Germany has launched an investigation into the suspected attempted murder of a Berlin-based Russian journalist after she suffered symptoms consistent with poisoning.
Elena Kostyuchenko exposed allegations of Russian war crimes in Ukraine while working for the Nobel Prize-winning Novaya Gazeta newspaper, until it was forced to close as part of Moscow’s harsh information crackdown.
The 35-year-old – who left Ukraine last March after being told Chechen units at Russian checkpoints had been ordered to kill her – recently revealed that she had experienced extreme disorientation, abdominal pain and swollen extremities while on a train journey from Munich to Berlin last October.
“When I got out at the train station, I realized I couldn’t figure out how to get home,” Ms Kostyuchenko wrote two weeks ago in the literary journal n+1. “I knew that I needed to transfer to the subway, but I couldn’t figure out how.”
Riga-based investigative website The Insider, which helped link the alleged Salisbury Novichok attackers with Russia’s FSB security service, reported it had consulted doctors who believed poisoning was “the only explanation” for Ms Kostyuchenko’s symptoms.
Furthermore, the website reported that Ms Kostyuchenko was one of three exiled Russian journalists to have fallen ill with poisoning symptoms in European capitals over the same period.
Natalia Arno, president of the US-based Free Russia Foundation became ill in Prague, in May 2023, while radio journalist Irina Babloyan fell ill in Tbilisi last October.
German prosecutors have now announced that they will investigate Ms Kostychenko’s case – and are treating it as attempted murder.
Ms Kostyuchenko fell ill on a train from Munich to Berlin last October— ( Oslo Freedom Forum screengrab)
“We can confirm that an investigation into the attempted murder of Elena Kostyuchenko is pending,” a spokesperson for Berlin prosecutors said on Friday. They declined to give further details.
However, Ms Kostyuchenko and her doctors initially believed she was suffering from lingering Covid-19 symptoms, and by the time full tests were run – at the same hospital which positively diagnosed the now jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny – it was too late to test for poison residues.
Receiving such tests in December had required Ms Kostyuchenko to contact the police, and prosecutors said in May that they had closed the case concerning Kostyuchenko’s suspected poisoning.
But in July, the police reported that the case had been reopened so that more samples could be taken, and now two months later are investigating her attempted murder.
Now living in hiding, Ms Kostyuchenko said the impact of the poisoning was still with her, saying: “I’m truly exhausted though I have work to do.”
Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has also a survived suspected poisoning— (Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)
Ms Kostyuchenko, who joined Novaya Gazeta as a teenage intern, noted that four of her colleagues had been killed in her 17 years at the paper, comprising a grim proportion of the 19 unprosecuted cases of Russian journalists who have been murdered since the turn of the century.
Numerous Kremlin critics are suspected to have been poisoned during Vladimir Putin’s tenure, most notably Mr Navalny, leading opposition figure who fell ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow in August 2020, before being airlifted to Berlin in a coma.
While Russia denied that he had been poisoned, laboratories in Germany, France and Sweden confirmed that he had been targeted with Novichok. He returned to Russia and in the past two years has received three convictions on charges he says are politically motivated.
Mr Navalny was convicted earlier this month of extremism and sentenced to 19 years in prison.
Additional reporting by Reuters
