A familiar plot but truth may never be known
about latest ‘Russian poisoning’
Analysis: There is a murky history behind the apparent
targeting of Roman Abramovich and two Ukrainian negotiators
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Dan Sabbagh
Defence and security editor
Mon 28 Mar
2022 20.40 BST
An alleged
poisoning targeting, apparently, one of the country’s best known international
figures. Such a story could only really involve Russia, the state accused of
being behind dozens of poisonings over the past century.
The plot,
in its initial telling, appears bizarre: Roman Abramovich, now the outgoing
owner of Chelsea FC, and Ukrainian negotiators engaged in back channel talks
were targeted after a meeting in Kyiv – developing symptoms including peeling
skin, irritable eyes and were, it is said, painfully crying.
Can we be
sure they were poisoned? Not really; the three men were too busy to provide
samples to German toxicologists quickly enough. And their symptoms, never life
threatening, appear to have improved. So like a true Russian mystery, the truth
may never be known.
But the
Kremlin has enough form in this area for poisoning to be a plausible cause, a
hundred-year history that dates back to the founding of Moscow’s Lab X
poisoning laboratory by Vladimir Lenin back in 1921.
Names,
leaders and possibly ideologies may have changed over the intervening period,
but the current regime of Vladimir Putin is accused of being behind multiple
poisonings of those who opposed the Kremlin, including the use of the nerve
agent novichok.
The FSB is
accused of trying to kill opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who collapsed on an
internal flight in August 2020 and only survived because he was able to get to
specialists in Germany for treatment. It was administered, an FSB agent later
inadvertently revealed to Navalny himself, in the “inner seams” of his
underpants.
A couple of
years before that, two agents from GRU military intelligence took a trip to
Salisbury, although they had no intention of admiring the city’s 123-metre-high
cathedral spire as they later claimed. Novichok, carried in a disguised perfume
bottle, was sprayed on the door handle of the house of defector and former
colleague Sergei Skripal.
It was
March 2018 and Sergei’s daughter Yulia was visiting. A few hours after the agents
had visited, the two were found on a park bench in the centre of the Wiltshire
city, foaming at the mouth and drifting in and out of consciousness.
They were
lucky to survive. Like Navalny they were able to receive timely treatment and
the dose was not large. Not so fortunate was Dawn Sturgess, a Briton, whose
partner had found the discarded perfume bottle in a bin and given it to her
thinking it was a gift. Spraying it on her wrists in July 2018, she fell ill
within fifteen minutes and died a few days later.
The
incidents are so notorious – perhaps this is the intention, to induce a
psychology of fear – that they can be recalled at speed: Alexander Litvinenko
was poisoned with polonium-laced tea, leading to his slow and dramatic death in
London in 2006; Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov with a poison tipped umbrella
in 1979, an operation in which the Russian KGB is accused of helping enable.
Nor is the
goal always to kill. Labour MP Chris Bryant revealed he fell violently ill with
food poisoning during an official trip to Russia in 2009, when he was a junior
Foreign Office minister. It was, he learned, “standard irritants meted out by
the FSB to ‘difficult’ visitors”.
Poisoning
episodes are not unfamiliar in Ukraine either: presidential hopeful Viktor
Yushchenko was a 50-year-old with youthful looks when he ran for the top job
against pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych, but fell ill on the campaign
trail, his face rapidly disfiguring.
It was,
scientists concluded, the result of dioxin poisoning, but it remains unclear
who did it. Yushchenko’s former chief of staff blamed Russia for the attack,
but that has never been proven. Either way it was not very successful in
stopping him – Yushchenko triumphed over his rival and served a term as
president.
Allies of
the poisoned men – it is not clear whom – have this time blamed hardliners in
Moscow, who, according to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story,
“wanted to sabotage talks to end the war”. It is, given the long murky history
of poisonings, a plausible explanation, if nothing else.
A more
interesting question would be who might order such an operation. The Kremlin
has always denied being involved in poisonings. But only the state has the
power to use such deadly and complex substances.
Plus, the
growing centralisation of Russian state power under Putin leads to the
conclusion it would be a bold underlining to sanction such a plot against a
high-profile oligarch without authorisation from the top. If, that is, it was a
poisoning at all.
A murky
business all round.
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