‘You may have been poisoned’ : how an independent Russian journalist became a target
►https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/12/you-may-have-been-poisoned-how-an-independent-russian-journalist-became
Article exemplaire : dès que vous vous intéressés aux affaires des grands ils vous feront sentir leur désapprobation. Ceci va de l’intimidation pure et simple par des avertissements explicites auprès de vos contacts et prend la forme de tentatives d’assassinat dans des cas de plus en plus courants. You have been warned.
Les zones de combat changent de charactère et ne se limitent plus aux « théâtres de guerre » identifiés comme tels.
cf. ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/1016594
Think of Julian who is rotting in a british high security jail. No difference at all. Kill the messenger.
Elena Kostyuchenko - I didn’t want to write this for a long time. I feel disgusted, afraid, ashamed. Even now, I can’t write about everything I know because I have to protect the people who saved my life.
On 24 February 2022, my country attacked Ukraine.
The day of the invasion, I went to Ukraine on assignment from Novaya Gazeta, the independent Russian newspaper where I had been working for 17 years. I crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border on the night of 25 February. Over the course of four weeks, thanks to the incredible support of countless Ukrainians, I was able to file stories from the border, Odesa, Mykolaiv and Kherson. Kherson was under occupation. Getting in and out meant crossing the frontlines twice. In Kherson, Russian soldiers were kidnapping and torturing people. I found people who had survived being tortured. I found the detention centre where the kidnapped people were being held. I learned the names of 44 kidnapped people and the circumstances in which they were taken. I published my article and handed over what I had uncovered to the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office.
The next place I was aiming to report from was the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, where there was active combat and on many days there were no humanitarian corridors. The only occasionally passable road lay through Zaporizhzhia. It often came under fire, and as you approached Mariupol, the Russian checkpoints began. Nevertheless, people travelled this road every day in order to try to rescue their loved ones from the city as it was being destroyed. I decided to travel with them.
On 28 March, I entered Zaporizhzhia. Waiting at a checkpoint, I started getting messages from friends: “Assholes.” “Hang in there.” “Let me know if I can help.” That’s how I found out that Novaya Gazeta had shut down. The paper had received its second warning that year from the state censorship agency, which meant it could lose its licence. I’d been expecting this from the moment of the incursion, but I didn’t know how painful it would be.
I decided to go to Mariupol anyway. I’d publish my piece wherever I could.
I met with volunteers and the people heading to Mariupol to rescue their relatives. I found someone willing to take me in their car despite my having a Russian passport. We arranged to leave on 31 March.
I spent the day before our trip in a hotel, trying to gather my strength. A colleague from Novaya called me and asked if I was going to Mariupol. I was puzzled – only two people from the paper knew I was going to Mariupol: the editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov, and my editor Olga Bobrova. I said: “Yes, I am going tomorrow.” She said: “My sources have got in touch with me. They know that you’re going to Mariupol. They say that the Kadyrovites have orders to find you.” The Kadyrovites, a Chechen subdivision of the Russian national guard, were actively engaged in the fighting around Mariupol – they manned the checkpoints. My colleague said: “They’re not planning to hold you. They are going to kill you. It’s been approved.”
It was like running into a wall. I went deaf; everything went white. I said: “I don’t believe you.” She said: “That’s what I told them, too – that I didn’t believe them. Then they played me a recording of you talking to someone about Mariupol, planning your trip. I recognised your voice.”
She hung up; I sat down on the bed. I didn’t think anything, I just sat.
Forty minutes later, my source from Ukrainian military reconnaissance called. He said: “We have information that an assassination of a female journalist from Novaya Gazeta is being organised in Ukraine. Your description has been sent to every Russian checkpoint.”
An hour later, Muratov called me. He said: “You have to leave Ukraine this minute.”
But I couldn’t make myself leave.
The following morning, I woke up to messages from an editor at Novaya. The Russian prosecutor general’s office and the Russian media regulator, Roskomnadzor, had demanded they take my reporting from Ukraine down from their website or else the site would be blocked. Novaya complied. Somehow this was what crushed me. I started crying and couldn’t stop. Then rage came in place of the tears, and it filled my entire being.
I tried to find another way into Mariupol, bypassing the Russian checkpoints. But there was active combat everywhere. The only road was through Zaporizhzhia, and they were waiting for me on that road. In the end the thing that stopped me was thinking what would happen to the person who agreed to take me in their car. If I got killed, they wouldn’t be spared.
A Ukrainian soldier near Mykolaiv, Ukraine in March 2022, from where Kostyuchenko did some reporting at the time. Photograph: Scott Peterson/Getty Images
On the night of 1 April, I left Ukraine.
