Associates of Alexei Navalny have said traces of novichok were found on a bottle of water in his hotel room in Tomsk, suggesting he was poisoned while in the Siberian city, and not, as previously suspected, from a cup of tea he drank at the airport.
The Russian opposition leader fell ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow on 20 August. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, where he spent two days in a coma before being flown by a medical jet to Berlin. He remains in the Charité hospital in the German capital.
A video posted to Navalny’s Instagram account on Thursday morning showed a search of his hotel room after news of his illness and two empty plastic water bottles on a table. These were bagged and later given to German authorities along with other items from the room, according to the post.
“Two weeks later, a German laboratory found traces of novichok precisely on the bottle of water from the Tomsk hotel room,” the post said.
According to the post, some of Navalny’s team had stayed in Tomsk for an extra day. When they heard of his sudden illness and hospitalisation, they went to the hotel room where he had been staying and searched for evidence.
“We didn’t have a great hope of finding anything, but as we were clear that Navalny had not ‘got a bit ill’ … we decided to collect everything that could even hypothetically help, and pass it on to doctors in Germany. It was also pretty obvious there would not be an investigation in Russia,” it said.
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said earlier this month that tests carried out in Germany showed “unequivocally” that the nerve agent was used to poison Navalny. Subsequent tests in France and Sweden have returned similar results. The same poison was used in the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in 2018.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said in a statement on Thursday that it had received a request for analysis of Navalny’s biomedical samples from Germany. “Results of this analysis are forthcoming and will be shared with the German authorities,” the world chemical weapons watchdog said.
Russian authorities have repeatedly denied involvement in Navalny’s poisoning, either by claiming he was not poisoned at all or by claiming it could have been a “provocation”. Earlier this week, the head of Russia’s foreign spy agency said Russia had already destroyed all its supplies of novichok, and that Navalny had no poison in his body when he was flown to Germany in a coma.
Navalny’s associates remain convinced the poisoning was ordered at the highest level, and signed off by President Vladimir Putin. “In Russia there is no person who would take the responsibility on themselves to do this without consulting with Putin,” said Georgy Alburov, who travelled with Navalny to Tomsk, in an interview on Wednesday.
Navalny posted a photograph on Instagram earlier this week, and said he was conscious and breathing unassisted. His team says he plans to return to Russia and continue his work as soon as he has recovered.
