[1]
By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with [2]
Novichok is a military weapon, the deadliest chemical warfare agent developed by several armies around the world over the past thirty years, which hasn’t killed anyone.
Alexei Navalny is a Russian politician who over more than a decade nominated himself to be President Vladimir Putin’s main rival but whom just two percent of Russians have trusted enough to vote for.
Think of Novichok and Navalny, both of them, as political fictions.
The paradox of their combination is that Navalny’s claim to have been attacked with Novichok failed to persuade Russians to support him against Putin. Then, after he survived Novichok but died of natural causes, he lost his political value outside Russia just as he had already lost it inside Russia. However, the combination of the two fictions has served the ulterior purpose for which they were designed in Germany. This is why this book is being published for German readers now – now that they are being ruled by a chancellor with a multi-billion Euro plan to rearm Germany in order to fight the old German war against Russia once again.
This is the conclusion for the time being.
This introduction is to the evidence of years of planning and staging by the Chancellery and the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) to turn the personal medical collapse of Navalny into a public cause of war; that’s to say, preparation for war. It records the accumulation of disinformation and misinformation by the then Chancellor Angela Merkel; the BND chief Bruno Kahl, and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas; amplified daily by Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert, and compelling the Charité Clinic in Berlin, its doctors and administrators, to falsify the medical evidence until they made the colossal mistake of publishing the clinical test results for Navalny’s bodily liquids and his hair.
Merkel, Kahl, and Maas also compelled the Swedish and French governments, along with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague under US, British and Dutch control, to report their additional testing of Navalny’s liquids as corroborating their campaign against Russia, when their tests did no such thing. The Berlin clinic tests proved their lie.
After a pack of expensively fabricated lies about the Novichok poisoning of Navalny won the Oscar of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in March 2023 for the best non-fiction film of the year, and for the same category also the German Film Academy’s Lola, there should have been little doubt that he can win another Oscar now that he’s dead. But no.
Navalny died on February 16, 2024; he was 47 years old. The cause of death was not Novichok, not murder ordered by the Kremlin. “I may disappoint you,” the head of the Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, Kirill Budanov, told the press in Kiev eight days later, on February 24 [3]. “As far as we know, he indeed died as a result of a blood clot. And this has been more or less confirmed.”
The executor of Navalny’s will, his mother Lyudmila Navalnaya, has refused to reveal the results of the autopsy conducted by state pathologists. But she has not disputed their findings on the cause of Navalny’s death, nor has she arranged an additional private autopsy. She has refused to endorse western government and media allegations, fed by Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnya, who has repeatedly declared [4] that “Putin tortured, starved, and killed my husband”. She released a three-page official summary [5]she had received listing the autopsy findings of Navalny’s preexisting diseases and the heart arrhythmia episode which, the letter reportedly said, precipitated his death. She told the US propaganda agency Radio Free Europe that the letter was “another pathetic attempt to cover up what really happened: a murder.” She told Reuters the letter was “preposterous”. Reuters added [6]: “She did not say how she and her husband’s supporters had established the sequence of events she described.”
The timing was almost exactly two years after Russian forces launched the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine, and the battlefield war which Budanov was running had replaced the propaganda war. Once that had begun, Navalny lost his value as a propaganda weapon, no matter how hard he had tried from his Russian prison to recover his appeal to the western press as Putin’s rival, and also as his victim. Once he was dead, he could not be either. And since he was buried, there has been nobody for Novichok to kill which can attract the attention Navalny had tried to draw.
Why then re-tell the story of Navalny’s five months in Germany – from August 22, 2020, until January 17, 2021 – and expose the role the German government played in manufacturing the fiction that Navalny had been poisoned with Novichok on Putin’s orders; revived at a Berlin hospital; rested and refreshed in the Black Forest; and then returned to Moscow where he was arrested, tried, and sent to prison, initially for eleven years, and after a further trial, for an additional nineteen years?
[7]Read the book in hardcover, paperback or e-book by ordering through Amazon.de or Amazon.com [8].