I left in a very bad state. I had lice, mumps and PTSD. My friends took me in; they passed me from hand to hand. My girlfriend Yana came from Russia and took care of me, made sure I was eating and sleeping. My plan was to get better, finish the book I was writing and go back to Russia. All of my work, my entire life, my mother and sister – they are all there. The worse the news from home got, the more I felt like I needed to be there.
On the evening of 28 April, Muratov called me. He spoke in a very gentle voice. He said: “I know that you want to come home. But you cannot go back to Russia. They will kill you.”
I hung up the phone and started screaming. I stood in the street and screamed.
A month later, we were able to meet. Muratov said: “They’ll make it look like a hate crime. The people on the right hate lesbians.” By that stage I was working on my book. I wrote, and only thought about what I was writing. There wasn’t room for anything else in my head. Those were the best days.
At the end of September, I got in touch with Muratov again. I asked him to find out if I could return to Russia. He called me back several days later. “No. No. No.”
I found an apartment in Berlin and moved there. On 29 September, I began working for the website Meduza. We decided that my first reporting trip would be to Iran. I’d been there before, and I found people who would help me, got a visa, bought clothes. We decided that after Iran, I would go to Ukraine. Meduza asked me to submit the paperwork for a Ukrainian visa before I left.
I couldn’t fill out an application or make an appointment at the Ukrainian embassy on their website – it wouldn’t let me. The Ukrainian ministry of foreign affairs hotline told me their website was being attacked by hackers, so it was impossible to deal with my request for now. I started looking for contacts within the embassy. I got someone to agree to see me in their consulate in Munich. I have to admit that I corresponded about my trip to Munich over Facebook Messenger. It’s not secure, and I knew that. But I wasn’t in Russia – I was in Germany. I didn’t even think about the basic tenets of my security, the protocols I’d been following for years.
On the evening of 17 October, I booked a seat on an overnight train to Munich. On the train I took off my shoes, curled up on the seat and slept. People walked past me; they knocked into my feet. I kept sleeping.
When I arrived in Munich, I went to meet my friend, tried to get some sleep, then went to the embassy. The staff questioned me, asking what I was planning to do in Ukraine. They took my documents, but I still wasn’t able to apply for a visa – there were problems with their internal system. They said I should come back another day.
My friend picked me up at the embassy and we went to get lunch. We sat outside at a restaurant. While we were sitting there, two different groups of her acquaintances happened to run into us. They came up to our table – there was a man, and then two women. I thought: “What a small town Munich is. It really seems like everyone knows each other.” I went to the bathroom, still thinking about my visa.
Then my friend took me to the train station. As we approached it, she said: “Listen, I have to tell you: you smell bad. Let me find you some deodorant.” I remember I was shocked by what she said – she’s a very tactful person and she would have never said anything if I hadn’t actually smelled terrible. When I got on the train, I found my seat and immediately went to the bathroom. I wet some paper towels and started wiping myself off with them. I was covered in sweat. The sweat smelled strong and strange, like rotten fruit.
I sat down and started reading the manuscript of my book. After a while, I realised that I was just reading the same paragraph over and over. My head ached. I’d had Covid three weeks earlier. I thought: “Do I really have it again?” I called Yana. I said: “I feel unwell. I hope it’s not Covid – how will I go to Iran if it is?” I tried to get back to the book, but I was feeling worse. My headache got so bad I couldn’t look at things any more. I kept sweating. I went back to the bathroom and wiped myself off again.
When I got out at the train station, I couldn’t figure out how to get home. I knew that I needed to transfer to the subway but I couldn’t figure out how. I considered going outside and calling a cab, but the very thought of having to find my location on the map in the app terrified me. I looked for the right entrance to the subway for a long time. When I finally got there, I burst into tears – I didn’t know what direction I was supposed to go in. Other passengers helped me.
The walk home from the subway is five minutes. It took much longer. Every few steps, I had to put my bag down – it seemed unbearably heavy – and rest. On the stairs I got short of breath. I thought to myself: “This fucking Covid has really messed me up.” As soon as I got home, I went to sleep.
I was woken up by a pain in my stomach. It was strange – very strong but not sharp, it came and went as though being turned on and off. I tried to sit up but I had to lie back down. I felt so dizzy – it was like the room was spinning. With every rotation, I grew more nauseous. I got to the bathroom, where I threw up.
I kept corresponding with the Iranians. I cried. It was supposed to be my first trip for my new job, and now this. The pain in my stomach kept getting worse. It was painful to even touch the skin. I barely slept those first few nights – as soon as I drifted off, I would be woken up by the pain. My head kept spinning whenever I sat down or got up.
