Aleksey Navalny on the phone
After having been poisoned with the highly poisonous novichok on August 20, 2020, Navalny himself unmasked the perpetrators of the assassination attempt on him. The research websites Bellingcat [1] and The Insider, in collaboration with the news channel CNN and the German weekly Der Spiegel, had found the names of the perpetrators for him. With this information, Navalny set to work himself.
He recorded a telephone conversation with Konstantin Kudryavtsev, one of the FSB agents who had to retrieve Navalny's clothes after the poisoning to remove the traces of the novichok before they could be tested by independent experts. Navalny used caller ID spoofing software to impersonate the call from an FSB office. During the phone call, he pretended to be an assistant to the secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolay Patrushev and said he needed to investigate why the mission had failed.
Kudriavtsev unsuspectingly confessed that the novichok had been applied to Navalny's underwear while he was staying at the hotel in Tomsk, and that the poison had, apparently been absorbed too slowly by his body. He said the pilots diverted the flight to Omsk too soon and the doctors in Omsk administered an antidote «almost immediately».
The recording of the phone call was released on December 21, 2020.
A modern-day Nikanor Ivanovich Navalny's phone call demonstrates once again that the Russian Federation, in several respects, is still suffering from the same maladies as the former Soviet Union. At all levels of the hierarchy, even at the very top, positions are still staffed by apparatchiks - people appointed not based on their competence, but on their blind loyalty to the parties or individuals in power. Even today, People like Konstantin Kudryavtsev could perfectly serve as prototypes for the character of Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy in The Master and Margarita. |