Alexei Navalny accuses Putin of poisoning him and vows to return to Russia

The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Thursday accused Vladimir Putin of personal responsibility for his attempted murder him with the chemical weapon Novichok and vowed to return to Russia to continue his political struggle.

“I accuse Putin of being behind this crime, and I can see no other possible version of events,”  Mr Navalny told Germany’s Spiegel magazine in his first full-length interview since his recovery from being poisoned with the nerve agent in August.

The Kremlin denies any involvement.

“Not going back to Russia would mean that Putin had won. My task now is to remain the guy who isn't afraid. And I am not afraid... I will not give Putin the gift of not returning to Russia.”

Mr Navalny, who was discharged from a Berlin hospital last week and is currently staying in the city, gave a chilling description of the experience of being poisoned with Novichok.

“It's hard to describe because you can't compare it to anything,” he said. “You don't feel pain, but you know you are dying. Right now.”

The 44-year-old described watching a mobile phone recording of his collapse on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow.

“It’s circulating on the internet as ‘Navalny screams in pain’. But it wasn't pain, it was something else, something worse," he said. "Pain makes you feel you are alive. Here you simply understand: this is the end.”

He described how he went from feeling unwell to collapsing unconscious in just half an hour.  “I feel something is wrong, I have a cold sweat. I ask Kira, who is sitting next to me, for a handkerchief and say: ‘Talk to me. I need to hear some one’s voice’. She looks at me like I am a madman.”

He went to the aircraft toilet and washed his face with cold water. “I think, If I don't get out of here now, I'll never get out. I leave, I turn to the steward, and instead of asking for help, I say, to my own surprise: ‘I've been poisoned. I'm dying’. And then I lie on the floor in front of him to die... I hear voices getting quieter, a woman shouts: ‘Don't pass out!; Then it's over. I know I’m dead. Only later it turns out I was wrong."

Novichok, a nerve agent was developed by the Soviet Union in the Seventies, is one of the most lethal chemical weapons ever made. Mr Navalny spent three weeks in a medically induced coma and is still weak. He needs both hands to pour a glass of water.

“The doctors say I can recover 90 per cent, maybe 100 per cent, but nobody really knows,” he said. “Basically, I'm something of a guinea pig: there aren't many people who survive being poisoned with a nerve agent. At some point I’m likely to be written about in medical journals.”

Russian agents used Novichok in the 2018 attempted murder of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, but Mr Navalny says scientists believe a new version was used against him to avoid accidentally poisoning others.

He believes the poison was left on something he touched in the hotel where he stayed in Tomsk and entered through his skin.  Traces were found on a mineral water bottle he drank from at the hotel which was brought with him to Germany, but scientists think they were transferred to the bottle from his hand.

Mr Navalny believes the plan was for him to die on the flight to Moscow and that he only survived because the pilots made an emergency landing in Omsk, where he was injected with atropine by doctors. “It was a clever plan. I would have died on the flight and ended up in a morgue in Omsk or Moscow. No one would have detected Novichok: after all, there are no mass spectrometers in the morgue. It would just have been a suspicious death.”

He says he only survived because of the intense international pressure on Mr Putin to allow him to be flown to Germany for treatment.

“German politicians and Angela Merkel, of all people, saved my life. The doctors at Charité Hospital saved my life a second time and, more importantly, they gave me back my personality,” he said. “Germany has become a special country for me.”

Mrs Merkel visited Mr Navalny in hospital last week. He said he couldn’t comment on what they discussed but that it “wasn’t secret or sensational”. He added: “I thanked her and she said, ‘I only did what was my duty’”.

In Moscow, Mr Putin’s political allies rejected Mr Navalny’s claim the Russian president was behind the poisoning.

“Everyone tried to save him, from pilots and doctors to the president. Only someone who has no honour could make such statements,” said Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian State Duma.

Mr Navalny was a “shameless scoundrel” who “has been working hand in hand with the intelligence community and officials from foreign countries”, he claimed.

"We believe that such charges against the Russian president are absolutely groundless and unacceptable," Mr Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. He also claimed that the US Central Intelligence Agency was "currently working" with Mr Navalny.

Mr Navalny said he would sue Mr Peskov for defamation over the CIA claim.

“In case government bodies that Peskov represents have proof of the nonsense that he keeps saying, then it becomes a Russian national security issue, and I demand that this evidence be made public,” he said in a blog post.

“I do believe that Putin personally was behind the attempt to kill me. Who else could have possibly given an order to the two or three security services which have Novichok at their disposal as well as people who know how to use it?”

Mr Navalny told Spiegel he does not believe he will be the last opponent of Mr Putin to be poisoned.

“The Russian leadership has become so prone to poisoning that it won't stop anytime soon,” he said. “My medical history will be useful.”