On the third day, it became clear that I was not going anywhere, and that whatever I had wasn’t Covid.
It isn’t easy to see a doctor in Berlin. I was only able to get an appointment on 28 October, 10 days after I became ill. It was a regular clinic in my neighbourhood. The doctors – there were two of them – both immediately said that I had long Covid: “It can go on for up to six months. If you don’t feel better six months from now, come back.” But they did an ultrasound: all clear. They tapped on my stomach. I got them to do some blood tests. I came out of the clinic feeling comforted – it was nothing, I’d get better soon.
The blood tests came back bad. The levels of ALT and AST (alanine and aspartate aminotransferase) enzymes in my liver were five times above normal. They tested my urine. There was blood in it. The doctors stopped joking around. I was referred to a specialist. She said it was most likely viral hepatitis. “We’ll figure out which one it is and then treat it,” she said.
The hepatitis tests came back negative.
My symptoms kept changing. My stomach hurt less and I got less dizzy. But I was totally weak. My face started swelling, and then my fingers. I barely managed to take my rings off, and could not get them back on again. My fingers looked like sausages. Then my feet started swelling. The swelling kept getting worse – I lost sight of my chin, my face was no longer my face. When I looked in the mirror, it took me a moment to recognise myself. Sometimes my heart would start racing. Sometimes my palms and the bottoms of my feet would start to burn, turning red and shiny.
Everything was exhausting. It was hard to go down the stairs. Sometimes Yana and I would go out for 15 minutes, half an hour, and I would get so tired that I’d have to go home. I stopped being able to sleep, but it was not about the pain. It was as though my brain had forgotten how to fall asleep. I’d lie there for hours trying not to wake up Yana, looking up at the ceiling and wondering what was wrong with me.
My hepatic enzyme levels kept rising. There was still blood in my urine. I kept going to doctors. The doctors would come up with theories, test them, come up with new ones: autoimmune diseases, acute complicated pyelonephritis, systemic diseases.
Meduza put me in touch with a doctor they trusted. The doctor decided to retest me for hepatitis. The tests came back negative. While I was heading home, he wrote to me: “Is it possible that you have been poisoned?” I replied: “No, I am not that dangerous.”
I told Yana; we laughed. She said: “Oh yeah, the simplest explanation. She must have been poisoned – she is a Russian journalist.”
On 12 December, I went back to my local doctor. I got a new round of tests, and the results had got worse: my ALT was seven times above normal. We sat in her office. She said nothing, going through her papers. Then she said: “Elena, there are two theories left. The first one is that the antidepressants you’re on may have suddenly started working aberrantly. But you recently changed medications, and your symptoms and test results haven’t changed. That’s why we have a second theory. Please try to stay calm. You may have been poisoned.”
I laughed. The doctor stayed silent. I said: “That’s impossible.” She said: “We’ve ruled out all other options. I’m sorry. You need to go to the toxicology department at Charité [the university hospital].”
I spent the next three days lying in bed and thinking. I don’t remember what I was thinking about. Yana says that the first day I said it was stupid and that the doctors had made a mistake – it was just that they couldn’t diagnose what what wrong with me and didn’t want to run any more tests. Then I stopped talking. Then I got in touch with Meduza and we started trying to figure out what to do next.
In order to get blood tests done for poisoning, you have to go to the police. So I did. From the police station, they sent me straight to the hospital. The police officers turned up at the hospital to talk to me and the doctors.
My first session was with the Berlin criminal police and lasted nine hours. They wanted to know everything: what I was working on, and planning to work on, who I had been in contact with in Ukraine, which colleagues I was in contact with now. I had to reconstruct 17 and 18 October minute by minute.
My clothes and apartment were checked for radiation. My body, too. They took the clothes I’d travelled to Munich with. Then the police did a “safety check” of my apartment. An officer asked me: “Why are your blinds open? You could easily be shot from the balcony across the way.” The police told me I needed to follow new safety protocols. Like what? “Move house. Take different routes home. Don’t get cabs directly to your destination; get out a block away. Wear sunglasses.” “That’s it?” “Well, it will all help your chances.”
The police officers were angry at me. They didn’t show it, but after the third round of questioning, we started talking. The senior detective had run the investigation into the killing of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a former Chechen field commander, who had been shot in central Berlin in 2019. The killer was quickly caught thanks to eyewitnesses and security camera footage. His passport said he was Vadim Sokolov, but journalists and police established that his real name was Vadim Krasikov and that he had ties to the FSB security service. He received a life sentence in Germany for murder “on the orders of the Russian government, being a part of the Russian law enforcement apparatus”. The judge called what happened “state terrorism”. In 2022, Russia filed two separate requests to include Krasikov on the list of prisoners up for exchange, but Germany refused.
