New investigation names additional FSB officers linked to poisonings of Alexey Navalny
Investigative journalists at the Dossier Center have identified several FSB officers allegedly involved in attempts to poison Alexey Navalny, who accused Russian authorities of trying to poison him on three separate occasions. Two attempts were made in 2020 — during a vacation in Kaliningrad in July (when Yulia Navalnaya was harmed instead) and in Tomsk in August. The Dossier Center concluded that another attempt was made in early 2017 in Kirov during a retrial for alleged embezzlement from a local timber company. Navalny said he experienced an unexplained medical episode aboard a flight at that time.
The Dossier Center discovered that a group of at least seven people accompanied Navalny during the retrial. One of these people was FSB officer Sergei Filippov from the agency’s Second Service, responsible for counterterrorism and constitutional protection.
“The work of this department is concentrated on combating forces that the Russian authorities consider to be a threat to them. Officers from the unit have been involved in all known attempts on opposition figures, providing surveillance and security cover,” the Dossier Center reports.
Starting in January 2017, Filippov’s team expanded to include Alexey Alexandrov (who took part in Navalny’s August 2020 near-fatal poisoning and traveled to Kaliningrad during Yulia Navalnaya’s suspected poisoning), Konstantin Kudryavtsev (who essentially admitted to the attempt in a published phone call with Navalny), Second Service agents Alexander Samofal and Alexey Krivoshchekov, as well as senior officers Valery Sukharev and Roman Mezentsev.
FSB agents tracking Navalny on trips to Kirov operated under false identities using cover passports issued under the names of Nikolai Gorokhov, Vitaly Karpov, Alexander Kozhin, Petr Kotov, and Alexander Artemov. Kotov shadowed Navalny during his campaign trips to Vladivostok, Arkhangelsk, and Astrakhan in the fall of 2017. In November, both Kotov and Artemov monitored him in Irkutsk. Kotov also followed Navalny to Novokuznetsk in December. Gorokhov, as well as another member of the poisoning team, Vladimir Panyaev, also traveled with Kotov and Artemov, according to the Dossier Center.
Journalists found that the cover passport issued to “Petr Kotov” was used by Stanislav Makshakov, who is believed to have directed the assassination attempt on Navalny. The Dossier Center notes that Makshakov, who now serves as director of the FSB’s Institute of Criminalistics, was personally involved in monitoring Navalny, accompanying him on at least seven trips.
In October 2016, Makshakov was joined in Kirov by Mikhail Kuklev, another officer in the FSB’s Institute of Criminalistics. Records show that Kuklev maintained active contact with Makshakov four years later, when Navalny was poisoned in Tomsk in 2020. In March 2024 — a month after Navalny died at a federal prison in the Russian Arctic — Kuklev visited the Altai region, which houses a facility specializing in removing traces of chemical weapons. Members of the FSB’s assassination team had previously visited the facility in 2020. The Dossier Center suggests this March 2024 trip may have been connected to efforts to conceal evidence of the poisoning that finally killed Navalny.
Journalists discovered that Vitaly Senchenko, another likely Second Service officer, used a passport in the name of Vitaly Karpov. He also traveled under his real passport together with Konstantin Kudryavtsev, Alexander Samofal, and Valery Sukharev. Samofal, in turn, used passports under the names Alexander Kozhin and Alexander Artemov.
The Dossier Center also identified several other FSB officers who traveled with individuals already known to have been involved in attempts on Navalny.
Ivan Osipov — one of the FSB operatives involved in the attempt on Navalny’s life in Tomsk — was accompanied by Dmitry Kolodochka during a trip to Volgograd in October 2017. Navalny was not in the city at the time, but he did visit Volgograd in November that year. In August 2018, Osipov went to Velsk in Russia’s Arkhangelsk region, accompanied by FSB agents Dmitry Goloimov and Vladislav Kolychev.
In January 2019, Alexey Alexandrov was accompanied in Yoshkar-Ola by FSB Institute of Criminalistics officer Andrey Khitunov and also by Vadim Lyakhov, whose official place of work is concealed in available records — suggesting, according to the Dossier Center, probable ties to Russia’s state security agencies.