Eurasia Press & News
A joint investigation by The Insider, Bellingcat and CNN with the participation of Der Spiegel established the names and ranks of the FSB officers who poisoned Alexei Navalny with Novichok. As it turned out, the poisoning in Tomsk was already the second attempt; two months before that, the same FSB officers made an attempt on the life of an oppositionist in Kaliningrad and almost killed Yulia Navalnaya in the process. A special unit of the FSB Institute of Forensic Science played a key role in the assassination attempt.
After The Insider and Bellingcat managed to establish through billing telephone conversations of Skripal’s poisoners that GRU officers received Novichok from the Signal Scientific Center, it became possible to investigate other poisonings. By analyzing the billings of telephone conversations of the director of the Signal Scientific Center, Artur Zhirov, obtained by Bellingcat, it was possible to identify a number of FSB employees who maintain regular communication with him. This is how we managed to reach the FSB Institute of Forensic Science, whose employees (as their billings showed in turn) were the main perpetrators of the poisoning.
What is a “laboratory”?
Phone billings and travel records show that the Navalny poisoning operation was carried out by a group of at least eight FSB operatives from a secret department unit operating under the cover of the FSB Institute of Forensic Science (aka NII-2 FSB or military unit 34435).
The FSB Institute of Forensic Science, created in 1977 as a high-tech investigative unit of the KGB, is a sprawling organization that provides services ranging from polygraph testing and voice and facial recognition to robotic mine clearance. The unit played a key role in the investigation of all major incidents in the post-Soviet period – such as the bombings of residential buildings in 1999, the Kursk submarine disaster, the hostage taking in Beslan and Nord-Ost, as well as the explosions in the St. Petersburg metro (in In all these cases, the objectivity of the investigations raised big questions among journalists). This FSB unit also claimed some more esoteric achievements, such as the ability to determine the height and education of a suspect based on a voice sample, as well as the ability to determine the circumstances of the last days of the life of Jesus Christ. The same institute “discovered” drugs in samples of Ivan Golunov’s hair (the examination was later proven to be fabricated). Sometimes the institute also conducts linguistic examinations, for example, Alexander Korshikov and Anna Osokina found extremism in the words of HSE student Egor Zhukov, “you need to fight the system firmly and systematically.”
While NII-2’s official purpose is to conduct forensic examinations, former Soviet and Russian intelligence officers who defected to the West have said that the institute also runs a secret laboratory that during Soviet times produced poisons used to kill Western diplomats, Ukrainian nationalists and Soviet defectors. . According to former KGB general Oleg Kalugin, one of the first projects of this KGB laboratory was the preparation of a special bullet (a tiny ball with two holes) filled with ricin, which was used to poison the Bulgarian émigré writer Georgiy Markov, who was killed in London in 1979. Another KGB defector now living in the United States, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Bellingcat that the KGB’s main poison laboratory was located at the exact site where we determined the Institute of Forensic Sciences’ poison operations center was located. The same defector also claims that the site of the KGB laboratory was so secret that it was used by the putschists as a “situation room” in August 1991.
In 2007, an article on the website Gazeta.ru (later deleted but preserved in the Internet archive) reported that the polonium used to kill Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 in London was also taken from NII-2. Based on the phone billing of 12 FSB employees associated with the Institute of Forensic Science, we were able to confirm that this unit continues to operate a chemical weapons poisoning laboratory, which is based in two secret and highly guarded locations in Moscow and the Moscow region. The main complex of buildings is located at the intersection of Akademika Vargi Street and Teplostansky Proezd.
The second most important location of the “laboratory” is a complex of buildings in Podlipki (not far from Korolev). Also, operatives involved in the poisoning program often visit the administrative headquarters of the Institute’s parent organization – the Center for Special Equipment, located at 12 Vernadsky Avenue.
Director of the FSB Institute of Forensic Science is General Kirill Vasiliev. Vasiliev is a chemical engineer and specialist in the identification of substance metabolites in biomedical samples using mass chromatography and mass spectrometric detection (the gold standard for identifying chemical weapons in biomedical samples). Without disclosing his FSB affiliation, he is also involved in research for the Signal Research Center, which we identified in a previous investigation as a key participant in the revamped Novichok clandestine research and development program in Russia.
