OPINION: Navalny: Is the Kremlin innocent?

I begin this column with a declaration that shows my bias: if President Vladimir Putin wanted Alexei Navalny dead he would be dead. Army sharp-shooters do not miss a sitting target. A bullet in the head would leave an imprint hard to trace, and that would be that. Novichok, a poison, creates a multitude of problems, as we have seen.

Nevertheless, let’s assume the Kremlin was guilty of poisoning Navalny with novochok. If the authorities had kept him at home nobody would know what had nearly killed him. Then Russia would have been free to invent any cock and bull story, even though they knew it had been novichok. Of course, if Germany does send its samples to the independent WHO- the World Health Organisation- the UN body with the best medical specialists, and the tests show it was novichok, the Russians are in a corner. Strangely, Germany does not do this. It is Germany that is the prevaricator. Maybe Russia is innocent.

So let’s assume Russia is innocent. The Russian authorities have been very open. They don’t want to be accused of hiding the facts. They let Navalny go to Germany where they knew the odds were that the German government would claim novichok was used but, reasoned the Kremlin, there’s also some chance that truth will prevail in a democratic society, either through parliamentary scrutiny or because of Germany’s feisty media.

The Germans only sent samples of the poison to allies, France and Sweden, but not to Russia. The Germans, French and Swedish may be reasoning that because novichok was invented by Russia the media and public opinion will give their narrative the benefit of any doubt, and nobody in the West will contradict them. Indeed, it is probable that a majority of informed people in the West now do believe that the Kremlin ordered the attempted murder.

The fact that there are today other sources of novichok has not been mentioned by these three countries, even though one plausible scenario is that the attack on Navalny was carried out by a lone assassin who hated Navalny (as happened with Mahatma Gandhi, Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, with John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King). Or was ordered by a senior politician belonging to the government’s United Russian Party (URP) in Siberia’s big city, Tomsk, where the opposition, partly thanks to Navalny, was about to trounce the URP in the local election of September 13. Somehow the assassin managed to get his hands on novichok.

But there is one argument that goes against Russian innocence – the attempted murder in March 2018 of an ex-Russian intelligence officer in Salisbury in the UK, using novichok. Surely the British government was right in pointing a finger at Moscow. For reasons I don’t understand the Kremlin refused to cooperate in the investigation.

Could Russian rogue agents, harbouring a grudge against a victim who the British authorities accept had double-crossed Russia, use it in the UK and a quite separate assassin could use it in Siberia? Well, yes. There is a black market.

This month’s Science magazine, one of the world’s top academic journals, reports that there is. The US army itself has purchased novichok on the black market. In March 2018 the Voice of America (the government’s official overseas radio station) reported that Chechen criminals were sold it by a senior chemist, Leonid Rink, who worked in a Russian chemical weapons’ factory. (Presumably this story was leaked to the VOA by US intelligence sources.) At the time of the Salisbury poisoning the British prime minister, Theresa May, said that it was possible that “the Russian government lost control of this catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others.”

Another point: even if it’s true that the Salisbury attempted murders were carried out by official Russian agents, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the same happened to Navalny.

If I were a judge in court I would not be able to convict Russia, based on such contradictory evidence. The only thing that would change my mind is if Germany sent samples of the tests on Navalny to the WHO and the WHO did find traces of novichok. (Germany has sent samples to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, OPCW, the world’s chemical weapon watchdog, but WHO has more in-house expertise on the use of poison on a single individual.