I found the video they’re lying about Alexei Navalny “Putin’s Enemy” on YouTube. It discusses four questions about the Russian lawyer and dissident Alexei Nawalny, who recently died in Russian imprisonment.
The video appears to make a variety of disputable assertions, based on a book by Jacques Baud, about the relation between Alexei Nawalny and the Russian government. I want to focus only on the topic of Novitschok poisoning.
The video claims that:
- Novitschok was never adopted by USSR/Russia and that production was ceased in 1987.
- Samples of Novitschok have been found in several member states of NATO, including Germany, US, Great Britain, Czechoslovakia, Sweden.
While it is not explicitly stated in the video, the narrative appears to be that a Novitschok poisoning of Navalny, assuming that such a poisoning took place, is more likely to have been caused by one of the countries mentioned in point 2. than by Russia/USSR.
The video furthermore claims that:
- Doctors treating victims of Novitschok poisoning need to wear full protective gear.
- Doctors treating Navalny did not wear protective gear in the Charité in Berlin. Furthermore, nobody on the flight from Russia to Berlin was wearing protective gear, nor was anyone in the ambulance transporting Navalny from the airport to the Charité.
Finally, the video claims that:
- the Charité Lancet article shows that Navalny's blood values may have been caused by other drugs and alcohol consumption instead of Novichok poisoning.
- the evidence is favor of the hypothesis that Navalny was poisoned with Novichok is weak since it is based only on biomedical samples that, except for the lancet report, remain classified.
My question is: How well do the above claims stack up and how much credibility should we subsequently give to the hypothesis that Alexey Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok-type nerve agent by the Federal Security Service in 2020?
I will answer my own question below but welcome other insights.