Kirill Vasiliev, in turn, reports to Major General Vladimir Bogdanov, the former head of the Institute of Forensic Science, who currently heads its parent enterprise, the FSB Center for Special Equipment, and is the deputy director of the FSB scientific and technical service.
Poisoners from the FSB
By analyzing call metadata and comparing it with offline databases, as well as with data from open sources, we identified 15 people from the FSB Institute of Forensic Sciences associated with the poisoning operations, and at least 8 of them, including the leader of the group, Colonel Stanislav Makshakov , participated in the attempted murder of Navalny (it is curious that the group of poisoners from the GRU also included 8 people, more about this in the text “The Poisonous Eight” ). The members of the criminal group have different backgrounds – some have a medical education, some had a career in the army, some in the FSB special forces, and there are also chemical weapons specialists. Here are brief biographies of the main perpetrators of the failed murder:
Stanislav Makshakov
Born March 25, 1966. Colonel, military scientist, previously worked in the closed military town of Shikhany-2 (Volsk-18, military unit 61469). Before the official end of the Russian chemical weapons program in 2017, new forms of chemical weapons were being developed here, including Novichok-type nerve agents.
Oleg Tayakin ( “Tarasov”)
Born December 6, 1980. A senior member of the Navalny poisoning team, usually coordinating the actions of other officers and working primarily from the central office on Akademika Varga Street. He served at the White Coal base of the FSB Special Forces Service in Essentuki, as well as in military unit 03523 of the Space Forces. In 2004, he graduated from the Pirogov Medical Academy in Moscow. Before joining the FSB Institute of Forensic Science, he worked as a doctor.
Alexey Alexandrov (“Frolov”)
Born June 16, 1981. In 2006 he graduated from a medical institute in Moscow and worked as an emergency doctor and then as a military doctor; he began serving in the FSB in 2013. Aleksandrov appears to be a key operative involved in two attempts to poison Navalny in 2020.
Ivan Osipov (“Spiridonov”)
Born August 21, 1976. Doctor. He left social networks in 2012, apparently that’s when he joined the FSB.
Konstantin Kudryavtsev (“Sokolov”)
Born April 11, 1979. He served in a military unit in Shikhany. Before starting work at the FSB Institute of Forensic Science, he graduated from the Russian Academy of Military Chemical and Biological Defense.
Alexey Krivoshchekov
Born April 11, 1979. Before joining the FSB in 2008, he served in the Ministry of Defense.
Mikhail Shvets (“Stepanov”)
Born May 3, 1977. He is officially registered at the address “Trubetskaya Street, 116, Balashikha” – this is the address of the FSB Special Operations Center. Let us remember that it was there, at the FSB TsSN base in Balashikha, that Vadim Krasikov (Sokolov) trained, immediately before he went to Germany, where in August 2019 he killed refugee Zelimkhan Khangoshvili. Telephone metadata shows that Shvets spends part of his time in the laboratory on Akademika Varga Street, and part of his time at the FSB TsSN base.
Vladimir Panyaev
Born on November 25, 1980 in Serdobsk, Penza region. Before joining the FSB Institute of Forensic Science, he worked in the FSB border service, then became a co-founder of a company dealing with gas equipment. Whether it’s a coincidence or not, he lives in the same house as Alexei Navalny. After the poisoning, his registration address was changed to the FSB headquarters on Lubyanka, 1.
37 “coincidences”. How the poisoners spied on Navalny
An analysis of the previous travels of members of this group of poisoners shows that they began monitoring Alexei Navalny at least in January 2017, that is, immediately after he announced his plans to participate in the 2018 Russian presidential elections. As part of his election campaign during 2017, Navalny made more than 20 campaign trips outside of Moscow. FSB poisoners followed him on almost all of these trips, with the exception of a few one-day ones that did not require him to spend the night at his destination. In total, these FSB officers made 47 trips to the same directions where Alexei Navalny was flying or traveling.
