Navalny's Novichok poisoning was Putin sending the world a message, experts say
With international pressure building over Russia’s continued imprisonment of dissident Alexei Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin went after his critics Wednesday in a fiery state of the nation speech, warning countries who attempt to meddle not to cross unspecified “red lines,” without mentioning his domestic political antagonist by name.
As Putin spoke, protests broke out across Russia, where demonstrators chanted “Let Navalny go!” in reference to Putin’s most vociferous critic and the man believed to have been poisoned by Russian operatives last summer with Novichok, the Cold War-era neurotoxin developed in the former Soviet Union.
Navalny, who on Friday ended a three-week-long hunger strike and is said to be close to death, was very nearly killed by the exposure to Novichok, whose use as a means to exterminate political enemies first came to light in the 2018 poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England. Before that, says professor Gregory Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University, “nobody was thinking about the use of Novichok for assassination purposes” and even if they were, only a dozen or so labs in the world, he said, would be able to definitively detect it.
How many other perceived enemies of the Kremlin have been poisoned with Novichok and how long Russia’s special military intelligence units have been using the banned chemical is unclear. Novichok is a clear, odorless organophosphate. Mere drops of it are eight times more powerful than the highly toxic nerve agent VX. “These are the most lethal nerve agents we’re aware of,” says Koblentz.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/navalnys-novichok-poisoning-was-putin-sending-the-world-a-message-experts-say-090052524.html
So what message is he trying to send? That he's an asshole? We already knew that.
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