Former Soviet chemist
“Navalny was murdered to prove that Novichok works”
March 7, 2024, 11:03 a.m
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Wil Mirsayanov believes that Russian authorities conducted experiments with the nerve agent Novichok on opposition politician Alexei Navalny before murdering him. The order for this could only have come from Putin personally.
A former Soviet chemist assumes that the Russian secret services conducted experiments with the nerve agent Novichok on Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny. This is how Navalny was murdered, Wil Mirsajanow told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
“I believe that they carried out experiments on Navalny’s skin by injecting him with first small and larger doses of Novichok and then immediately the antidote,” said the now 88-year-old, according to “Welt”, which provides a German translation of the interview published. “Then he was allowed to recover for a while before they gave him a strong dose, until finally they gave him a lethal injection to punish him and to prove that Novichok works.”
Wil Mirsajanow was not directly involved in the development of Novichok, but worked at the institute where the program was based. There, Mirsayanov headed the technical counterintelligence department, whose task was to prevent weapons from being detected after they had been used. In the 1990s, he revealed that the Soviet Union and Russia were sticking to the secret Novichok program, despite protestations to the contrary. In 1995 he emigrated to the USA.
Alluding to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, Mirzayanov said: “The man you all know is a killer. According to his logic, he also wanted to finish the task he set out to do in 2020, and in the same way .” In the summer of 2020, an attack with Novichok was carried out on Navalny, which he narrowly survived. At that time he came to Berlin for treatment; He returned to Russia in January 2021.
Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya also accused Putin of murdering her husband with Novichok. Three days after his death in a Russian penal colony, she said the body was being withheld so that traces of “another Putin Novichok” would leave his body. In an interview with “La Repubblica,” Mirsayanov said that the order to kill Navalny could only have been “given from the very highest authority,” by Putin personally.
Novichok is a nerve agent that has been used so frequently against Russian defectors and opposition figures that it has been used in assassination attempts Business card of Russian secret services is. The Russian ambassador in Berlin does as usual jokes about the fact that he offers pastries and tea without Novichok when he receives visits from German journalists, which no longer happens so often. In 2018, former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter survived a Novichok attack in England.