From the crowd-sourced investigative site bellingcat,a story about the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alex Navalny
A joint investigation between Bellingcat and The Insider, in cooperation with Der Spiegel and CNN, has discovered voluminous telecom and travel data that implicates Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) in the poisoning of the prominent Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny.
Moreover, the August 2020 poisoning in the Siberian city of Tomsk appears to have happened after years of surveillance, which began in 2017 shortly after Navalny first announced his intention to run for president of Russia. Throughout 2017, and again in 2019 and 2020, FSB operatives from a clandestine unit specialized in working with poisonous substances shadowed Navalny during his trips across Russia, traveling alongside him on more than 30 overlapping flights to the same destinations. It is also possible there were earlier attempts to poison Navalny, including one in the Western Russian city of Kaliningrad only a month before the near-fatal Novichok poisoning in Siberia.
SOURCE WATCH: Bellingcat is a crowd-sourced investigative site, funded by foundations and the U.S. government-sponsored National Endowment for Democracy, established to advance the foreign policy of President Ronald Reagan. Bellingcat’s finding that two undercover agent from Russia’s GRU were involved in the 2018 poisoning of renegade Russian agent Sergei Skirpal was confirmed by other news organizations. Critics say bellingcat’s editorial priorities follow the agenda of Western intelligence services by focusing on Russian, not American, misdeeds. This is often, but not always, true. For example, bellingcat exposed “grave civilian harm” caused by U.S.-backed Saudi-UAE forces in Yemen. RECOMMENDED.
