One of the world's most visible oligarchs, Roman Abramovich, was briefly blinded in a suspected poisoning while visiting Ukraine earlier this month on a peacekeeping mission, reports said this week.
Abramovich is one of the world's most high-profile oligarchs, owning both the Chelsea Football Club and one of the world's largest yachts.
He has been offered up as a bridge between hard-line Kremlin backers close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian negotiators trying to broker peace after Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February.
Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that when Abramovich was on a trip to Kyiv in the first week of March, both he and two Ukrainians accompanying him suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning after talks concluded.
He reportedly suffered short-term blindness and found the skin on his hands and face peeling off, as did Ukrainian lawmaker Rustem Umerov and another unnamed negotiator.
The Bellingcat open-source collective, an increasingly influential source for objective news on the Russian/Ukrainian conflict, said that they believed the attack was likely not intended to kill Abramovich.
“It was not intended to kill, it was just a warning,” Christo Grozev, an investigator with the Bellingcat, told the Journal.
Why Poison Abramovich?
The possible poisoning of such a high-profile target who was not yet under international sanctions may be a clear sign from Putin's government that even people close to the president will be punished for any anti-war criticism.
Abramovich remains unsanctioned by the United States, likely because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he will be a valuable go-between for peace talks.
But he has been hit by a laundry list of bans and sanctions in the United Kingdom, where he owns multiple properties and one of its major soccer clubs, and the European Union, where he is considered one of the continent's wealthiest people.
Kremlin Warnings Can Be Deadly
Russia is well-known for using poisons on dissidents or critics of its government.
It disfigured Viktor Yushchenko, a pro-democracy Ukrainian candidate for president in 2004, and faced international condemnation for poisoning a defector, Sergei Skripal, and several other people in an attack in 2018 in London.
