There’s a saying in Leonid Petrov’s native Russia: Drink the vodka, not the tea. “Russia’s politics can be toxic,” explains Petrov, an expert on Russian and Korean history now based in Australia. And the Kremlin’s revenge is often served piping hot.

Former spy Alexander Litvinenko was famously murdered with a cup of radioactive tea. Journalist Anna Politkovskaya drank a laced brew while flying to cover a crucial story, and instead woke up in hospital. In 2020, two years after the Russian military toxin Novichok was unleashed on double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, on British soil, it was deployed against another high-profile enemy of the Kremlin, popular opposition figure Alexei Navalny. Navalny boarded a flight from Siberia to Moscow. An hour later, he had to be carried, screaming, from the aircraft bathroom during an emergency landing.

Political poisonings may seem like the stuff of medieval intrigue or Cold War legend (take the 1978 case of the Bulgarian journalist murdered with a poison-tipped umbrella on a London bridge, for example). But experts say poison has remained a signature weapon of the Russian state since Moscow’s secret poisons laboratory No. 12 began experimenting with chemical agents in 1921.

Today, critics of the Kremlin still have a much higher chance of succumbing to rare poisons than the general population – although the Russian government has consistently denied any involvement in the string of suspicious deaths and illnesses that have befallen politicians, spies and journalists down the years.

So, why do Russian dissidents keep being poisoned? Can anything be done about it? And what does the attack on Navalny reveal about the state of Russia – and President Vladimir Putin’s hold on it – today?

Why poison?

Dr John Besemeres has forged a long career as an intelligence analyst and Russia expert, and even he “can’t keep track of the dozens and dozens of murders” and attacks on political dissidents in the past two decades. “It reflects the KGB [Russian secret service] tradition: ‘If anyone betrays us, we kill them, we follow them to the ends of the Earth’,” Besemeres says. “Putin is ex-KGB, and he hates traitors.”

Russia is not alone in hunting down political dissidents, on occasion. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un had his own half-brother assassinated with a nerve agent, hand delivered by two allegedly unknowing women in a Malaysian airport in 2017. But experts say Russia’s pursuit of its enemies is without equal. Extrajudicial killings overseas were even formally given legal sanction in 2006 – countries such as the US target terror groups abroad but Russia’s wildly loose legislation leaves the definition of “extremist” to the president to determine.

The appeal of poison for Russian assassins is twofold, according to a man who has lived much of his life on the wrong side of Putin, US financier and human rights campaigner Bill Browder.Poisons are notoriously difficult to trace and deaths are sometimes blamed on a victim’s existing health conditions. “On the other hand, everyone knows who did it,” Browder says. Poison has become a kind of Kremlin calling card. “Putin likes to have it both ways … make a symbolic point but [escape] the consequences,” he says. “The message is clear: if you challenge [him], you will die.”

Poisoning is also typically painful, and recovery – or death – is slow, making it viciously theatrical. Two of the most shocking poison attacks in recent memory – against former spies Litvinenko in 2006 and then Skripal in 2018 — left a toxic trail through the UK and the victims in hospital for weeks. While the Skripals survived, one woman died after her partner gave her a perfume bottle he’d found in a charity bin, which, unbeknown to him, contained the Novichok. And Litvinenko suffered a slow, agonising death in a hospital bed, “a clear warning to others like him”, Besemeres says.

Writing of her own poisoning in 2004, Anna Politkovskaya said the choice for Russian journalists had become “total servility to Putin” or death. “It can be … the bullet, poison, or trial – whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.” Two years later, on Putin’s birthday, Politkovskaya was shot dead in an assassination blamed on Chechens but which, again, cast suspicion on the Kremlin.

Browder says the mysterious misfortunes of Kremlin critics have increased in the 20 years Putin has been in power. Among the arsenal of toxins identified in recent incidents are the radioactive isotope polonium-210, a rare Himalayan plant toxin and, of course, Novichok, the nerve agent lethal to the touch. “Really exotic stuff,” says Canberra emergency doctor and toxicologist David Caldicott. “These are some of the most lethal chemicals humans have ever created.”