From the point of view of the Chancellery in Berlin, confirmed in the opinion polls at the time, Navalny’s Novichok had successfully polarized German public attitudes towards Russia and convinced as many as 60% of German voters that Putin was a direct, violent threat to Germany [9]. This was Chancellor Angela Merkel’s success; so pleased with it she was that just before Navalny was released from his Berlin hospital, she visited [10] to congratulate him and embrace him in his bed. The Chancellery did not allow photographs of the two confederates together.
“Alexei Navalny was the victim of an attack with a chemical nerve agent of the Novichok group, Merkel announced [11] publicly instead. “This poison could be identified unequivocally in tests. So it is clear that Alexei Navalny is the victim of a crime. He was supposed to be silenced, and I, together with the entire German Government, condemn this in the strongest possible terms.” Merkel was right – not one German Government official called into question, then or since, any of the evidence for the alleged crime. She was lying – Novichok was not identified unequivocally. She was wrong – the German plan was not to silence Navalny but to amplify the Novichok attack as an indictment of Putin, the Russian government, and their “crime”, according to Merkel, “against the basic values and fundamental rights we support.”
Voter support for Merkel had peaked at the start of June of that year. She knew [12] it was starting downward when Navalny arrived in Berlin, and it continued downwards — plunged in fact, into 2021 when Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union-Christian Social Union faced the national parliamentary election of September 26, 2021, and lost it with its worst-ever result of 24.1%. As a mobilizer of votes for Merkel’s party, the Novichok Navalny fiction was almost as big a flop in Germany as it was in Russia.
But Navalny thought otherwise. He believed he could continue his success from his Russian prison cell, especially because it was a prison cell. “This is the best day in the past five months,” Navalny told the press at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, as he disembarked from the Berlin flight on January 17, 2021 [13]. “Everyone is asking me if I’m scared. I am not afraid,” he said. “I feel completely fine walking towards the border control. I know that I will leave and go home because I’m right and all the criminal cases against me are fabricated.” What Navalny meant was that his version of the truth of his case would prevail in the west, as it does still, starting with Germany. But Navalny was lying about the truth of his case. Once he was imprisoned, then dead, his case, the truth and the lies, had exhausted their political value in Germany.
The following chapters of this book explain how the medical evidence of his case was manipulated and the evidence of the Novichok weapon invented with the German purpose of preparing Germany’s decision to go to war with Russia.
[14]This was the same road to the same war which the British Government had started with the fiction of Russian agents carrying Novichok on a Putin mission to kill Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence agent, at the front door of his home in Salisbury, England. That happened on March 4, 2018. Like the Skripals, Novichok failed to be fatal for Navalny. Like them too, the official story of the Novichok weapon and how it was delivered had to be changed several times over as Navalny’s claims and the official evidence turned out to be impossible to believe and provably false. Unlike the Skripals, though, Navalny was not silenced. For the five months he was in Germany, he, his organization, his sources of money, and the German Government beat their drum against Putin, for Navalny as his replacement, and by escalation of economic sanctions and military force in the Ukraine as the method.
This book’s Navalny story was written for publication as the events happened, with investigation of the evidence available at the time. The most telling evidence of this came from Navalny himself in the documented tests of his blood, urine and hair. According to these data, Navalny’s collapse was the outcome of an overdose of lithium, benzodiazepines, and other drugs which Navalny was taking for a combination of medico-psychiatric reasons and for recreation. The story is retold until Navalny left Germany. At that point in time, January 17, 2021, the German government had no further practical use for him.
[15]The finale of the Navalny story is an exclusively Russian one. It began on February 16, 2024, with the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) announcement, followed by an official telegramme to his mother in Moscow, that he had died just after two in the afternoon, Yamalo-Nenets time; that was just after noon Moscow time. Two hours later, the Russian media began carrying the official announcement. The wording of the last line of the announcement is significant. “The causes of death are being established”, the FSIN statement said [16]. Causes — plural.
