How Russia Poisons Dissidents with Nerve Toxin – US and German Investigations

Natalya Arno has a hard time keeping herself upright and still for a long time. Her right side is paralyzed, as is her back and face since she was poisoned five months ago, like many Russian dissidents.

Arno suffers from polyneuropathy. “It’s the same diagnosis that was made for deputy Vladimir Kara-Murza,” who was poisoned twice, in 2015 and 2017, and was sentenced in April to 25 years in prison for “high treason” after denouncing Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

The 47-year-old president of the non-governmental organization Free Russia was in Prague in early May when something strange happened to her. “My hotel room door was ajar. Inside there was one unpleasant smell“, he narrates from Paris.

At first she searched the room for “bedbugs,” mocking herself for her “unfounded” concerns. At 5 in the morning however he wakes up with strong pains in the mouth. He decides to return to United Stateswhere she lives, to consult her dentist.

But during the flight, over the Atlantic, “I started to feel pains everywhere: in my armpits, in my chest, in my ears, in my eyes and in my legs. It was as if all the organs were leaving me one after the other”.

Tests find that Natalia Arno “has been exposed to nerve toxin“, which cannot be produced naturally. “My nerves are on fire. They may be rehabilitated in a year,” he says in a determined tone.

With the neurotoxic agent novitsok in March 2018, the attempt to poison ex-agent Sergei took place Skripal and his daughter Julia, in Salisbury, Britain.

With the same nerve toxin is believed to have poisoned Alexei Navalny in 2020, on a plane that took him from Siberia to Moscow on August 20.

Novichok (also known as Agent A) is a group of seven binary chemical weapons developed by the state chemical research institute GosNIIOHT in the Soviet Union and Russia from 1971 to 1993.

Russian scientists who developed the nerve agents claim they are the deadliest ever created.

A poisoning investigation is underway in the US, but also in Germanywhere Natalia Arno was before staying in Prague.

Because an exiled Russian journalist, who was in Berlin for a meeting with deputy Mikhail Khodorkovsky, he also fell ill.

A third woman, settled in Agricultureis feared to have been poisoned at the end of 2022 in Tbilisi.

Natalia Arno says Russian human rights activists are “easy targets” for the Kremlin, whose “long tentacles” reach into the West.

The fact that they are being attacked outside Russia “shows that we are effective, that we are angering them,” says Natalia Arno, who has been the target of “harassment” several times before her 2012 exile.

“I left Russia at gunpoint from FSB agents,” the Russian secret service, he says. “Poisoning is something new to me. But I’m not going to be paranoid about what I eat and drink.”

“Murderers in the Service of the Russian State”

Yevgenia Kara-Murza, the wife of the convicted dissident, blames “murderers in the service of the Russian state” for the poisonings.

This is the “same group involved in his poisoning Alexei Navalny“, of the leader of the Russian opposition who has been sentenced to 19 years in prison for “extremist action”.

Vladimir Putin’s regime has been built on “attack” and “intimidation”. “If he did not use these methods of repression, he would no longer exist,” says Yevgenia Kara-Murza, while denouncing the conditions of her husband’s detention.

Natalia Arno and Yevgenia Kara-Murza were last week in Paris at an event of Russian dissidents.

“For the table at the opening of the works, we did secret restaurant reservation and we didn’t announce it until the last minute,” says Olga Prokopieva, a representative of the non-governmental organization Russia Freedom, organizer of the event. The co-defendants were instructed to drink only from sealed bottles. But the participants had no fear. “That’s not what’s going to stop them.”

“I will do everything to bring closer the day when this regime will collapse,” says Yevgenia Kara-Murza. “Because someone I love is behind bars.”