Members of this group usually traveled in groups of two or three – on different flights, mixing not only the composition of their team, but also alternating real names and cover names, and sometimes they even traveled under one name from Moscow and under a second one back. It is noteworthy that they almost never flew on the same flight as the opposition politician, but instead flew on parallel flights, preferably from other Moscow airports. More often than not, they also took a flight preceding—sometimes by one day—Navalny’s arrival at a particular destination. This modus operandi minimized the likelihood that Navalny or members of his team would spot the same passengers on different flights.
In fact, of all the group trips made by members of this FSB team in 2017, only one did not coincide with Navalny’s trip. On April 27, 2017, officers Alexey Alexandrov (flying under the fictitious name “Frolov”) and Vladimir Panyaev (under his real name) flew from Moscow to the city of Astrakhan in southern Russia and returned two days later, on April 29, 2017. Navalny did not travel to Astrakhan. However, as he himself wrote on his blog on April 28, 2017, he bought a ticket and planned to fly to Astrakhan that morning to observe the opening of the local election headquarters in the city. His trip was made impossible by severe eye inflammation after he was attacked the previous day when Kremlin provocateur Alexei Kulakov threw brilliant green mixed with an unidentified caustic substance in his face – Navalny’s vision was then saved by Spanish doctors.
Did this group of FSB officers attempt poisoning already in 2017 or were they just preparing for the assassination attempt? In a conversation with us, Alexey Navalny said that during one of the flights in 2017 (he no longer remembers which one exactly), he felt symptoms very similar, although less serious, to what happened during the fatal flight from Tomsk.
One way or another, after the Central Electoral Commission refused to register Navalny for the presidential elections in December 2017 (under the pretext of a conviction in the Kirovles case, the verdict in which was overturned by the ECHR), surveillance stopped for a while. In 2018, Navalny had no coincidental trips with poisoners; in 2019, there was only one, in February to St. Petersburg. In July 2019, Navalny became ill in the isolation ward where he was imprisoned for calling for protests—he was hospitalized with severe swelling of his face. He was officially diagnosed with an “allergic reaction,” although Navalny had never been allergic and could not have had any contact with allergens in the cell.
In 2020, the hunt for Navalny resumed in full force.
Kaliningrad fiasco
Billings of telephone conversations show a surge in communication between employees of the Signal Scientific Center and three FSB officers already two months before Navalny’s poisoning in Tomsk.
On July 2, 2020, three members of the poisoning squad – Aleksandrov (“Frolov”), Shvets and Panyaev (under real names) bought tickets to Kaliningrad. Panyaev flew away that same evening, and “Frolov” and Shvets – the next morning, July 3. On the same day, July 3, Alexei Navalny and his wife Yulia flew to Kaliningrad to spend a five-day vacation at the Schloss Hotel Yantarny on the shores of the Baltic Sea. This time, the FSB officers again flew from another airport so as not to be noticed: Navalny flew from Domodedovo, the poisoners from Sheremetyevo. Shortly before departure, all three FSB operatives spoke repeatedly on the phone with Colonel Makshakov. He, in turn, exchanged phone calls with his superiors, Generals Kirill Vasiliev and Vladimir Bogdanov. All three operatives turned off their regular cell phones for the duration of the trip. However, at least one of them, Aleksandrov (“Frolov”), used the “left” phone number to contact his commander Makshakov throughout the operation.
Two hotel employees independently told us that the day before the Navalnys arrived, “several people in civilian clothes came, talked with the authorities, then went into the rooms, did something there and left.” The hotel staff then decided that they were intelligence agencies installing wiretapping. Unfortunately, both employees saw the faces of those who came only briefly and could not identify them from the photo, saying that they no longer remember what they looked like.
On July 3, Alexandrov and Makshakov exchanged several SMS from 15 to 17 hours Moscow time and once again after midnight. On July 4, communication became more active, with a total of 21 text messages sent during the day, the last of which was at 4:57 am the next day (3:57 am on July 5 local time in Kaliningrad). On the afternoon of July 5 at 16:55 the trio flew back to Moscow. Upon arrival, Alexandrov called Makshakov, and all three immediately went to the office on Academician Varga Street.
