An alleged poisoning targeting, apparently, one of the country’s best known international figures. Such a story could only really involve Russia, the state accused of being behind dozens of poisonings over the past century.
The plot, in its initial telling, appears bizarre: Roman Abramovich, now the outgoing owner of Chelsea FC, and Ukrainian negotiators engaged in back channel talks were targeted after a meeting in Kyiv – developing symptoms including peeling skin, irritable eyes and were, it is said, painfully crying.
Can we be sure they were poisoned? Not really; the three men were too busy to provide samples to German toxicologists quickly enough. And their symptoms, never life threatening, appear to have improved. So like a true Russian mystery, the truth may never be known.
But the Kremlin has enough form in this area for poisoning to be a plausible cause, a hundred-year history that dates back to the founding of Moscow’s Lab X poisoning laboratory by Vladimir Lenin back in 1921.
Names, leaders and possibly ideologies may have changed over the intervening period, but the current regime of Vladimir Putin is accused of being behind multiple poisonings of those who opposed the Kremlin, including the use of the nerve agent novichok.
The FSB is accused of trying to kill opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who collapsed on an internal flight in August 2020 and only survived because he was able to get to specialists in Germany for treatment. It was administered, an FSB agent later inadvertently revealed to Navalny himself, in the “inner seams” of his underpants.
A couple of years before that, two agents from GRU military intelligence took a trip to Salisbury, although they had no intention of admiring the city’s 123-metre-high cathedral spire as they later claimed. Novichok, carried in a disguised perfume bottle, was sprayed on the door handle of the house of defector and former colleague Sergei Skripal.
It was March 2018 and Sergei’s daughter Yulia was visiting. A few hours after the agents had visited, the two were found on a park bench in the centre of the Wiltshire city, foaming at the mouth and drifting in and out of consciousness.
They were lucky to survive. Like Navalny they were able to receive timely treatment and the dose was not large. Not so fortunate was Dawn Sturgess, a Briton, whose partner had found the discarded perfume bottle in a bin and given it to her thinking it was a gift. Spraying it on her wrists in July 2018, she fell ill within fifteen minutes and died a few days later.
The incidents are so notorious – perhaps this is the intention, to induce a psychology of fear – that they can be recalled at speed: Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium-laced tea, leading to his slow and dramatic death in London in 2006; Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov with a poison tipped umbrella in 1978, an operation which the Russian KGB is accused of helping enable.
Nor is the goal always to kill. Labour MP Chris Bryant revealed he fell violently ill with food poisoning during an official trip to Russia in 2009, when he was a junior Foreign Office minister. It was, he learned, “standard irritants meted out by the FSB to ‘difficult’ visitors”.
Poisoning episodes are not unfamiliar in Ukraine either: presidential hopeful Viktor Yushchenko was a 50-year-old with youthful looks when he ran for the top job against pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych, but fell ill on the campaign trail, his face rapidly disfiguring.
It was, scientists concluded, the result of dioxin poisoning, but it remains unclear who did it. Yushchenko’s former chief of staff blamed Russia for the attack, but that has never been proven. Either way it was not very successful in stopping him – Yushchenko triumphed over his rival and served a term as president.
Allies of the poisoned men – it is not clear whom – have this time blamed hardliners in Moscow, who, according to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “wanted to sabotage talks to end the war”. It is, given the long murky history of poisonings, a plausible explanation, if nothing else.
A more interesting question would be who might order such an operation. The Kremlin has always denied being involved in poisonings. But only the state has the power to use such deadly and complex substances.
Plus, the growing centralisation of Russian state power under Putin leads to the conclusion it would be a bold underling to sanction such a plot against a high-profile oligarch without authorisation from the top. If, that is, it was a poisoning at all.
A murky business all round.
• This article was amended on 29 March 2022. Georgi Markov was poisoned in 1978, not 1979 as an earlier version said.
