Russia’s love affair with Poison ☠️
A brief look into venomous revenge
Alexei flopped down onto the bed in his hotel. It had been a tiring day and he still had a flight to Moscow to catch. ‘Smart Vote’ was his idea — the reasons he had gone to Novosibirsk, the third-largest city in Russia, and the reason he was now in Tomsk. He had built quite a following over the years on YouTube and Twitter for his Anti-Corruption expositions of the government. He was now trying to use that influence to support candidates in local elections who had a chance of defeating the pro-government puppets. Damn Putin puppets. He had seen some success with this strategy in Moscow last year but to push the movement forward, it had to succeed in the elections coming up in Novosibirsk and Tomsk.
Thirsty, he took a sip of the bottle of water next to him in his hotel room. Some people may call him a reckless man. After all, he did try to run against Vladimir Putin for President of Russia in 2016. He also did recommend a sanctions list for the west when Russia annexed Crimea. Some people don’t see it that way, though. Some celebrated him. Like the Wall Street Journal, who labeled him ‘The Man Putin Fears the Most’ in 2012. He wasn’t sure if it was retribution for his relentless activism or if it had added more fuel to a fire that would soon devour him. Among all the risks he had taken in his life, he didn’t expect the sip from that water bottle to be what would threaten his life. As he made his way to the airport, he looked forward to getting back to Moscow, back to his wife Yulia and two children.
While boarding the plane, his eyes had trouble focusing, and he reminded himself to try to sleep better. He was thankful to be seated finally since a bit of nausea had kicked in. Red and yellow circles were blurring his vision. He tried to go to sleep but eventually decided a trip to the washroom was inevitable. He found it hard to stay steady as he made his way to the bathroom. The last thing he remembered was vomiting before everything turned dark.
Alexei Navalny woke up two weeks later, but he wasn’t in Moscow. He was in Berlin, Germany.
Sergei Skripal had, what some might call, an exciting life. He had been a secret agent in the Soviet Union. Then he had turned double agent for Britain in 1995. However, what people don’t realize is that espionage is much less glamorous in reality. None of that James Bond nonsense. It’s more of awkward meetings in parks, constant fear, and an almost guaranteed outcome of being captured and arrested. Sergei should know since his love affair with Britain came to an end in 2004. He was arrested and charged for treason and sentenced for 13 years.
Thankfully, both sides are always playing the game, and in 2010, the United States discovered a sleeper cell of ten Russian agents in their country. In the prisoner swap that followed, the United Kingdom managed to include him as one of the imprisoned agents set free for the captured Russians. God bless the Queen. He moved to the United Kingdom and purchased a house there in Salisbury in 2011.
Yulia Skripal, his daughter, was all that was left for him to live for. His wife died of cancer in 2012. His son and a brother had died a year ago. His daughter, Yulia, still worked in Moscow, in sales. She would visit him from time to time. March 2018 was one such time.
Looking back, he wished he had never gone back home on March 4, 2018. He wishes even more that he didn’t have Yulia with him. Their quiet dinner and well-needed rest were pleasant for someone who was usually alone. The next day, they ended up going to the park in Salisbury. The warm weather and the outdoors was not enjoyable as usual, though. Sergei’s vision was not great ever since he got up. Now, he was feeling nauseous and had trouble breathing. Before he could collect his thoughts, out of the corner of his eyes, he saw that he was not alone. Yulia was having trouble breathing too. As they both struggled and the fear set in, Sergei vaguely remembered the stares of people around him, before the darkness set in.
Novichok
Designed to be the deadliest poison in the world, Novichok is almost undetectable. It can be delivered as a liquid, aerosol, or gas and can be absorbed through contact with your skin. It can also be transmitted undetected from person to person, object to object, through touch. A drop of it is enough to kill a few people, and unless you knew exactly where the drop was on a surface, it would go undetected. As a nerve agent, it affects your nervous system, causes permanent nerve damage, and kills you by shutting down your lungs, heart, and other organs.
A dab of Novichok was found on Alexei’s water bottle in his room in Tomsk.
A spray of Novichok was found on Sergei’s front door handle in Salisbury.
Developed sometime between 1971 and 1993, Novichok is a nerve agent created by the Soviet Union. It’s too complex to be manufactured by an individual. Russia was believed to have destroyed the stockpile they amassed as part of the Chemical Weapons disarmament under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in the 1990s. It looks like they didn’t.
Miraculously, both of them survived. The dosage they absorbed was small enough to allow doctors to put them in a medically induced coma to buy time to fight the toxin and its effects.
However, the poison spread in Salisbury. A police officer investigating the incident made contact with the Novichok on the door handle. He was hospitalized but recovered. Dawn Sturgess was not as lucky. Her boyfriend, Charlie Rowley, found an unidentified perfume bottle in a park, four months after Sergei’s poisoning. He gifted it to her a few days later and watched as she unknowingly sprayed the lethal poison on herself. Both were hospitalized, but while Charlie made it, Dawn had absorbed too large a dose to survive.
Fear and Deniability
It’s not the first time the Russians have played with poison for assassinations. It won’t be the last either.
Nikolai Khokhlov was a Soviet spy, a KGB officer, who when asked to assassinate a United States (US) citizen, disobeyed his order and defected to the US in 1954. In 1957, in Germany, his cup of coffee was poisoned with Thallium, a radioactive substance. He lived to tell the tale.
Georgi Markov was an ex-Bulgarian citizen who moved to England and worked for the BBC, where he criticized Bulgaria and the Soviet Bloc policies. He was assassinated in 1978, presumably by the KGB, on the streets of London, by a stranger who fired a pellet of Ricin from the tip of his umbrella.
The KGB was succeeded by the FSB, for who Alexander Litvinenko used to work for. He later became a critic of the government and fled to Britain and sought asylum in 2000. In 2006, while meeting former FSB agents, Polonium-210, a radioactive substance, was slipped into his tea, and he died three weeks later. A successful assassination believed to have been authorized by Putin himself.
More often than not, Russian attempts at assassination fail. However, Russia and Putin persist for the fear it creates in future dissidents. Unlike China, Putin’s regime is built on fear rather than an authoritarian constitution, and the weapon of fear must be wielded generously. Poison also allows Putin and Russia plausible deniability because of the difficulty in proving guilt.
After the Salisbury poisonings, Britain expelled Russian diplomats in protest, and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), in 2019, added Novichok to the list of ‘controlled substances’ under the Chemical Weapons Convention. It’s a rare major update to the treaty since it was agreed in the 1990s.
You may think the international community’s response to the Salisbury Poisonings would have made Russia think twice in the future. It didn’t. It didn’t stop Russia from poisoning Alexei Navalny with the same nerve agent in 2020, and it won’t stop them from doing it again.
ReferencesGermany says that Alexei Navalny was poisoned with NovichokThe Weekend Interview with Alexei Navalny: The Man Putin Fears MostThe Salisbury Poisonings | Netflix (Highly Recommended)The BBC journalist assassinated with a poison-tipped umbrellaAlexander Litvinenko: Profile of murdered Russian spyNovichok nerve agents banned by chemical-weapons treaty
