IT seems archaic, but as Russia’s opposition leader Alexei Navalny fights for life in hospital with suspected poisoning, he is far from the first Russian critic in recent times to fall victim to such a plot.

 

How is Navalny?

The vocal opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin was taken ill during a Moscow-bound flight and a picture online - apparently taken at Tomsk airport - showed him drinking from a cup. His team believe his tea was poisoned. Critically ill, he was transferred from Siberia to Berlin for treatment, arriving on Saturday after Russian doctors initially resisted attempts to move him.

 

There have been dozens of similar incidents?

This case is the latest in a long line of unusual assassination plots connected to Russia, ranging from the use of poisoned ricin darts fired from an umbrella, to radioactive polonium dropped in a teapot at a London hotel.

 

A journalist was killed?

Investigative journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, wrote extensively about politics in Russia and covered abuses by Russian and pro-Moscow Chechen forces fighting separatists in Chechnya. In 2004, she fell violently ill after drinking tea given to her by a flight attendant on Russian airlines Aeroflot. She survived, but two years later, aged 48, she was was shot to death outside her Moscow apartment building.

 

Litvinenko?

Former spy, Alexander Litvinenko, 43, was killed in 2006. He had been an officer with the Federal Security Service in Russia, but fled to the UK where he became a vocal opponent of the Kremlin. He was killed by radioactive polonium-210, believed to have been slipped into his tea. A “hot” teapot was found at London’s Millennium Hotel with an off-the-charts radioactive reading. A public inquiry into his death in 2016 concluded that Putin 'probably' approved his assassination.

 

It’s not a new phenomenon?

Back in 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident writer, was waiting for a bus on London’s Waterloo Bridge when he was jabbed in the back of the leg by a suspected agent of the KGB (Russia’s former state security agency) who fired a deadly ricin pellet from a specially constructed umbrella weapon. Years later, a KGB defector confirmed that the KGB arranged the hit, even presenting the Bulgarian assassin with alternatives such as a poisonous jelly to smear on Markov's skin. 

 

Skripals?

In the most renowned case of recent times, former Moscow spy and double agent for the UK’s intelligence services, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Julia, were poisoned in their new home of Salisbury. The pair were found collapsed on a bench in the town in March 2018 and it emerged traces of the nerve agent Novichok were on the front door handle of their home. They are now said to be living abroad with new identities.

 

What has Putin said?

Later in 2018, Putin called Sergei Skripal a “scumbag” and a “traitor” and angrily denied allegations that the Kremlin ordered his poisoning. Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has wished Navalny a “speedy recovery” and insisted that there is no evidence the politician was poisoned, adding that “assumptions are only assumptions”.