The same senior detective had in 2018 investigated the poisoning of Petr Verzilov, the publisher of Mediazona and a member of Pussy Riot. He had been taken to Charité from Moscow on a private plane, convulsing and delirious. Verzilov’s friends found that the Berlin hospital was under surveillance by the Russians. The police offered Verzilov protection and opened an investigation. “And we weren’t able to establish anything. Not even the substance used.”
Elena Kostyuchenko, smiling slightly and wearing a buttoned silk blouse and three necklaces, sits crosslegged on a hospital bed next to a monitor, with a medical band on her head and holding up an oxygen monitor on her finger
Kostyuchenko at the Charité hospital in December 2022 after her suspected poisoning. Photograph: Elena Kostyuchenko/Instagram
“How come?”
“Because it’s impossible to ask a lab: ‘Was this person poisoned?’ You can only ask if there was a specific substance present in their body. And there are thousands of substances. That’s why it’s such a popular means of assassination.
“We can’t understand why it took you this long to come to us. You should have called the police right away, as soon as you felt sick on the train. We would have met you at the station.”
“But I didn’t think I’d been poisoned. I’m still not sure.”
“Why didn’t you think so?”
“It seemed crazy to me. And I’m in Europe.”
“So what?”
“I felt like I was safe.”
“That is what drives us crazy,” the detective said. “You come here and act like you’re on holiday. Like this is some paradise. It doesn’t even occur to you to keep yourself safe. We have political killings here. The Russian special services are active in Germany. Your carelessness, yours and your colleagues, knows no bounds.”
I was not kept informed of the progress of the investigation.
On 2 April, at a journalism conference, I was approached by Roman Dobrokhotov, editor-in-chief of the Insider, an independent Russia-focused news website. He took me aside. “Lena, I have a personal question. But first I need to tell you something. Christo Grozev from Bellingcat and I have been investigating a series of poisonings in Europe. All the known targets are female Russian journalists. I want to ask you: you haven’t written anything for a long time – is it because you’ve been sick?”
And I told him what I am telling you now.
On 2 May, I got a letter from the Berlin prosecutor general’s office telling me that the investigation into my attempted assassination had been closed. The police had not found “any indication” that there had been an attempt to kill me. “Blood test results do not conclusively indicate poisoning,” it said.
The doctors speaking to the Insider and Bellingcat said that the most likely explanation for what had happened to me was that I’d been poisoned with a chloroorganic compound. I passed this information on to the police. On 21 July, the prosecutor’s office reopened the case.
How am I now? The pain, nausea and swelling have gone. I still have no energy. I left Meduza – I am a long way away from being able to return to the field. Right now I can work three hours a day. This keeps increasing, but slowly. There are days when I can’t do anything. I lie there and try not to hate myself.
While I was writing this, I strove to establish the chronology of events, and to remember all the important details. But which details are really important? Last November, a friend of mine came to Berlin. He is a publisher – not an activist, not a journalist, not a politician. He came over and he was horrified at the state I was in. He said: “Do you understand that you may have been poisoned? Have you talked to your doctors about that?” I said: “I haven’t and I am not going to – that’s stupid.” I said: “Don’t try to infect me with your paranoia.”
I had lied to the police when I told them the idea of being poisoned “seemed crazy” to me – it didn’t. During my time at Novaya Gazeta, four of my colleagues were killed. I organised the funeral of journalist Mikhail Beketov. He’d been a friend. I knew that journalists got murdered. But I did not want to believe that they could kill me. I was protected from this thought by revulsion, shame and exhaustion. It disgusted me to think that there were people who wanted me dead. I was ashamed to talk about it. Even with loved ones, let alone the police. And I knew how exhausted I was, how little strength I had left, and that I wouldn’t be able to go on the run again.
My book I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country is coming out in October. It is about how Russia descended into fascism. It is coming out in several languages simultaneously. The police believe it might become a trigger – that the people who tried to kill me in Ukraine, and possibly in Germany, will try again.
I want to live.
That’s why I’m writing this.
I also want my colleagues and friends, activists and political refugees currently living abroad to be careful – more careful than I have been. We are not safe, and we will not be safe, until there is regime change in Russia. The work we do could help to bring this regime down, and it is defending itself.
If you are suddenly ill, please do not discount the possibility that you may have been poisoned. Tell your doctors. Fight for yourself. And if it’s already happened to you, please make contact with the investigative teams at the Insider or Bellingcat. They are looking for the people who are trying to kill us.