Sarah Hurst is a freelance journalist based in the UK who has been covering Russia since her first visit to the Soviet Union in 1990, when she interviewed Soviet Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin. She has lived in Russia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, China and Alaska. Her live coverage of Russia and the region can be seen on Twitter at @XSovietNews.
Following the pattern established in the wake of the downing of MH17, the assassination of Boris Nemtsov and nerve agent attack on the Skripals, the Kremlin has been pushing a variety of fantastical narratives to cast doubt on the assumption that opposition politician Alexei Navalny was poisoned.
Despite international demands for a full investigation, Russian authorities insist there is no indication that any crime was committed when the opposition leader suddenly collapsed in agony on a plane and fell into a coma on August 20.
Under pressure from representatives of the security services who were inside the Omsk hospital where Navalny was first treated, doctors there said he was suffering from a metabolic disorder and had low blood sugar.
Pro-Kremlin media contributed theories that Navalny himself was to blame and also referred to him disparagingly as a blogger: RIA FAN suggested that he could have been poisoned by an energy drink. His colleague Lyubov Sobol has tweeted that the claim that he drank an energy drink is an “absolute lie”.
Other reports raise the possibility of an alcohol- or drug-induced illness, even though Navalny has always been very fit and regularly went jogging. Even after Navalny had been evacuated to the Charité hospital in Berlin, doctors in Omsk claimed to have found alcohol and caffeine in his urine.
Doctors at the Charité hospital said Navalny had been poisoned by a cholinesterase inhibitor, a cluster of nerve agents that includes novichok. The Russian TV doctor Alexander Myasnikov wrote on Telegram that cholinesterase inhibitors can be used to stimulate brain activity: “For example, the young politician wanted to improve his work capabilities and memory, he took a powerful dose of tablets, then didn’t eat, he drank too much – and overdose!”
“What unbelievable rubbish,” Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh tweeted in response.
On the other hand, perhaps Navalny’s devotion to his health was the problem. Komsomolskaya Pravda published an article titled “Could dieting to lose weight be the reason for Alexei Navalny’s coma?” However, it admitted that a person would have to fast for more than three days for their blood sugar level to become so critical as to make them fall into a coma, unless they already had cirrhosis of the liver.
Kremlin-controlled media also took aim at the Germans themselves, after Russian authorities delayed Navalny’s evacuation flight for 24 hours. “The German ambassador was reminded about concentration camp prisoners against the background of aid to Navalny,” a RIA Novosti headline read. The “Strong Russia” movement sent a letter to Germany’s ambassador to Russia, Géza Andreas von Geyr, reminding him about Germany’s refusal to treat former child victims of Nazi concentration camps, the article said. The head of the organisation, Anton Tsvetkov, also claimed that he had written to Angela Merkel a couple of years ago inviting her to participate in a joint programme to help the victims, but had been rejected.
Duma [the lower house of the Russian Federal Assembly] speaker Vyacheslav Volodin went a step further and asked whether the West was responsible for what happened to Navalny.
“We need to study all sides of what happened... to understand whether this was an attempt by foreign states to cause harm to the health of a Russian citizen with the aim of creating tension within Russia and also making the latest accusations against our country,” he said. Russians, he added, should note that this happened while the EU, Ukraine and the US were simultaneously interfering in the internal affairs of Belarus.
Meanwhile Vladimir Putin and his spokesman Dmitri Peskov continue to minimise Navalny’s significance. They have an apparently unspoken accord to never say his name in public, and Peskov has been referred to as “a patient in a coma”. When asked why he wouldn’t say Navalny’s name, Peskov replied, “this doesn’t change the substance of the matter.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry even deployed the tried-and-tested argument that poisoning Navalny would not have been beneficial to Russia. During a visit to Moscow by US Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun, the Foreign Ministry issued a statement that said: “We drew the attention of our American counterpart to the suspicious haste with which Washington and Brussels seized on the theory of the deliberate poisoning of A.A. Navalny.
“Inevitably the question arises – who benefits? Clearly not the Russian government. Moreover, we again reminded him about our readiness to investigate openly, impartially and with genuinely established facts in our hands not only this particular case, but also the so-called “cases of A.V. Litvinenko and the Skripals”, about which Western media have again reminded us in such a friendly way, as if on command. We have not yet received answers to our extremely specific questions.”
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