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The Kremlin, FSB, and the 'Berlin patient's' underpants
Vladimir Putin has used the FSB’s aura of efficiency and brutality to threaten regime opponents with kompromat, exile, poisoning, or a bullet to the head. The Aug. 20 botched assassination of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and the embarrassing unraveling of the Kremlin’s narrative thereafter have turned the FSB into a laughingstock as memes belittling Putin and his FSB circulate on social media.

As of Dec. 17, however, it looked as if the Kremlin would ride out the Navalny poisoning largely unscathed. Putin, in his four-hour Direct Line press conference (37,000 word transcript), showed no signs of his rumored Parkinson’s disease as he declared that “ensuring national stability and development” may require another term in 2024.

Direct Line offered a friendly platform to reject the call for an investigation of the Navalny poisoning as Putin asked rhetorically: “Who cares about him, anyway?” Continuing his avoidance of Navalny’s name, Putin issued no direct denial of Kremlin involvement in the poisoning of the “Berlin patient.” Putin shrugged off the exhaustive Dec. 15 investigative report that placed FSB’s assassins at the scene of the poisoning operation. According to Putin, no big deal. The FSB must keep track of troublemakers like the “Berlin patient,” who clearly “have the support of the (U.S.) special services.” This fake assassination is “a trick to attack our people at the top,” he claimed.

Unbeknownst to Putin, three days earlier, the “Berlin patient” waked purported assassination-team member, Konstantin Kudryavtsev (“Konstantin”), with a 7 a.m. telephone call using a fake FSB caller-ID. Navalny, playing a harried assistant, informed Konstantin ominously that the director of the National Security Council that manages the FSB, Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev, was demanding a report on why the operation failed. Navalny’s subtle message to Konstantin: Heads are going to roll… Here is your chance to protect yourself; stop worrying that the call is not on a secure line.

By cajoling, pleading, and calling for understanding, Navalny kept his would-be assassin on the line for 49 minutes as Konstantin loosened up on what “went wrong” with the operation: Navalny’s plane landed too soon; just a little longer (chut’ dol’she) and he would have been dead. The paramedics were not clued in. They injected him with a life-saving antidote. The Novichek dose was correctly calculated, but there are “many nuances” in such an operation.

Konstantin’s most telling revelation: The squad laced the poison into the seams of Navalny’s blue underpants.

As the squad’s chemical weapons specialist, Konstantin’s job was to remove any traces of poison from Navalny’s underwear confiscated at the Omsk hospital.

Navalny made a videotape of his conversation with Konstantin. It shows his supporters listening tensely and exchanging virtual thumbs-up as they realized that Navalny had recorded a confession from his own intended assassin.