The next day, July 6, 2020, two separate storylines unfolded: one in Kaliningrad and the other in Moscow.
Early in the morning on the fourth day of their vacation in Kaliningrad, Alexey and Yulia Navalny decided to go for a long walk along the beach. They returned to their hotel room briefly and then went to have breakfast at a nearby beach cafe. On the way to the cafe, Yulia Navalnaya suddenly felt ill.
“I was just walking down the street, feeling completely normal. And suddenly I felt bad. Then it got really bad. Then I felt as bad as I had never felt in my life. Alexey asks: what hurts you? How can I help you? But nothing hurts me and I myself don’t understand what’s happening. He brought me water, I went back to the room. On the way, I sat down on a bench and had difficulty getting up from it. I barely made it to the room, although it was three hundred meters away. She lay down on the bed. It was just terrible. An hour later it became easier and I fell asleep. And in the morning everything was completely normal.”
Navalny recalls that moment with alarm: “Just imagine, a person says: I feel very bad, I can’t do it at all. You ask him questions: what hurts? Maybe the heart? Should I call an ambulance? And he answers: nothing hurts. It’s now, after I’ve gone through this myself, that I understand how bad it can be and how impossible it is to explain what’s happening. And then I thought: well, this is some kind of nonsense. Body failure.”
The fact that Yulia Navalnaya survived and did not even lose consciousness does not mean that the poisoning was mild. According to expert estimates , Novichok-type agents may not cause significant symptoms until cholinesterase inhibition reaches 75–80%. That is, if the victim received a dose less than lethal, he may experience only temporary motor or respiratory problems.
Meanwhile, telephone activity was heating up in Moscow. Beginning at 8:30 a.m. on July 6, 2020, there was a constant exchange of telephone calls between three members of the poisoning team, who had just returned from Kaliningrad, and their superior Makshakov, who, in turn, again called to report to Generals Vasiliev and Bogdanov. At 9 am, Makshakov, Vasiliev and Bogdanov took turns calling Artur Zhirov, director of the Signal Scientific Center. At 10 a.m., Zhirov, and then Makshakov, called Oleg Demidov, a chemical weapons specialist who had previously worked at the 33rd Military Institute in Shikhany (dealing with Novichok). Oleg Demidov is a co-author of several patents related to chemical weapons, including a 2003 patent for “an imitation formulation for training troops to fight in conditions of chemical contamination.” After formally retiring from the 33rd Institute, he worked for several years at the Dubna Research Institute of Applied Acoustics, which is not formally associated with chemical weapons, but which Tayakin and Aleksandrov regularly visited in May-June 2020, judging by the metadata of their phones. As of 2019, Demidov worked at the Signal Scientific Center and recently frequently communicated by phone with at least five members of the FSB poisoner group.
After an active exchange of calls between the FSB and the Signal NC, at 13:00 General Bogdanov headed to the airport and at 14:30 he flew to Kaliningrad. Geolocation data shows that he spent the next few days at the FSB headquarters in Kaliningrad, communicating by phone mainly with Makshakov, but also with chemists at the Signal Scientific Center and the Institute of Forensic Science. Apparently, by the time the general flew to Kaliningrad, the FSB already understood that the poisoning attempt had failed, and they could also understand that Yulia Navalnaya, and not Alexey, suffered from Novichok, but what Bogdanov’s specific task was at that moment is unclear .
last try
A month after the Kaliningrad attempt, three FSB poisoners – Aleksandrov, Osipov and Panyaev – booked tickets for a flight to Novosibirsk. Aleksandrov flew as “Frolov”, Osipov as “Spiridonov”, only Panyaev again under his real name. By this time, the FSB already knew that two days earlier, a key member of Alexei Navalny’s team from the FBK Anti-Corruption Foundation, the head of its investigations department, Maria Pevchikh, had purchased a ticket to Novosibirsk. At that time, the FBK team had not purchased return tickets, nor did the FSB officers buy them. Navalny booked his return ticket (not from Novosibirsk, but from Tomsk) only on August 17, and a few minutes after that the FSB officers did the same.