In Anglo-American coroner’s court practice, what this means is that there is likely to have been a sequence of causation, medically speaking, with the first or proximate cause of death identified as heart, brain, or lung injury or failure; and the second, intervening, or contributory cause of death such as biochemical factors, including prescription drugs in lethal combination; mRNA anti-Covid vaccination triggering fatal blood clots; or homicidal poisons. For example, in the case of the alleged Russian Novichok death of Dawn Sturgess in England in June 2018, the evidence is of British government tampering with the post-mortem reports [17], to add Novichok when it wasn’t suspected or identified by police and hospital pathologists at first.
In Navalny’s case, poisoning on the order of President Putin had already been publicly announced as the cause of Navalny’s death without evidence at all. The delay time required for the complicated processes of forensic pathology and toxicology to establish the evidence has been reported [18] in the Anglo-American media to signify cover-up and body snatching. Meduza, a Russian oppositionist publication in Riga, reported [19] that “a doctor who advised Navalny’s associates” has said that blood clotting was “an unlikely cause of death” – this is medically false.
In speculation of poisoning as cause of death, there was at least as much likelihood that Navalny, his team, and their CIA and MI6 handlers had been preparing a repeat of the August 2020 Tomsk operation; decided on it when Navalny met with his lawyer at the prison on February 14; but when he implemented the plan two days later the resuscitation Navalny himself was expecting failed. Without the toxicology evidence of what drugs Navalny had been taking in the hours before his death, this is no more than speculation. Navalny’s family and organization will not reveal the proof.
The Anglo-American propaganda warfare army was already pronouncing the contributory Cause 2– Putin did it — as the cause of Navalny’s death. If the Russians had announced the proximate Cause 1 as cardiac arrest or brain aneurism, without a Cause 2, they would not have been believed. In the short term, Cause 2 cannot be established with credibility in Russia since it took the British government ten years, 2006-2016, to fabricate their story of Russian polonium poisoning in the Alexander Litvinenko case. In the Russian Novichok cases in England, it has so far taken seven years of court, police, and pathologist proceedings, 2018-2025, without definitive outcome – except as propaganda [20].
The problem for readers to interpret what has happened in the Navalny-Novichok complex is that the Anglo-American and German propaganda warfare machines are better at what they do than the Russian side. But then when it comes to war with guns, not words, the Russian side is far superior, as can be seen in the Ukraine right now. Accordingly, the Kremlin has decided to concentrate on the main fight. Inside Russia, it has been obvious for a long time that in or out of prison, Navalny alive was politically insignificant; but now even less. The new western propaganda has proved to be as ineffectual for Russians as Navalny was himself.
But the purpose of the propaganda is different. President Joseph Biden’s statement [21] on Navalny’s death made this clear. “This tragedy reminds us of the stakes of this moment. We have to provide the funding so Ukraine can keep defending itself against Putin’s vicious onslaughts and war crimes. You know, there was a bipartisan Senate vote that passed overwhelmingly in the United States Senate to fund Ukraine. Now, as I’ve said before, and I mean this in the literal sense: History is watching. History is watching the House of Representatives. The failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten. It’s going to go down in the pages of history. It really is. It’s consequential.”
[22]In retrospect now, it is the evidence of the Charité Clinic’s test results of Navalny’s blood, urine and hair which prove the lie to both Merkel’s and Biden’s claims. The medical consensus on the risk Navalny was running of combining benzodiazepines with other drugs through liver enzyme failure and fatal tachycardia is well established; it has been documented here [23]. Russian doctors typically prescribe a benzodiazepine called Grandaxin (tofisopam in the west) for reducing bipolar mood swings, diffuse anxiety, and panic attacks. If combined with a sedative also commonly prescribed in Russia for sleeplessness and branded as Teraligen (alimemazine), the risk of liver enzyme failure leading to heart attack is not as well known in Russia as it should be — as it is in the US and UK. The result is that Russian doctors do not monitor their patients on this combination of drugs by regular testing of their liver function. Navalny, his family, and his organization have never acknowledged his prior medical conditions, nor the medications he was taking in Tomsk in 2020 or in prison in 2024. To date, however, they have made no complaints against the Federal Penitentiary Service for depriving Navalny of the medicines he has requested. It remains to be seen whether the family or the prison service will ever release these personal data.
