is odd. Moreover, the Kremlin’s initial response was confused. There was no solid cover story, and any plot appears to have been a spectacular failure.

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

Putin has been presented as a kind of Darth Vader of global politics, capable of meddling in US elections, organising protests in France, coaxing Brexit along and propping up dictators including Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. A former KGB man, he is savvy, strategic and cunning. So why couldn’t he manage to have the Skripals or Navalny killed? And why would Russia hand ­Navalny over to Germany, where novichok would be detected?

Now Putin faces an inter­national outcry and the threat of sanctions, including the potential cancellation of lucrative inter­national projects such as the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany.

Poisoning Navalny hardly seems worth it. Indeed, the attack resembles a maximum-effect anti-­Russian public relations tactic more than a sinister Kremlin plot. Yet if the notion that Putin directly ordered the attack is suspect, the allegation that Western intelligence agents orchestrated it is even more so. If nothing else, German or Swedish scientists, unlike their Russian counterparts, are unlikely to be convinced to pretend they found novichok in Navalny’s system.

A more likely explanation lies in Russia’s political system, which is run by the siloviki — Putin’s political allies, whose power base is in the security apparatus. Some functionaries may have guessed that Putin wanted to silence Navalny before the local elections; others could have been subjects of Navalny’s corruption investigations. In Russia, all sorts of goods and services — including military-grade nerve agents — are traded on the black market. And the siloviki owe their positions to loyalty, not competence. Any number of them may have foolishly believed poisoning Navalny was a good idea. It would have taken only a couple to carry out the attempt.

Vladimir Kara-Murza.

Other failed poisonings — such as those of Vladimir Kara-Murza, a journalist and co-ordinator of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia organisation, in 2015 and 2017, and Pyotr Verzilov, publisher of MediaZona, a news site chronicling abuse in Russia’s justice system, in 2018 — may have similar origins. The same may be true of the deadly poisoning in 2006 of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB officer and regular critic of the Russian security services.

Like the Navalny poisoning, these attacks have often been counter-productive. In 2004, Anna Politkovskaya, a columnist for liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was sickened by toxins aboard an aeroplane travelling from Moscow to Beslan. She survived, but was shot to death in the elevator of her apartment building two years later. As Putin noted at the time, her “death brought greater damage to the Russian image than her reports”.

This is not to absolve the Kremlin of any of these attacks. Whether or not Putin directly ordered each hit, he created the ­system that allowed them to happen — one that is ineffective, ­unaccountable and prone to destabilisation by rogue actors.

Navalny’s death could have been seen as something the master of the Kremlin wanted, and pleasing the master is the siloviki’s ultimate objective. In an unstable and Putin-centric system, they have few legitimate options for ensuring stability. And even if their efforts to settle personal and political scores backfire, they will not be punished. They were, they can always claim, trying to defend the President’s interests.

Those now accusing the Kremlin in Navalny’s poisoning are unlikely to find any “smoking gun”. No matter: ultimately, the Kremlin is to blame. The West should be consistent and united in holding it accountable, even if that means implementing sanctions or other policies running counter to its own economic interests. Putin created a system that places him at its centre. In Russia, that is where all responsibility — and blame — is to be found.

Project Syndicate

Nina L. Khrushcheva is professor of international affairs at The New School. She is the author (with Jeffrey Tayler), most recently, of In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones.