The Mystery of The Poisoning of Alexei Navalny
Take the strange case of Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident, who many think nearly died from a poisoning ordered by the Kremlin.
After sifting through the conflicting evidence, I was
suddenly struck by a couple of sentences in a novel I’m reading right now, “The
End of the Affair”, written by Graham Greene, widely considered to be one of
the great writers of twentieth-century English literature.
“Does truth lie at some point in the pendulum’s swing, at a
point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles
in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than
another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty
degrees, one could believe the truth is there.”
Indeed, it will be difficult to get a straight up and down
answer to who did it. Germany, where Navalny is now being treated in hospital
after his near-death experience on a Russian passenger aircraft, has accused
the Kremlin of being behind the poisoning. The Kremlin in repost denies this
and says the West is using the incident as yet one more way of undermining
Russia’s reputation.
But might the truth lie somewhere in between at an odd angle
-- perhaps an individual political opponent from Tomsk, the capital of a big
oil and gas producing region, where Navalny was campaigning in the local
elections the day before he boarded a plane to Moscow -- the opposition
trounced Putin’s United Russia Party.
Or a hit-man hired by one of the many people who simply hate
Navalny. After all, we saw something similar with the murder of the Swedish
prime minister, Olof Palme, in 1986, when an unknown individual, acting on his
own impulses, shot Palme dead in the street as he emerged from a cinema.
There were many people in Sweden, including some in the
police, who hated Palme for his left-wing views, his decision during the
Vietnam war to give refuge to deserters from the US army, his refusal to enter
NATO, his pro-Fidel Castro stand and his economic policies whereby the better
off were taxed more and more to provide services for the poorer. The police,
acting unconscionably slowly, didn’t throw up roadblocks in the city’s main
exit roads until well after the murder took place. It seems we will never know
if that was connivance or inefficiency, despite multiple investigations.
An interesting analysis of the Navalny affair has been made
by Craig Murray who was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002
to October 2004. He writes on the web-page of Russia Today, a Moscow-based
television station.
He begins by clearing the decks, “I have no difficulty with
the notion that a powerful oligarch or an organ of the Russian state may have
tried to assassinate Navalny. He is a minor irritant, not remotely as
politically important in Russia as he is portrayed by the Western press, but
not being a major threat does not protect you against political assassination
in Russia.
What I do have difficulty with is the notion that if Putin
wanted Navalny dead he would not be alive in Germany today. If Putin had wanted
him dead, he would be dead.” A bullet to the head would have done the deed and
would have worked instantly and left no trace as to its origin. There are many
well-trained Russian sharp-shooters who never miss and the opportunities to
shoot him were plentiful -- as, like with Palme, in a street where there were
ample places to run away to.
It seems difficult to imagine why a government-hired
assassin would want to see his victim falling ill during a flight. And if so
would the Russian state have allowed the plane to make an emergency landing to
be met by an ambulance who rushed him to a hospital where everyone agrees the doctors
saved his life? Why then would the Russian state allow him to be transferred to
Germany for specialized treatment when he could have been treated in a top
Moscow hospital? Then the Germans would not have been at liberty to publicize
any diagnose they chose to and in fact did so with the charge that he had been
poisoned by novichok.
Novichok is said rightly to be the creation of military
research in Russia. But it has been manufactured outside Russia. According to
Wikipedia, "In the 1990s, the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND)
obtained a sample of one Novichok agent from a Russian scientist, and the
sample was analysed in Sweden, according to a 2018 Reuters report. The chemical
formula was given to Western NATO countries, who synthesized it then used small
amounts to test protective equipment, detection of it, and antidotes to
it."
So what other theory works? The US is very much concerned
about the market for liquefied gas to Europe and feels their shale oil industry
will be threatened by the Russian/German/Dutch/French-financed Nord Stream 2
gas pipeline, now nearly completed, that will bring gas from Russia to Europe.
The US is also worried about the impact this will have on its allies in the
Arab Gulf.
The US and Saudi Arabia have every reason to instigate a
split between Russia and Germany. So perhaps an American agent is behind this
attempted killing?
There are other theories, some of which emanate from Russian
government bodies and media. A lot are nonsensical, such as blaming his sugar
level.
What we need is clarification if we are to get to the truth.
Why don’t the Germans make the results of their toxicology and other tests
available to Russia and the World Health Organization? On September 14 it was
announced that labs in France and Sweden had confirmed the German results, but
these are NATO members. (Sweden is not de jure but is de facto.) Are the
Germans and its allies hiding something and trying to use this incident to
seriously wound Putin’s reputation?
There can be no rational reason for not sharing their tests
on Navalny, yet much of the Western press seems to refrain from posing the
question of why it has not been done. The NATO membership, ever since it broke
its promise to the Soviet Union not to expand NATO to Russia’s frontier, seems
to have had a consistent policy of bashing the Russian role in international
events, whatever the facts.
I find it hard to believe Chancellor Angela Merkel would
engage in such subterfuge, but now I’m having serious second thoughts. She must
come clean if she wants Germany to be believed.
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