There was a noteworthy difference between the US and NATO leaders on what happened to Navalny. In the wording Biden read out in his press conference, he had said; “make no mistake — make no mistake, Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death. Putin is responsible.” When pressed by a reporter to clarify “was this an assassination?” the president said [21]: “The answer is, I — we don’t know exactly what happened, but there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something that Putin and his — and his thugs did.”
The innuendo of murder does not (repeat not) appear in the statements by the French, German and British leaders. The most loyal among the smaller allies of the US were also reluctant to repeat Biden’s claim and followed the French [24] and British [25] lead instead. Their remarks indicate the US was failing to hold its front against the Russians. Canadian government leaders were circumspect [26] on the cause of Navalny’s death; the one Canadian exception was Bob Rae, a former provincial premier and then Canadian representative at the United Nations. Rae tweeted [27]: “Putin murdered #Navalny just as surely as if he’d strangled him with his bare hands.” The Australian foreign minister, Penny Wong [28], stopped short of charging homicide, but imitated Biden: “We hold the Russian Government solely responsible for his treatment and death in prison.”
In Germany Merkel’s successor Chancellor Olaf Scholz [29] didn’t follow the Biden line. “Navalny had been brave to return to Russia in 2021 after his recovery in Berlin. He has now paid for his courage with his life…This shows perhaps more starkly than ever the kind of regime we are dealing with. Anyone expressing criticism or standing up for democratic values must fear for their safety and their life. Russia had long ceased to be a democracy…Navalny’s years of inhumane imprisonment were the result of hypocritical, politically motivated sentences. He campaigned for democracy, freedom, and the rule of law in Russia.”
This was the Chancellery’s method for burying Navalny and praising him – and then moving on to the new political priority in Berlin, continuing the war against Russia. “Germany will continue to support independent Ukraine in its defence against the Russian offensive for as long as is necessary”, Scholz declared on February 16, 2024. More than a year and half later, this is still the Chancellor’s war policy, but the victories by Russian forces on the battlefield have changed the meaning of Scholz’s qualifier, “necessary”.
This book has been written to demonstrate to German readers that the war which was commenced on the foundation of a lie, the Novichok Navalny lie, isn’t necessary at all.
On December 14, 2020, Navalny made two disguised telephone calls from Germany to Russians he believed had been part of a Federal Security Service (FSB) squad tracking him on his electioneering travels in Siberia four months before. in August. The first call was immediately detected and the line cut. The second call, reported by the NATO propaganda unit Bellingcat on December 21, was with Konstantin Kudryavtsev.
According to the publication [30], “Bellingcat can now disclose that it and its investigative partners are in possession of a recorded conversation in which a member of the suspected FSB poison squad describes how his unit carried out, and attempted to clean up evidence of, the poisoning of Alexey Navalny. The inadvertent confession was made during a phone call with a person who the officer believed was a high-ranking security official. In fact, the FSB officer did not recognize the voice of the person to whom he was reporting details of the failed mission: Alexei Navalny himself.
This 49-minute call between Navalny and Konstantin Kudryavtsev, one of the FSB officers who traveled to Omsk in the aftermath of the Navalny poisoning, provides a detailed first-person account that describes how the FSB organized the attempted assassination in Tomsk as well as the subsequent clean-up operation. The unintended confession adds significant new details to our understanding of the operation, including the exact manner in which, according to the FSB officer, the Novichok was administered.”
In fact, Kudryavtsev was not an FSB officer. He was employed by a Ministry of Defense biological security research centre where he was a specialist in chemical and biological weapons.
On December 17, 2020 [31], three days after the call, four days before Bellingcat’s publication, Navalny was interviewed by the Berlin Staatsanwaltschaft (District Attorney). “I was interrogated all day,” Navalny reported in a tweet [32]. “The German prosecutor’s office interrogated me at the request of the Russian authorities.” In a longer Facebook post later in the day, Navalny corrected a detail: “I spent the entire first half of the day at the German prosecutor’s office. I was interrogated there at the request of the Russian side.” The Justice Ministry officially confirmed [33] the questioning at the time.
Navalny, who was accompanied to the interview by his wife, told the Dutch government-financed outlet Moscow Times that they had asked [34]“what he ate and which medications he took around the time of his poisoning, as well as whether he suffers from diabetes. Russian medics, officials and Kremlin-backed media outlets have at various times claimed that Navalny fell violently ill from a metabolic disease, alcohol poisoning or low blood sugar.” “The 44-year-old Kremlin critic promised to publish a detailed list of the questions as well as his answers sometime later,” the newspaper reported. But Navalny didn’t.
By then the Berlin prosecutors, as well as several other German government agencies, had read the Charité Clinic’s battery of test results which had concluded on Day 33 of Navalny’s hospitalization – September 24. If Navalny was lying in his December interview about his regular medications and what food, alcohol and drugs he had consumed in Tomsk, the day and night before his collapse, the Germans already knew. Those data, including the laboratory values on Navalny’s initial hospital admission, appeared in the four appendixes of The Lancet report by Navalny’s Berlin doctors which first appeared in print on January 16, 2021 – see Chapter 14.
The German authorities knew already, just as had the Russian authorities who were holding copies of Navalny’s medical reports and prescription drug records; they used them to compose some of the questions they requested the German prosecutors to ask Navalny to answer. The two sets of records threatened to discredit the allegations the Navalny organization was repeating that the poison had been delivered in liquid form, first in tea at the airport and before that in a water bottle at the hotel. The water bottle evidence had been tested in Germany at the Bundeswehr Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology (IPTB] in Munich which was also responsible for special testing of Navalny’s blood. But the only “evidence” from IPTB came from a press release by Merkel’s spokesman Siebert (Chapter 2).
However, Navalny was already prepared with his brand-new evidence – this was the admission to Novichok poisoning of Navalny’s underpants which came from the telephone call with Kudryavtsev. It is unlikely that Navalny kept his surprise new evidence secret from the German prosecutors. Instead, in his Facebook report of what they had discussed together, Navalny said [32]: “Congratulations once again to Bellingcat, our (FBK) Inside, and everyone involved in the investigation. The evidence is such reinforced concrete that it is impossible to argue with it. And even just lying as usual is impossible.”
There is no German government record of either accepting Navalny’s and Bellingcat’s claims about the Kudryavtsev admissions or verifying them independently. Der Spiegel, which was one of the sponsors of the Bellingcat investigation and which published a video of the telephone operation, failed to find a German official to authenticate the voice of Kudryavtsev himself or confirm the veracity of what he was taped as saying. If the Berlin prosecutors who interviewed Navalny had been serious in their attempt to investigate the Novichok story, they would have followed their rules, the Code of Criminal Procedure (Strafprozeßordnung), for examining and proving evidence, including the chain of custody for the Kudryavtsev taperecording. They would have required Navalny to hand over the tape, which would then have been examined for signs of editing, tampering, faking.
Without such corroborating evidence, the Navalny-Kudryavtsev telephone record would be inadmissible in a German court trying the charge against the Russian government which Navalny and the German Government were making – that of attempted murder. Instead, the December 14, 2020, taperecording of Kudryavtsev is the crucial piece of evidence in a propaganda film [35]. Even in that context, the faults are glaring.
[36]The film begins with a trick played on the viewer. This shows Navalny being fitted with a microphone taped against his chest and concealed under a pullover. Why? The camera crew recording Navalny in action was using a sound boom. There were separate recording devices attached to the telephones in use. Additional microphones were placed around the recording studio. “Now I feel like an undercover agent, being wired up,” Navalny says to the camera. But he wasn’t undercover, and the microphone on his chest would not have been able to pick Kudryavstev’s replies to Navalny’s questions. The strap-on was a deception for the film audience.
