• Russia Vladimir Putin admits that his agents follow Navalny, but says there is no reason to kill him

A Russian FSB security service agent who was sent to follow Alexey Navalny has revealed details of how the opposition leader was poisoned in August with the nerve agent Novichok, which was placed in his underpants.

He has told Navalny himself, who has posed as one of the heads of this Russian intelligence service and has called him on the phone.

To mislead the agent, the phone number Navalny was calling from was 'disguised' as belonging to the official FSB headquarters, Navalny's team explains.

Kudryavtsev's responses in the 45-minute call are

the first direct evidence of the involvement of an FSB unit

in the Navalny poisoning.

In the video of the call, Navalny and his family are seen silently celebrating each of the candid responses of the agent, who does not know at all times who he is talking to.

In the recording, posted on the opposition leader's YouTube channel, Navalny asks him where it is better to put the poison.

Konstantin Kudryavtsev, the agent, simply replied: "The underpants."

Navalny keeps asking exactly where the deadly Novichok was applied: if on the internal or external seams.

"The inside, in the crotch," Kudryavtsev responds.

Poison specialists

Kudryavtsev is, according to CNN, a specialist in chemical and biological weapons and works at the FSB Institute of Criminalistics.

He is one of the agents who, according to the Bellingcat investigation (which used thousands of phone records and airline tickets) were part of the "team of toxin experts" that followed Navalny before he was poisoned in August.

Putin confirmed last week that FSB agents followed Navalny, but said that if Russia had wanted him dead, "they probably would have carried it through to the end."

As for the Bellingcat probe, Putin and other government figures have dismissed it as part of a campaign orchestrated by Western intelligence agencies.

The Kremlin has never admitted trying to kill Navalny

.

But the night the Novichok was placed in Navalny's hotel room, a signal was captured from a cell phone that apparently belonged to one of the toxins team, Alexei Alexandrov, who was geolocated at the time just a few hundred meters from the Navalny hotel.

In this latest recording, Kudryavtsev admits to knowing Alexandrov and praises his work.

It is not clear that Kudryavtsev was also in Tomsk when the poison was placed.

But this call shows that Kudryavtsev has detailed knowledge of what had been done and that he was involved in the clean-up operation to make sure no traces of Novichok remained after Navalny left the first hospital where he was admitted, in Omsk.

Why didn't he die

Navalny began to feel ill after taking off from the city of Tomsk.

"The flight takes about three hours, it's a long flight," says Kudryavtsev in the recording.

"If they didn't [emergency] land the plane earlier [in Omsk], the effect would have been different and the result would have been different.

So I think the plane played the decisive role

."

"We did not expect all this to happen. Everything went wrong," laments Kudryavtsev.

These responses suggest that perhaps the FSB's intention was to kill Navalny.

In fact, when asked if perhaps the problem was the wrong dose of poison, Kudryavtsev replied: "As I understand it, we added a little more."

What Kudryavtsev did personally take care of was getting Navalny's clothes to prevent them from being analyzed.

So he flew to Omsk, the city where Navalny was admitted, on August 25, five days after the poisoning.

"When we arrived, they gave it to us, the 'boys' from Omsk [local agents] brought them to the police,"

Kudryavtsev openly says on the call, thus revealing the cover-up operation.

He even adds that special substances have been applied so that no traces of poison remain on the clothes.

Navalny and his team have repeatedly demanded that his suitcase be returned to him, but the Russian authorities have refused.

Kudryavtsev says that they told him "to be careful with your underwear, on the inside."

Then Navalny asks: "Who said that? Makshakov?"

Stanislav Makshakov is identified in the investigation as the official in charge of the toxin team, which is based in the FSB Criminalistics Unit outside Moscow.

"Yes," confirms Kudryavtsev.

"So there will be no surprises with the clothes?" Asks Navalny, pretending to be a boss worried that there will be no clues of the FSB 'mission'.

"That's why we went there several times,"

Kudryavtsev replies.

Research published last week reveals details of the toxin team's communications and travels.

And it shows that they had followed Navalny on more than 30 trips outside of Moscow since 2017.

Vladimir Putin said last week that these investigations amount to just a kind of

"information war"

, describing the revelations as "a dump where everyone throws things in the hope that it will make an impression on citizens and instill distrust of political leadership." .

This latest Navalny video had almost half a million views an hour and a half after being posted.

In fact, as soon as the video of Navalny was released, on Suzdalskaya Street in Moscow,

the police surrounded the house of the FSB agent

, according to a collaborator of the opposition, present in the vicinity.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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