Immediately after booking tickets to Novosibirsk, Dr. Ivan Osipov called Makshakov, who, in turn, immediately called his boss Kirill Vasiliev, head of the Institute of Forensic Science. On the same day, there was a continuous exchange of calls with three other members of the poisoning group – Krivoshchekov, Kudryavtsev and Shvets.
Judging by the calls, Tayakin remained in Moscow and constantly communicated via messenger with the poisoners who followed Navalny.
When Aleksandrov, Osipov and Panyaev took off on flight SU-1460 from Sheremetyevo to Novosibirsk at 9:05, their colleague Tayakin headed from the office on Vargi to another Moscow airport, Domodedovo. Geolocation data from his phone shows that he was delayed at the airport without calling anyone. He remained there until 11:00 and then returned to the main office on Vargi. It was at this time that the head of the FBK investigation department, Maria Pevchikh, flew from Domodedovo to Novosibirsk. A few months later, state channels showed video recordings (not only from security cameras, but also, judging by the angle, made by operatives), from which it followed that Pevchikh was watched throughout the day, starting from the moment she left her Moscow apartment early in the morning.
The next day, August 14, 2020, at 15:34 Tomsk time, Alexandrov made one of his two main mistakes. He turned on his main phone briefly, which triggered a geolocation data check. At that time, it was located next to the base station on Dimitrova Avenue, 2 – next to the hotel in Novosibirsk, where Maria Pevchikh booked a room (Maria, however, wisely checked into a different hotel than she had booked).
Telephone records over the next three days show that Oleg Tayakin was constantly at the main office on Akademika Vargi Street in Moscow during the operation, leaving home twice briefly during this time. Most nights he constantly made and received calls over the Internet. He also called Makshakov early every morning. Makshakov, in turn, called General Bogdanov immediately after each call from Tayakin.
Due to the fact that the three poisoners who went after Navalny to Novosibirsk used “left” phones, their movements are difficult to track (apart from Aleksandrov’s mistake), but data on calls from other members of the unit who used their regular phones show that there were two periods of particularly high activity in their work – one on the evening of August 16 and one on the night of August 19, 2020. At this time, the frequency of calls increased sharply, and nightly conversations also appeared between Makshakov and his superiors, on the one hand, and Tayakin, Kudryavtsev and Krivoshchekov, on the other.
The first peak—August 16—came on Navalny’s last day in Novosibirsk. The next day, he and his team traveled by car to Tomsk, a three and a half hour drive north. From 7:00 to 9:00 Novosibirsk time (or from 3 am Moscow time) General Bogdanov and Makshakov exchange phone calls, interspersed with text messages between Makshakov and members of the poisoning team – Shvets and Krivoshchekov. Perhaps the poisoners initially wanted to carry out their plan in Novosibirsk, but leaving for Tomsk mixed the cards.
The second burst of nighttime activity occurred on the evening of August 19—apparently, it was then that Navalny was poisoned in Tomsk.
At 16:21 Moscow time (20:21 Tomsk time) Vladimir Panyaev sent a text message to Makshakov. Around this point, Navalny went to swim in the local river (a tradition that Navalny tried to observe in his trips to the regions). He was away from the hotel for about 2.5 hours. He returned to Xander at 11 pm and met his team, who had just finished dinner at the hotel’s Velvet bar. After spending just a few minutes in the bar, he went to bed. Around the same time, at 20:08 Moscow time, Krivoschekov called Makshakov. At 20:37 Tayakin spoke briefly with someone via instant messenger, after which he called Makshakov, while maintaining a data connection. Over the next few minutes, he spoke with Makshakov four times, the last time at 20:44. In Tomsk it was 0:44.
Four minutes later, at 0:48, Aleksandrov made a second mistake. He turned his regular phone back on. The phone was only turned on for a couple of seconds, but that was enough for it to exchange one byte of data with the cellular network. According to the metadata, at that moment the phone was located near a cell tower in the center of Tomsk, just a few minutes’ drive north of the Xander Hotel. The map below shows triangulation data showing the location of the device north of Navalny’s hotel on the night of the poisoning.