In Navalny’s case, strange details quickly emerged, such as the mysterious (and fake) bomb threat that forced an evacuation of the airport where Navalny’s plane was making an emergency landing. Or the Russian doctors, who insisted officially Navalny was suffering from a “metabolic disorder” and so blocked his transfer to a Berlin hospital for more than a day – “almost the exact amount of time the poison would need to leave his system”, Caldicott notes.

When Pyotr Verzilov of the Russian protest group Pussy Riot fell violently ill in 2018, in circumstances he now says eerily mirror Navalny’s, he was kept sealed off in a Russian ICU ward for days before being released to Berlin. In his case, it was too late to pinpoint the exact poison. In Navalny’s, a German military lab found “unequivocal proof” of Novichok.

Such a poison can interfere with the crucial neural pathways in the body that control breathing, heart rate, and digestion. Treatment is dangerous and difficult, both for the patient and staff due to the risk of contamination, Caldicott says. Litvinenko’s autopsy is still considered the most dangerous post-mortem ever conducted in the modern world. Navalny’s own entourage was at first told he may be too dangerous to approach without protective gear. He remained in a coma for almost three weeks.

Who is Alexei Navalny and why is he a target?

In a country where elections are heavily manipulated and genuine opposition candidates do not see the inside of parliament, lawyer and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny has used the internet to mobilise considerable swathes of the population. Since politician Boris Nemtsov was shot dead just metres from the Kremlin in 2015, the charismatic Navalny has been de facto head of the opposition – so big is his standing that Putin will not even speak his name. His slick video exposés and commentary draw millions of views every week and target Putin’s inner circle – including the powerful oligarchs who took control of Russia’s resources after the fall of the Soviet Union. For a 2017 investigation into the vast empire amassed by Russia’s then prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, Navalny’s drones flew over palaces, yachts and secret mountain dachas, or seasonal houses, across the country – all built with “donations” from mining oligarchs and banks.

The scale of the wealth he uncovered gave Russians a rare glimpse into how they were being ripped off, Petrov says. One of Medvedev’s country estates, Navalny quipped, even appeared to have a house built just for the ducks on its lake, and ducks quickly became a symbol of mockery and protest, turning up in inflatable form at rallies even beyond Russia’s borders.

Navalny may have been disqualified from running for president under trumped-up criminal charges, but Besemeres says “He Who Must Not Be Named” has still become a serious problem for Putin. He has turned the formidable Russian government into the “Party of Crooks and Thieves”, a foe that can be weakened, even one day overcome, through his tactic of “smart voting” that encourages Russians to vote for local representatives in regional elections over the official Kremlin candidate at all costs.

This plan has already meant Putin’s Russia United party lost a third of its seats in the 2019 Moscow election; and a local, Sergei Furgal, was elected to the role of governor in far-east Khabarovsk. Furgal’s subsequent arrest by the Kremlin on murder charges widely considered to be politically motivated has since sparked months of protests – the biggest unrest Russia has seen since Putin took office. But the Furgal protests were quickly surpassed by the tens of thousands who took to the streets in the bitter cold across the country to chant Navalny’s name after his poisoning. Calls from world leaders for a proper investigation were brushed off by the Kremlin.

So Navalny, recovering from the attack in Germany, took matters into his own hands, releasing a recording in which he apparently duped one of the FSB (Russian secret service) agents on his tail into admitting how they poisoned him (using Novichok sprinkled on his underwear). A laughing Putin later admitted his agents had been tailing Navalny but said if they had wanted to kill the critic, they “probably would have finished it”. Navalny was not cowed. In early 2021 he made good on his vow to return to Russia ahead of its elections. He was swiftly imprisoned, declaring from the dock that Putin would go down in history as “Vladimir the underpants poisoner”.

“In 100 years time, the history books in Russia will discover the most important person of the last two decades was not Putin who disgraced us but Alexei who saw above it all but took terrible risks,” Besemeres says. “They must be consumed with hatred for him in the President’s office.”

