Inside the suspected poisoning of Roman Abramovich

Roman Abramovich suffered symptoms of a suspected poisoning during peace talks on the Ukraine-Belarus border earlier this month, sources close to the Russian billionaire have claimed.

The ultra-rich owner of Chelsea Football Club experienced “red eyes, constant and painful tearing, and peeling skin” on his face and hands, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) said. Ukrainian MP Rustem Umerov and another negotiator were also affected by the alleged attack.

Sources close to Abramovich, who has “shuttled between Moscow, Belarus and other negotiating venues since Russia invaded Ukraine”, told the paper that he “was blinded for a few hours and later had trouble eating”.

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Russian saboteurs

The attack on Abramovich and others involved in talks to bring the conflict in Ukraine is said to have taken place on 3 March. Sources close to the oligarch said his condition has since improved. He was pictured last week in the VIP lounge of an Israeli airport.

Individuals with knowledge of the suspected poisoning told the WSJ that it was being blamed “on hard-liners in Moscow who they said wanted to sabotage talks to end the war”. A source close to Abramovich said it was “not clear” who was behind the attack.

The investigation into Abramovich’s mysterious symptoms was spearheaded by Christo Grozev, the lead Russia investigator at Bellingcat who first revealed that a team of Kremlin agents poisoned Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny with a nerve agent in 2020.

It was discovered during the enquiries that the three individuals that later developed symptoms consistent with poisoning had consumed “only chocolate and water in the hours before the symptoms appeared”, the WSJ reported.

Grozev told the paper that he had seen images of the oligarch following the attack. But “examinations of the affected individuals couldn’t be arranged” as “these people were in a hurry to get to Istanbul” following the talks, the WSJ added.

That Abramovich survived the chemical attack suggests that the poisoning was “not intended to kill” the oligarch, Grozev said, adding: “It was just a warning.”

Unclear role

The attack on Abramovich, who has long denied having close ties to the Kremlin, has “cast light” on his “reported role as a broker in talks between Ukraine and Russia”, the BBC said. His spokesperson has previously stated that his influence is “limited”.

Last week, the WSJ separately revealed that Volodymyr Zelenskyy personally requested that the Biden administration not sanction Abramovich. The paper said that the Ukrainian president explained to his US counterpart in a call that Abramovich could “​​prove important as a go-between with Russia in helping to negotiate peace”.

“Several Ukrainian officials and officials from other Western governments” were said to be “sceptical about how deeply Abramovich is involved in the peace talks”, the paper added. The Ukrainian president���s office refused to comment on his role.

“Inevitably people will be wondering if this was the work of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, who Britain concluded was behind the Novichok Salisbury poisoning in 2018,” said BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner.

“But we have no idea who did it,” he added. “There is no claim of responsibility.”

‘Century-old fascination’

Just as doubt remains over Abramovich’s involvement and influence in the effort to end the war, the “truth may never be known about [the] latest ‘Russian poisoning’”, said The Guardian’s defence and security editor Dan Sabbagh.

“The plot, in its initial telling, appears bizarre,” he said, “but the Kremlin has enough form in this area for poisoning to be a plausible cause, a hundred-year history that dates back to the founding of Moscow’s Lab X poisoning laboratory by Vladimir Lenin in 1921.”

It is also known that the goal of such attacks is not “always to kill”, he added. “Labour MP Chris Bryant revealed he fell violently ill with food poisoning during an official trip to Russia in 2009, when he was a junior Foreign Office minister.”

Bryant later stated publicly that his symptoms were a result of “​​standard irritants meted out by the FSB to ‘difficult’ visitors”.

Chemical attacks were “one of the favoured methods of assassination for the KGB, the successor to the NKVD, offering the opportunity to flee the scene of the crime”, said The Times. And after Putin’s “ascension to power”, such attacks “came back into fashion”.

As well as the attacks on Navalny and the poisoning on British soil in Salisbury, Viktor Yushchenko, the former president of Ukraine, was disfigured when he was poisoned with dioxin in 2004, and Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko died after being targeted with radionuclide polonium-210 in 2006 while living in London.

While the full facts may never be known, Russia has a “century-old fascination with deadly toxins”, the paper added. Abramovich may therefore be “the latest victim in Russia’s long history” of chemical attacks.