Alexei Navalny novichok finding prompts calls for answers from Moscow

World leaders are demanding answers from the Kremlin after toxicological examinations indicated that the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent from the novichok family.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, revealed that tests carried out at a military laboratory had “identified unequivocally” the Soviet era nerve agent. She referred to the case as an “attempted murder” and said the findings raised “very difficult questions that only the Russian government can answer, and has to answer”.

The UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, called the findings “outrageous” and said: “The Russian government must now explain what happened to Mr Navalny.”

The White House called the attack “completely reprehensible”. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden called it an “outrageous and brazen attempt on Mr Navalny’s life” and noted that Donald Trump had yet to personally condemn the attack.

Navalny, whose foundation publishes investigations into corruption among high-level officials in Russia, fell ill on a flight back to Moscow from Siberia on 20 August and was transferred to Berlin two days later.

Doctors who treated him in the Siberian city of Omsk, where his flight made an emergency landing, insisted there was no proof of poisoning and were initially reluctant to allow him to leave the country on a specially equipped plane.

The discovery that novichok was used on Navalny will lead many to conclude that the attack was meant as a brazen message to critics of the Kremlin, and Navalny’s associates quickly pointed the finger at Putin.

“Choosing novichok to poison Navalny in 2020 is basically the same thing as leaving an autograph at the scene of the crime,” wrote Navalny’s associate Leonid Volkov on Twitter, appending an image of Putin’s autograph to the tweet.

Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation, wrote that it was “beyond any reasonable doubt” that only Russian security services would be able to use novichok.

Born in 1976 just outside Moscow, Alexei Navalny is a lawyer-turned-campaigner whose Anti-Corruption Foundation investigates the wealth of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

He started out as a Russian nationalist, but emerged as the main leader of Russia's democratic opposition during the wave of protests that led up to the 2012 presidential election, and has since been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side.

Navalny is barred from appearing on state television, but has used social media to his advantage. A 2017 documentary accusing the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, of corruption received more than 30m views on YouTube within two months. 

He has been repeatedly arrested and jailed. The European court of human rights ruled that Russia violated Navalny's rights by holding him under house arrest in 2014. Election officials barred him from running for president in 2018 due to an embezzlement conviction that he claims was politically motivated. Navalny told the commission its decision would be a vote 'not against me, but against 16,000 people who have nominated me; against 200,000 volunteers who have been canvassing for me'.

There has also been a physical price to pay. In April 2017, he was attacked with green dye that nearly blinded him in one eye, and in July 2019 he was taken from jail to hospital with symptoms that one of his doctors said could indicate poisoning. In 2020, he was again hospitalised after a suspected poisoning, and taken to Germany for treatment. The German government later said toxicology results showed Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent.

The nerve agent was used to poison the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Britain two years ago. It is a cholinesterase inhibitor, part of the class of substances that doctors at Berlin’s Charité hospital initially identified in Navalny.

According to the German news magazine Der Spiegel, experts at the Charité sought advice from Porton Down, Britain’s secretive laboratory for research on chemical and biological weapons, because of possible similarities with the 2018 Skripal attack.

The use of novichok nerve agents was banned last year after being added to the chemical weapons convention’s list of controlled substances.

The UK foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, said: “The Russian government has a clear case to answer. It is absolutely unacceptable that this banned chemical weapon has been used again, and once more we see violence directed against a leading Russian opposition figure.”

The US National Security Council noted that Russia had used novichok “in the past”, and said the US would “work with allies and the international community to hold those in Russia accountable, wherever the evidence leads, and restrict funds for their malign activities.”

The German government’s official statement described the attack on Navalny as an “astounding act” and appealed to the Russian government to urgently offer an explanation.

Novichok refers to a group of nerve agents developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s to elude international restrictions on chemical weapons. Like other nerve agents, they are organophosphate compounds, but the chemicals used to make them, and their final structures, are considered classified in the UK, the US and other countries.

The most potent of the novichok substances are considered to be more lethal than VX, the most deadly of the familiar nerve agents, which include sarin, tabun and soman.

Novichok agents work in a similar way, by massively over-stimulating muscles and glands. Treatment for novichok exposure would be the same as for other nerve agents, namely with atropine, diazepam and potentially drugs called oximes.

The chemical structures of novichok agents were made public in 2008 by Vil Mirzayanov, a former Russian scientist living in the US, but the structures have never been publicly confirmed. It is thought they can be made in different forms, including as a dust aerosol.

The novichoks are known as binary agents because they only become lethal  after mixing two otherwise harmless components. According to Mirzayanov, they are 10 to 100 times more toxic than conventional nerve agents.

“We condemn this attack in the strongest possible terms”, said the foreign minister, Heiko Maas, adding that the Russian ambassador in Berlin had been summoned in light of the new findings.

Official reaction in Moscow on Wednesday afternoon was a mixture of denial and obfuscation. The Kremlin said it had not yet been informed of the findings, while some other officials suggested Russia was willing to work with German investigators, but attempted to cast doubt on the test results.

“The Russian side is still expecting an official answer from Berlin to the inquiry from the Russian prosecutor general’s office and Russian medical institutions,” said the foreign ministry in a statement.

The Russian doctors who treated Navalny in Siberia have repeatedly contested the German hospital’s conclusion, saying they ruled out poisoning as a diagnosis and that their tests for poisonous substances came back negative.

“We will demand that the Germans send their analyses so we can compare with our data and work out what really happened,” Vladimir Dzhabarov, of Russia’s upper house of parliament, told Interfax. “We are ready to cooperate. The main thing is whether they are. Because ideally they should have invited us and familiarised our investigation team with their materials.”

Seibert said the German government would inform its partners in the EU and Nato about the test results. He said it would consult with its partners on appropriate next steps in light of any Russian response.

In the wake of the killing of a Chechen dissident in a central Berlin park last August, the German government was initially cautious to blame the Kremlin, even after federal prosecutors alleged that Russian state agencies had tasked the assassin.

The language of the German government’s statement on the Navalny affair could prompt a more decisive response. Merkel said on Wednesday that the poison attack went “against the basic values we stand for”.

Sergey Lagodinsky, a German Green MEP and former fellow student of Navalny’s at Yale University, said: “I’m impressed by the clear framing of the government’s response. The confirmation that a banned nerve agent was used to poison a Russian opposition politician brings this case on to an international level. We need an international investigation.”

Whether the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has the capacity to carry out such an investigation remains unclear.

On Tuesday, before the use of novichok was confirmed, Merkel had again confirmed that her government would continue and finish the construction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline in spite of pressure from the US government.

The infrastructure project, which eastern European states fear will boost Russia’s geopolitical power, plays an important role in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, home to Merkel’s own constituency.

Navalny is being kept in a medically induced coma and on a ventilator at the intensive care unit of the Charité hospital. While his condition remains serious, a spokesperson said last Friday there was no immediate danger to his life.