Three Russian journalists critical of the Kremlin have been allegedly poisoned in Germany, the Czech Republic and Georgia in the past twelve months. One of them is Elena Kostyuchenko, a special envoy for ‘Novaya Gazeta’ and ‘Meduza’. In October 2022 she was poisoned in Munich. “I don’t have a theory about what has happened, but at least my energy has partially returned, although I can only work three hours in a row, I get tired very quickly,” he explains to EL MUNDO from his exile in a country that he prefers not to reveal. There he prepares the launch of his book in several languages.
He believes she was poisoned after going into exile in Germany, a place he considered safe for the Russians. “I don’t think it is anymore, in Russia we think that Europe is a paradise, but on the continent political assassinations happen, secret services operate.” Her case coincided in time with that of Irina Babloyan, who worked for ‘Echo of Moscow’ and was poisoned in Tbilisi. And in May of this year, Natalia Arno, president of the Free Russian Foundation, also presented symptoms of poisoning.
Kostyuchenko is considered one of the bravest journalists in Russia. When the full-scale invasion began, she went to Ukraine to cover the war for ‘Novaya Gazeta’. There she documented the war crimes that the Russian army committed against the civilian population.
In the Ukraine he had gone through all kinds of risky situations. She came to cross the front line several times. But it was at the end of March, just before traveling to Mariupol, that he felt the real danger. From the newspaper they alerted her that she was on the radar of the Russian government: “They know that you are going to Mariupol and they tell me that [Ramzan] Kadyrov’s men have been ordered to find you. They are not going to arrest you. They are going to kill you Everything is already organized”.
The director of ‘Novaya Gazeta’, Dimitri Muratov, gave him direct orders to leave Ukraine and not return to Russia. He decided to move to Germany for a while. There, while he managed a new visa to go to Ukraine in the future and his next trip to Iran, he began to feel bad: “he had sweats”, as well as mental confusion, and “a strong body odor”. One morning he woke up with severe pain in his abdomen: “The room seemed to be spinning around me, and I felt more nauseated when I moved. I managed to walk to the bathroom and threw up.” Her body swelled, there was blood in the urine. The doctors began to freak out with the crazy results of the blood tests.
She tried a trusted doctor recommended by Moscow journalists: “Is there a possibility that you have been poisoned?” she asked after seeing the results of the new tests. “In the time I worked at ‘Novaya Gazeta’, four of our employees were killed. But I didn’t consider myself that important.”
He spoke to the German police. “My apartment and my belongings were checked with radiation detectors. They took away the clothes I had worn. The police checked the security of my apartment.”
On May 2, a letter from the Berlin prosecutor’s office informed him that the open case in connection with his assassination attempt had been closed. Detectives were unable to establish “any indication” that she had been poisoned, as “available blood tests do not clearly point to poisoning.” But other doctors consulted by the Russian media ‘The Insider’ said that the most likely cause of my symptoms was poisoning with an organic compound. This is how the case was reopened.
Russian journalists Roman Dobrokhotov and Christo Grozev had been investigating a series of poisonings in Europe for some time. The victims are all Russian journalists. When they saw that Kostyuchenko had not published for a while, they decided to contact her.
Various experts confirmed the facts, including a doctor who helped save the life of Alexei Navalni, who was treated in a Berlin hospital in 2020 after being poisoned with Novichok.
Now Kostyuchenko knows that no place is safe, but wants to move on: “Although we have already seen that words do not defeat fascism.”