La Trobe University’s Russia expert Dr Robert Horvath agrees that if a democratic Russia one day emerges “from the wreckage of Putinism”, Navalny will have been its prophet.

Navalny had had warnings before – he was twice doused with a corrosive antiseptic on the street in attacks that left his skin dyed green and damaged his eye. He also fell ill with a mysterious “allergic reaction” when he was last locked up by the state for organising unsanctioned protests, and his anti-corruption fund was blacklisted “as a foreign agent”, though Navalny says he has never received overseas money.

“When I was watching Navalny’s latest broadcast [before the 2020 poisoning], I was wondering, how can he still be alive?” Petrov admits. “He was calling Putin a thief, a criminal – not just the party – and he’d been linking the corrupt officials in his investigations to him more and more. The President is very sensitive to these kinds of personal attacks.”

Even after the 2020 poisoning, as Navalny sat in prison, he released his most explosive exposé yet: claiming that Russia’s oligarchs had secretly built Putin an extravagant billion-dollar Black Sea palace, which Navalny called “the largest bribe in history”. The Kremlin denied the report. Putin’s former judo sparring partner claimed the estate – which boasts its own casino, vineyard and underground ice-skating rink – belonged to him instead.

Still, Navalny’s survival despite regular police raids and fines made many see him as almost untouchable himself – someone to be worn down by the Kremlin, not martyred with a swift exit from Russian politics. Now, he has been sentenced to his longest stint yet: almost three years in a penal colony (one of the country’s notoriously brutal prison camps) for breaking parole on those embezzlement charges when he was in hospital recovering from the poisoning.

What does the Navalny poisoning tell us about Russia?

There may be no official rubber stamp from the Russian secret service on the attack, but the world is in little doubt about who is to blame. The United States, Britain and the European Union quickly imposed sanctions against Russia in response. Navalny himself has even heard the voice of his would-be assassin when he posed as a top security official in order to trick one of the FSB agents regularly on his tail into “debriefing” him on the poisoning.

While Navalny has enemies beyond just the President, not least of all the string of corrupt officials he has exposed in his investigations, most experts scoff at suggestions the hit could have been carried out without the President’s sign-off. “[Navalny] is the most well-known person outside Putin,” Petrov says. “Without Putin’s consent, it’s hard to imagine someone would touch him.”

Besemeres agrees: “It’s Putin’s regime, he’s the boss, so there might be other people acting but the options really become, was it this arm of Putin’s regime or this arm over here?”

And the timing may have been more telling than Putin would like – ahead of crucial 2021 elections and as the people of neighbouring Belarus, Russia’s closest ally, rose up against their own long-time autocratic leader, Alexander Lukashenko.

Browder and Horvath say Putin fears revolution contagion back home. “[He was] panicking,” Browder says. “The natural person to lead [an uprising] in Russia would be Navalny.”

Besemeres agrees the poisoning appears to be a “desperate but emphatic” move on the part of the Kremlin. “It’s meant to make people’s blood run cold,” he says. “Let the serfs know they will not be talking back to the masters any more. Not many people are as brave as Navalny.”

Some fear it might signal something more – that Putin is done playing at democracy and will no longer entertain any real opposition in Russia. Certainly, record protests against Putin following Navalny’s return and arrest in Russia were met with a notably brutal crackdown by authorities. Thousands were detained.

“It’s a very scary development from that point of view,” Besemeres says. “[Putin’s] behaviour over the past few months has been getting more and more extreme, there’s been more arrests, more people run out of Russia.”

Journalist Alexander Baunov has argued that if Putin is crossing the line from hunting down ex-spies such as Skripal and Litvinenko to a figure as prominent as Navalny, then it’s a sign “the regime – certainly its most hardline elements – feels more endangered than ever”. While Putin has recently rushed through a suite of amendments to the constitution to solidify his rule (which would let him run for two more six-year terms, taking him to 2036), his popularity has slumped in the face of an economic crisis at home (even pre-COVID) and his controversial decision to raise the pension age.

“Navalny was, and hopefully still is, someone who sensed the weakness of Russia as a federal state, who understood it’s a colossus on clay feet,” Petrov says.

