Navalny Is The Latest In A Grim Line Of Putin Opponents Believed To Have Been Poisoned

Navalny, suspected of being poisoned Thursday during a flight to Moscow from Siberia, is expected to be transported Saturday to a hospital in Germany, a move which Russian doctors originally denied, claiming his condition was “too unstable,” but reversed after a German medical team arrived at the hospital and were permitted to examine Navalny.

Pyotr Verzilov, a Russian opposition activist, said he went through the same symptoms in 2018, including being put on a ventilator and eventually being flown to a German hospital for treatment, according to the New York Times.

Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist and fierce critic of the Russian government, became seriously ill after a suspected poisoning in 2004 during a domestic Russian flight, and was gunned down two years later.

The same week Politkovskaya was poisoned, Roman Tsepov, who was a bodyguard for President Vladimir Putin in the 1990s before he came to power, became violently ill and died a few days after having a cup of tea at a local Russian security service office—his autopsy revealed radioactive material in his body.

Aleksandr V. Litvinenko, a rogue Russian intelligence officer, died after drinking tea laced with a lethal radioactive isotope, polonium 210, just a month after Politkovskaya’s murder—a 2016 British investigation concluded his death could have been approved by Putin himself.

Opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza was poisoned in 2015, one month after calling for the U.S. to impose harsher sanctions on Russia during a series of public meetings on Capitol Hill—Kara-Murza said he was poisoned again in 2017 as he toured Russia showcasing a documentary about murdered Putin critic Boris Nemtsov.

Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in 2018 and his daughter were poisoned by two Russian intelligence operatives with a toxic nerve agent applied to their door handle in Salisbury, England—they recovered but the attack led the U.K. and its allies to expel 150 Russian diplomats and impose crushing sanctions on the Kremlin.