[37]A frame from Navalny, the film – https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17041964/?ref_=vp_close [38]
The taperecording in which Kudryavtsev’s voice is poorly audible, compared to Navalny’s, can be listened to in the published Bellingcat recording here [30].
Navalny opens the call with Kudryavtsev (as translated by Bellingcat)), “Konstantin Borisovich, hello my name is Ustinov Maxim Sergeyevich. I am Nikolai Platonovich’s assistant. I need ten minutes of your time …will probably ask you later for a report …but I am now making a report for Nikolai Platonovich … what went wrong with us in Tomsk…why did the Navalny operation fail?”
The Kudryavtsev voice on the tape answers: “I would rate the job as well done. We did it just as planned, the way we rehearsed it many times. But when the flight made an emergency landing the situation changed, not in our favor….The medics on the ground acted right away. They injected him with an antidote of some sort. So it seems the dose was underestimated. Our calculations were good, we even applied extra.”
Independent forensic experts who have listened to the call claim that the Russian audiotape is unconvincing — on Navalny’s side for the lack of the professional focus his cover story was intended to convey; on the interlocutor’s side, for the absence of his security checks for such a highly classified subject; his lack of curiosity in the line of the questioning; his frequent memory lapses; and the drone-like quality of his answers.
The experts say they find it highly improbable that an operational debriefing of the kind Navalny was asking for should not have occurred within hours of the operation itself in August; and that an out-of-channel call from the office of Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Security Council, should have reached Kudryavtsev at 6:30 in the morning, Moscow time, one hundred and sixteen days after the operation in Tomsk. “The Heads of Defence and Security will discuss this once again, and they will probably ask you to prepare a full statement, but now I am doing a report for Nikolai Platonovich, which will be discussed by the Security Council at most senior level. I need … a single paragraph from every unit member: What went wrong? Why the Navalny operation in Tomsk was a complete failure? Tell me your view, I will write it down and then you can elaborate further in your own report [30].”
The Kudryavtsev voice replied uncertain what Navalny was talking about.
“Was it a failure in Omsk?
“No, in Tomsk, I am speaking of Tomsk!”
“Of Tomsk?”
“Yes.”
“What happened in Tomsk?”
“Konstantin Borisovich!”
“Yes, yes, yes.”
“Did you hear what I said. I am calling on Patrushev’s orders!”
“[Coughing]. I understand very well, I am just trying to remember what happened in Tomsk?
“Well, what was the reason for you to go to Omsk on the 25th?”
“In Omsk or in Tomsk [30]?”
Russians in a position to know say assassins don’t speak to the Kremlin like this.
One of the key changes in Navalny’s Novichok narrative which was introduced publicly for the first time after the tape and transcript were made public was that the assassination weapon had been delivered, not in the form of tea or water which Navalny had drunk on the morning of August 20, but in the underpants he was wearing that day. There is no detail in the Kudryavtsev claim – no disclosure of whether the Novichok weapon was in the form of an aerosol spray, a gel, or a powder. Also, no disclosure of when the underpants were weaponized – while Navalny was out of his hotel room on the evening before, during a hotel laundry operation two days before the attack, or while he was asleep – and how many of Navalny’s underpants were treated. According to Bellingcat [39], Kudryavtsev “was privy to only part of the operational details – in particular, the evidence clean-up in Omsk.” / [30]
In the tape, Kudryavtsev claims to have been ordered to Omsk to sanitize Navalny’s clothing, removing whatever traces of Novichok remained five days after the attack. According to Bellingcat’s report, however, traces of Novichok are unlikely to have persisted in clothing for more than a few hours. Kudryavtsev told Navalny he arrived in Omsk on August 25 and then “some time later, a week or two weeks [later]”. Bellingcat corrected the second visit date in its report to claim that it occurred in early October. By then, Kudryavtsev knew, as did his superiors in the FSB criminalistics institute, that the German Bundeswehr’s military laboratory was “involved. They have military chemists working there. Maybe they have some methods of detection. On which part of the body they could have found traces? Nothing on the body could have been found, there was nothing there. They probably found something in the blood. I don’t think there was anything on the body. That must be the assumption. He was also washed in our hospital.”