As in Belarus, he says, the people are tired of a failing economy and government spending on “guns not bread”. “All Putin seems to do is fear-monger, claiming NATO is on the doorsteps and without him Russia will fall prey to a Western conspiracy. But as soon as people see the vulnerability of the state, they will start to question Moscow’s legitimacy to rule, to collect taxes … It’s what Putin fears most.”

Others say Navalny does not pose a serious challenge to Putin, especially now he is in prison. Such is the power of the regime that its end will likely come from within, not from a man calling protesters to the streets.

While Putin’s strongman image, standing against Western foes, has become more tired and uncool, of late, some commentators say it’s just been given a shot in the arm thanks to US President Joe Biden, who very pointedly branded Putin a “killer” in early 2021.

Such was the anger within Russia that an editorial in the newspaper Kommersant predicted Putin’s party might win every seat in Russia’s parliament “thanks to Biden”. Meanwhile, very quickly, Putin, who has never debated a domestic political opponent in his life, challenged Biden to a live debate (not the done thing among world leaders). And his famed outdoor (and occasionally bare-chested) photoshoots have returned with gusto, as his propaganda machine goes into overdrive to shift the narrative away from unrest.

Ultimately, Browder thinks the attack on Navalny might tip the scales one of two ways: “either destroy the opposition in Russia or be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and leads to uncontrolled uprisings. Much depends on what happens to Navalny.”

Can anything stop these poisonings?

While lower-tier hitmen involved in such attacks are sometimes charged, justice never quite reaches those who gave the orders. In the case of the Skripal poisonings in Salisbury, the two Russian agents identified by British intelligence flew straight from their “sightseeing trip” to Moscow, where they remain safe from extradition. Litvinenko’s assassins, former KGB colleagues, also escaped British justice, even after a UK inquiry finally found, a decade on, that the hit had “probably” been ordered by Putin.

“With Salisbury, something so shameless, even then the West has been weak and soggy in its response,” Besemeres says. “A lot of these high-ranking Russians enjoy having a summer house in France or London and those countries enjoy their money.”

Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, died in 2009, sick and reportedly beaten in a Kremlin prison, after discovering Browder had been targeted in a $230-million tax fraud by the Russian government. Four other witnesses to the scandal also died in mysterious circumstances.

In Magnitsky’s name, Browder lobbied for the US to create a new law targeting sanctions at individuals involved in killings and human rights violations, rather than whole nations, by blocking visas and even seizing properties. Versions of the Magnitsky Act have since been adopted by a number of countries – most recently by all members of the EU and Australia.

Navalny is a big supporter of Magnitsky and his poisoning helped
galvanise the EU’s adoption of the sanctions regime. “It seems particularly fitting that the Magnitsky Act should be applied to the people who tried to kill Navalny,” Browder says.

Of course, not everyone in Russia is conspiring to bump each other off. Browder, who lived in Moscow for a decade before he was deported for speaking out on corruption, says: “Russian people are some of the most honest, brave and idealistic people you will ever meet. Take Magnitsky. He was thrown in jail and he still refused to recant [his testimony] … It’s a shame it doesn’t come across in their international reputation, in their government.”

Still, the shadow of FSB surveillance often demands precautions, even beyond Russia’s borders.The champion chess player turned opposition figure Garry Kasparov reportedly has bodyguards oversee his meals and carry bottled water. A professor who predicted the end of Putin’s reign by 2022 recently confessed to independent Russian media that he had been warned his poisoning was already planned and he should steer clear of drinking tea or coffee.

Browder himself has been the target of death threats and kidnap plots as well as persistent ‘red notices’ from the Kremlin requesting that Interpol arrest and return him to Russia. If assassins do come calling, he imagines poison will be a likely weapon of choice.

“Russia is quite a dangerous place to be,” Petrov says. “You never know who you are talking to and who’s watching you. But overseas things usually only happen if you are a particular value or danger to the Russian leadership, then special agents are sent to find a way. And they do.”

This explainer was originally published in August 2020.