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By Ruth Kae

In movies, the villain poisons the hero to keep him/her from revealing the truth and fighting evil. What sounds like a scene from a James Bond movie became reality for Alexei Anatolievich Navalny on an inland flight on August 20th.

Navalny is one of the most active Russian opposition politicians, a jurist and anti-corruption activist who speaks out about the social and political injustices in his country. The list of names of people who have criticized the Russian regime, and probably therefore have been poisoned or killed, is long. In 2018, the case of the poisoning of the Russian spy Sergej Skripal, his daughter Julia and his girlfriend, who died after the incident, in Salisbury, England, caused an international stir. 

After Nalvany was treated in the Charité in Berlin and woke up from his coma, German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited him in a private meeting at the hospital. This highly political act shows how serious the German government takes the attack on the Kremlin critic. In a statement, Heiko Maas, the foreign minister of Germany, demanded the total clarification of the event by the Russian government. Sanctions will follow if Russia refuses to cooperate and allow an independent organization to investigate the incident. The popular assumption that President Vladimir Putin was the contracting authority behind the attack on the political opponent was disputed by the Russian government. Russian officials spread different theories that Navalny’s health condition was caused by either a drug overdose or low blood sugar. All explanations were proven wrong by several independent laboratories, when they found traces of Novichok–a military-grade nerve agents created in the Soviet Union–in Nalvany’s body. In 2017, Russia declared that it had destroyed all of its chemical weapons, which would have included poison agents like Novichok, the military nerve agents that can be lethal to the touch. Brian O’Toole, an author for the Atlantic Council, described the poisoning of Navalny as “a panicked move by an increasingly unpopular autocrat”. 

The significance of this attack becomes even clearer if one looks at the role Navalny plays for the Russian opposition. Vladimir Putin and his staff have never–with one exception in 2013–addressed Navalny by his name. Many newspapers compared the practice to the villain of the famous Harry Potter movies, Voldemort, whose name one should never mention. Navalny seemed to be out of Putin’s control. In the Moscow's election in 2013 Navalny could secure more than 25 percent of the votes with his slogan “Change Russia, Start With Moscow''. Because of Navalny and the work of his team, United Russia, the party of Vladimir Putin, no longer has the majority in the city legislature. With this public approval of Navalny and his criticism against the corrupt Russian elite, he became even more dangerous to Putin. 

As an international response to the attack, the foreign ministers of the member states of the EU met on the 12th of October to discuss the sanctions against Russia. One of the conclusions of the meeting is that the poisoning “was only possible with the consent of the Presidential Executive Office”. Therefore, the EU imposed sanctions against six individuals of Putin’s inner circle, which includes freezing assets and bank accounts and travel bans. One of them is Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor intelligence agency to the Soviet KGB. The Russian State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology will also be affected by these consequences. Some members of the German government also demanded that Chancellor Merkel cancel the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project. Since the project is finished up to 94 percent, Merkel and other supporters of the project desist from canceling this very important economic cooperation.

In the next few weeks it will become clearer how this situation and the relationship between Russia and the EU will evolve. After his recovery Navalny will return to Russia and continue his work against United Russia. In his luggage he will bring the support of the EU, international attention of the media and the ace with which he cheated death.

Ruth is a political writer for La Tonique.