As interpreted at first by Bellingcat and Navalny, and then repeated in the film, Navalny’s body, allegedly contaminated by Novichok, and his clothing also, were removed by the Omsk hospital staff treating him. None of them has been reported to have suffered any adverse contact effects.
The story of the underpants being treated by the FSB up to five days after the attack was contradicted from the beginning by Navalny’s spokesman Kira Yarmysh. She tweeted on the evening of August 20 that Navalny’s wife had not allowed his clothing to be confiscated by either the hospital or the police, and that she had taken the underpants and other garments with her immediately, and then to Berlin [40].
[41]Source: https://x.com/kira_yarmysh/status/1296454882518544384?lang=de [40]
In the audiotape, Navalny corrected the original story of what had happened to his clothing. For a professional forensics specialist on a mission to cover up a top-secret assassination operation, Kudryavtsev is remarkably unsure of himself.
“You flew to Omsk on the 25th?
“Well, I’d like to remember. Well, I guess, approximately, yes. I have it written down at work.”
“Specifically, what happened to them [Navalny’s clothing]?
“Their final destination?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I have no idea of the final location but I can tell you this. They were given to us when we arrived, they were brought to us by the local guys from Omsk… from this police, what’s their… transport police. They gave us the box, we worked with the box, respectively, and returned everything to the local guys. And the local boss – I have his phone number, I can give it to him if you need it – I told him to give the box back. Most likely, he gave it back to these guys, the transport police…”
“Well, we went twice. The first time it was an ordinary package, with seals all over it, it was torn all over. Well, there were things, they were all kind of wet. There were things, respectively, there was a suit, shorts, socks, masks, a T-shirt.”
Note that in this transcript the purported assassination squad member remembered there were multiple pairs of underpants.
“And what procedure did you implement, what did you do with that, so that I can report?
“Well, the processing was done.”
“The processing according to this Biysk methodology?”
According to the Bellingcat report. “Navalny was referring to a 2018 procedure for cleansing traces of chemical weapons developed by the Biysk Institute.” But Kudryavtsev, the chemical weapons specialist, didn’t know what Navalny was talking about.
“Biysk?
“Well, correct me if I’m wrong.”
“No, no, I don’t know the Biysk methodology. Or maybe I do, but I don’t know what it’s about right now.”
“What exactly was being done, can you explain?”
“They treated it with solutions, that it wasn’t… ohhhh… how to say it… treated it so there wouldn’t be any marks there, nothing like that…
“On the things, is there any chance that Navalny’s wife, or someone at the hospital, cut off a piece of clothing and it got…”
“No.”
“There is no such possibility?”
“No. Everything was in one piece. There were no traces of cutting and so on.”
“In your opinion, how did the Germans eventually discover [30] it all?”
The amount of forensic detail is enormous. On its face, it had been contradicted already by the Navalny organization itself. In the new narrative revealed four months after the event, the uncertain admissions by the Kudryavtsev voice are also consistent with double-checking which the Russian investigators were making of evidence they believed at the time the German military doctors were investigating. Picking through the detail, piece by piece, is one method for casting doubt on the veracity of the telephone call and then the film. But the German authorities who endorsed Navalny’s Novichok story never exposed the evidence to the testing which German criminal law requires.
[42]September 2, 2020 – German Chancellor Angela Merkel reads from a script claiming Navalny had been the target of attempted murder by Novichok. The Berlin clinic tests to which Merkel referred were incomplete when she spoke; they were not published until January 16, 2021 – more than four months later. The German military, French and Swedish government, and OPCW tests have not been published.
“It is clear that Alexei Navalny is the victim of a crime,” Merkel had announced in a scripted press statement on September 2, 2020 [11]. In retrospect, when the accumulating evidence of Navalny’s blood, urine, and hair testing failed to substantiate the original narrative of the Novichok crime, an entirely new narrative had to be substituted. But this has not been tested by the only standard which applies in Germany –- the criminal law.