These data do not provide a clear answer to the question of exactly how the poison was applied, but they fit well with The Insider’s previous hypothesis that Novichok was applied to the underwear that the oppositionist took to the dry cleaner: the items were brought from the hotel dry cleaner at the moment when Navalny went for a swim.
Disposal of evidence
At 6 a.m. on August 20, 2020, Navalny’s team gathered in the lobby and waited for him to come down from his room to head to the airport with press secretary Kira Yarmysh. They ordered a taxi. Navalny came down at 6:05. Exactly at this minute (at 2:05 Moscow time) Krivoshchekov sent Makshakov an SMS. Makshakov wrote to Tayakin, after which he immediately went to the office. He arrived at the building on Academician Varga Street around 4 a.m., just as Navalny’s plane took off from Tomsk.
The rest of the story is well known – about 30 minutes after the start of the flight, Navalny felt bad, went to the toilet to wash himself, but he didn’t feel better, he got off the plane and managed to tell the flight attendant that he felt bad and that he had been poisoned, after which he lost consciousness. The pilot directed the plane to the nearest airport—Omsk—at approximately 5:15 a.m. Moscow time, and after a short delay (about 15 minutes) due to a false bomb alert at the airport, the pilot was able to land the plane at 6 a.m. Moscow time. The ambulance doctors, having assessed Navalny’s symptoms, administered atropine to him (which, according to German doctors, saved his life).
At exactly 6 a.m., immediately after the plane landed, Makshakov called Krivoshchekov, and at 7:11 a.m., Major General Bogdanov.
Meanwhile, at 5:36 Tayakin left the office and headed towards Domodedovo Airport. Mobile phone data shows he almost made it to the airport at about 6:27 a.m. but stopped several kilometers away. He made a call from there, waited another half hour, after which he turned around and headed back to the office, from where he continued to exchange calls with Makshakov and other team members. At 11:30 he arrived at Bogdanov’s office on Vernadsky Avenue, 12. He stayed there for an hour and then drove back to the office on Academician Varga Street. Immediately after this meeting, he booked a ticket to Gorno-Altaisk for the same evening. On the way to Domodedovo airport, he called the head of the FSB department. He took off at 2:40 a.m. and immediately after landing went straight to the FSB headquarters in the city center.
What could Tayakin be doing in Gorno-Altaisk, a city of 60,000 people located 9 hours from Tomsk and 13 hours from Omsk? Probably his goal was not in Gorno-Altaisk itself, but in the neighboring town of Biysk, where the Institute of Chemical-Energy Technologies is located , which has a special relationship with the Institute of Forensic Science. According to government procurement documents, the institute provided the Institute of Forensic Sciences with “services for the production of pharmacological substances” as well as “research and experimental services in the field of chemistry.” The institute also announced the invention in 2018 of “a set of nanosorbents to remove traces of chemical weapons from contaminated sites.” It is important to note that at least one FSB employee, Aleksandrov, is shown by phone records to be in frequent telephone contact with the institute’s scientist, Mikhail Vasilishin , a chemical engineer specializing in experimental chemical production.
It was to Gorno-Altaisk that Alexandrov, Osipov and Panyaev also went. Apparently, it was there that they got rid of things that might have had traces of Novichok on them. On August 24, all three flew from Gorno-Altaisk to Moscow.
And on August 25, 2020, their colleague Kudryavtsev, a qualified chemical weapons specialist, on the contrary, flew from Moscow to Omsk. He stayed in the city for less than 10 hours and returned to Moscow that same night. By that time, Navalny was already in Germany, but Navalny’s clothes (with traces of Novichok) remained in the Omsk hospital – apparently, it was Kudryavtsev who flew in for them. Until now, the official authorities have not answered Navalny where his clothes disappeared and why they were not returned if officially there was no poisoning.
We also note that there is no evidence that any of the FSB poisoners were in Omsk when Navalny was lying there. Therefore, the rumor that FSB officers could poison him again in Omsk, which was spread by The Times, is most likely untrue.
