Grozev says rare poison finding humiliates Kremlin (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: It is two years to the day since Alexei Navalny, once Vladimir Putin's most prominent political opponent, died suddenly in jail on the 16th of February 2024 at the age of 47. Floral tributes have been laid in Moscow from supporters. It comes as the UK and other European allies have said that Russia murdered the dissident using poison taken from Ecuadorian dart frogs, following analysis of material samples found on Mr Navalny's body. Moscow has dismissed the findings. We can speak now to Christo Groshev, a journalist who's lead investigator at the Insider and Spiegel. He was once called a modern-day Sherlock by Alexei Navalny due to his investigation into the poisoning squad behind the attempt to kill Navalny in 2020. Welcome to you, thank you very much for being with us. Tell us first of all a little bit about your relationship with Alexei Navalny and I understand you were part of an attempt to have him freed just before he died.

[00:00:58] Speaker 2: I obviously have followed Alexei Navalny's work for, had followed it for a decade before I in fact met him. I had exchanged some barbs tweets with him over the years. I was not always in agreement with some of his political decisions and in particular engaging with people from all kinds of fringe parties and talking to them. But that was of course part of his strategy to unite, create a united front against Putin at all costs. But again we had communicated online, sometimes in agreement, sometimes in disagreement. But the first time I met him was because I had to contact him in the summer, in September of 2020, just after he had been released from hospital to tell him that I had a lead, I believed I had a lead on who might have poisoned him. That's when I met him and the next few months we spent much of the time together working on the investigation into his own poisoning. And I grew to love him as a person because I realized that that he was completely transparent, honest person whose goal was to come to power to Russia only in order to make Russia a country that does not need somebody to be a king or a tsar, as he said, but for Russia to be a complete democracy. And that was his only goal. That was the man who went back to Russia to try to be with the people and not talk to it from abroad when he made the, as we now see, ill-fated decision to go back in the beginning of 2021. And that was the man that I and his colleagues spent almost a year and a half trying to free in an exchange of prisoners that ultimately happened without him salary.

[00:02:51] Speaker 1: Christo, we've heard accusations from the UK and other countries that he was killed by Russia with dart frog poisoning, and Russia denies this. Does this change anything?

[00:03:03] Speaker 2: Well, the announcement does change. First of all, I cannot overstate the miracle of this discovery because the Russian government did everything possible to not let any samples of the body, not have the relatives have access to the body taken out. And despite this, the family were able to carry out and transport tiny samples and deliver them to Western laboratories for independent testing. The miracle is further enhanced by the fact that this was a very rare poison, previously unknown to have been used as in a weaponized form against a human by another human or by government. So it was a sequence of very unlikely events that led to this announcement a couple of days ago. I don't think this was anticipated by Putin. I don't think it was. Many people say, oh, he would love to be blamed for this. And he was leading a sort of a business card of a unique poison left and right, as he did with Novichok. No, from everything we've seen this time around, they made everything possible for this to be untraceable, untractable as a crime. So that's why I do think that this announcement makes a huge difference. It is a slap in the face of Putin. It will be another humiliation for him also domestically. And it was important for this statement to come out again, because alternatively, Russia would always be able to default to, well, nothing was found. And therefore, he died on his own accord.

[00:04:36] Speaker 1: Christo, Alexei Navalny's mother has called for justice. We've heard the UK foreign secretary suggest there could be more sanctions against Russia. What could justice look like? Would more sanctions make any difference, do you think?

[00:04:50] Speaker 2: They would. What we know is that Russia is at crossroads at the moment. Economically, it is really suffering. We even see, and your own correspondent in Moscow has recently reported on an unprecedented way of critical comments in government-supported media or government-run media about the state of the economy. So any sanction at this point is actually going to have a consequence in terms of potentially, well, putting Russia over the cliff economically and helping stop the war. Things like this that unite people, nobody can say why sanction Russia over something as egregious as it carrying a poison attack against its own prisoner. It does help, again, because it is one thing to argue for sanctions because of a war on a third country. It's another thing to argue for sanctions over Putin killing his own people. And I do think that this will help.

[00:05:49] Speaker 1: Okay, really interesting to get your thoughts, Christo Grosjef. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you.