The EU is imposing sanctions on the FSB agents who poisoned Alexei Navalny in 2020.
In December 2020, The Insider, Bellingcat, and CNN released an investigation. Its authors came to the conclusion that at least 8 FSB officers were involved in the poisoning of Navalny with a Novichok family military agent. All of them are employees of the FSB Institute of Criminalistics (aka NII-2 FSB or military unit 34435), under the cover of which, according to unofficial data, a laboratory producing secret poisons for special operations operates.
The investigation was also based on phone billing. It turned out that employees of the FSB Institute of Criminalistics and the Second Service of the FSB (Department for the Protection of the Constitutional Order) had been following Navalny since the beginning of 2017, after he announced his participation in the presidential elections. They made 47 trips to the same destinations where Alexei Navalny flew or traveled, on the same days, flying parallel flights with the politician.
After the release of the investigation, Navalny called one of the FSB officers involved in the investigation, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, introducing himself as assistant to the Secretary of the Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev. In a conversation, Kudryavtsev told the details of Navalny's poisoning.
The Russian authorities do not recognize the fact of Navalny's poisoning. The criminal case has not been opened for the past year and a half. Instead, the security forces began to pursue those who may have passed information to investigative journalists about the flights of FSB officers.
In early March 2021, a criminal case was initiated against St. Petersburg police officers Major Roman Gladyshev and Captain Konstantin Golubev. They were suspected of transferring data from a departmental database about Alexei Navalny's fellow travelers on a plane from Tomsk to Moscow. After that, the head of the Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Vasileostrovsky district of St. Petersburg, where the suspect worked, resigned.
In January, Kirill Chuprov, a police officer from the Samara police department, also became a suspect in transferring data on the flights of FSB officers who were monitoring Navalny.
