For Alexei Navalny it was another routine trip to the regions. Specifically to Siberia’s biggest city, Novosibirsk, and to its alluring neighbour, Tomsk. “An excellent city. One of the most beautiful in our country,” Navalny enthused on Instagram, posting a photo from Tomsk on Wednesday with a group of young supporters.
Navalny is Russia’s most prominent opposition activist. He made no secret of why he had flown to Tomsk, known for its wooden mansions and enlightened university. The goal, he wrote, was to back independent candidates ahead of local elections next month. And, of course, to kick out the “crooks” from Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia party.
On Thursday morning he made his way to Tomsk’s Bogashevo airport for a flight back to Moscow. Navalny was travelling with his press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, and a couple of aides. At the airport he ordered a cup of black tea at the Vienna coffee house. He sat down. Navalny may be barred from state television but he is nonetheless a celebrity figure in Russia. Another passenger, the local DJ Pavel Lebedev, snapped a photo of Navalny – paper cup in hand, about to sip his drink.
The group boarded the S7 flight to Moscow. The plane took off. According to Lebedev, Navalny soon became unwell. The change in his condition was sudden, violent. He went to the loo at the back of the plane. He didn’t re-emerge and appears to have collapsed. Video footage shows crew scurrying towards him. There are grim howls of pain.
“He started feeling really sick. They struggled to bring him round and he was screaming,” Lebedev said. Realising Navalny’s condition was grave, the pilot made an emergency landing at Omsk airport. Navalny was wheeled off on a gurney. Video from the scene showed a prone figure, looking pale and distressed. Medics loaded him into a yellow ambulance. They drove him away.
Yarmysh broke the news on Twitter: that her boss was unconscious and seriously ill, and that his tea had apparently been poisoned. He had drunk or eaten nothing else, she pointed out. Doctors told her a toxin mixed into a hot drink would be rapidly absorbed. An hour later there was an update. Navalny was in intensive care. He was attached to a ventilator and fighting for his life.
Over the next few hours, the scenes at Omsk hospital number one were ghoulishly awful. According to Yarmysh, medical staff initially acknowledged that Navalny had probably been poisoned. Soon, however, police turned up, flooding the corridor outside the patient’s room. After that the doctors were less forthcoming. They were seemingly terrified of speaking out.
Anatoly Kalinichenko, the hospital’s deputy chief physician, told reporters that poisoning was one scenario among many. Meanwhile, Russian state media floated alternative versions of what might have happened. It suggested Navalny had drunk too much the previous night and had taken medication. This was untrue, Yarmysh said – another fiction in the Kremlin’s longstanding anti-Navalny campaign.
There were eerie echoes of another scandal featuring poisoned tea: the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London. Two Kremlin assassins killed Litvinenko using deadly polonium. Russian officials said Moscow could not have been responsible, since the episode damaged the country’s international reputation. On Thursday, the pro-Putin TV host Dmitry Kisylov deployed the same warped logic to Navalny’s condition, hinting the west was to blame.
By afternoon Navalny’s wife, Yulia – the mother of their two children – had reached the hospital from Moscow. She brought with her Navalny’s personal doctor, Anastasia Vasilyeva. The authorities, however, refused to allow them into the room. They demanded proof in the form of a marriage certificate that Yulia was indeed his wife – a cruel and petty gesture. Eventually she was allowed in.
Floating above these unhappy scenes were two questions. How much did Putin know of the events at Tomsk airport? And if this were a state plot, similar to the Litvinenko poisoning, why now? Unlike some Russia opposition figures who have gone into exile abroad, Navalny was based in Moscow. It would have been easy to poison him there months or even years ago.
During his Siberia trip, Navalny had been carrying out an investigation, as well as meeting local candidates and volunteers, the local news site Tayga.Info reported. There was a certain amount of cloak-and-dagger to the visit. “I can’t reveal all the details,” said Lyubov Sobol, an ally, when asked if he was preparing an expose. “But Navalny was on a work trip. He wasn’t relaxing in the regions.”
But, his friends add, it is unlikely a Siberian governor or mayor would poison someone of Navalny’s stature without permission from above. Poisoning, they add, is a favourite method of the Kremlin’s security services, in KGB times and today. Over the last century, Russian spies have perfected ways of administering invisible poisons – sometimes to warn, and sometimes to kill.
Recently Navalny wrote that the kind of revolution taking place next door in Belarus would soon happen in Russia, sweeping away Putin and his KGB ilk. The similarities are obvious. Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, has been in office for 26 years; over the summer Putin – in power for two decades already – “won” a constitutional vote, allowing him to stand again and to extend his rule potentially until 2036.
Regardless of Navalny’s fate, we are unlikely to discover the truth. The investigative and judicial system in Russia is in no way independent. Previous deaths of high-profile critics such as the journalist Anna Politkovskaya have never been fully investigated. Sometimes a few low-level people are convicted. But the zakazchiks – those who give the orders – are rarely if ever found.
* Luke Harding’s latest book, Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West (Guardian Faber), is available from the Guardian Bookshop.
