Thread by @bellingcat

New — Popular Russian poet, Dmitry Bykov was tracked by the same squad of FSB operatives that tailed Alexey Navalny prior to his poisoning, including shortly before he fell seriously ill from a sudden mysterious illness.
bellingcat.com/news/2021/06/0…

Bykov fell ill on a flight in 2019 with symptoms similar to those experienced by Navalny. On that trip, and multiple previous trips, Bykov was followed by FSB operatives involved with the poisoning of @Navalny.

Dmitry Bykov is a well-known Russian writer, poet and journalist. Renowned as a literary critic, educator and a satirist, he often churns out satirical poems that provide acerbic social commentary on current events and on the political regime.

He is an active opposition activist, taking regular part in and co-organising anti-government protests. In a primary election for an opposition coordination council in 2012, Bykov received the second-most number of votes after Alexey Navalny.

The first documentary evidence of Bykov being tailed by FSB officers from the cross-functional poisoning team is from 20 May 2018, just under a year before his presumed poisoning.

At 9:35 am on the morning of that day, Bykov flew from Moscow to Ufa. He was visiting the city to deliver a lecture to children & their parents on the importance of the children’s book character Karlsson-on-the-Roof as a disruptive character who helps build integrity in children.

Despite the non-subversive goals of this trip, 2 members of the FSB’s anti-extremism department shadowed Bykov to Ufa on the same flight. These were Vladimir Paniaev, travelling under his real name, & Valery Sukharev, who traveled under his cover identity as Nikolay Gorokhov.

Using flight travel data we were able to establish a significant number of journeys where Bykov's journey was shadowed by the two men.

On 11 April 2019 Bykov hosted his regular talk show on the Echo of Moscow radio station. He talked about his “political jokes” lecture in Rostov, and about his plans to expand on that topic in his upcoming lecture tour to Siberia.

The next day, 12 April, two FSB officers – Sukharev’s travel partner Vladimir Paniaev from the anti-extremism department and Ivan Osipov, a medic from the Criminalistics Institute – booked tickets on the same flight to Novosibirsk that same evening at 20:30.

By this time, they would have known that Bykov planned to fly to Novosibirsk later that night for the first leg of his three-city Siberian lecture circuit.

Notably, both of these FSB operatives flew under their cover identities on this trip – “Vladimir Alexeev” & “Ivan Spirodonov”, respectively. This was the first trip Paniaev would take under his cover persona while tailing Dmitry Bykov, the last use his 2017 shadowing of @Navalny.

The Aeroflot SU1548 flight arrived in the Siberian city at 4:40 am the next morning. Bykov arrived three and a half hours later, at 9:05 am.

Once they landed in Novosibirsk, Dmitry Bykov and his wife Ekaterina Kevkhishvili made their way into town and checked into the downtown Domina Hotel. At around 1:00 pm they left the hotel room and walked to the Pobeda cinema hall, a 10 minute walk from the hotel.

On that afternoon, Bykov had been scheduled to be the honorary reader in the Total Dictant event taking place at the hall – an annual spelling contest that involves journalists and authors reading long literary texts, while the general public tests their orthographic skills.

The actual Total Dictant event takes one hour of net reading time, and typically about two hours in total. The event was streamed online, allowing users to remotely follow the reading. totaldict.ru/news/news/el-i…

Thus, it was clear from the beginning that Bykov – and his wife who accompanied him to all events – would not return to the hotel for at least the duration of the event. In fact, the couple did not return to their hotel room until after 6:00 pm.

Just after midnight local time, FSB’s Paniaev and Osipov simultaneously made reservations for a flight from Novosibirsk to Moscow the next morning at 10:05 am local time.

On the next day, 14 April, Dmitry and Ekaterina spent most of their time away from the Domina hotel. On 15 April they flew onward to Ekaterinburg, and after a Bykov lecture in the Urals city that afternoon, the two prepared for their final leg of the lecture tour, to Ufa.

On 16 April Dmitry and Ekaterina woke up at about 8:30 am. They had breakfast with Evgeny Reusmann, another opposition activist, and just after 10 am they took a taxi to the airport. They had arrived by 10:25 am, just an hour before the departure.

Dmitry did not drink or eat anything at the airport, and after security formalities headed straight to the departures area. On the way to the gate, just before 11 am, and two-and-a-half hours after he woke up and put on his new set of clothes, Bykov felt nauseous.

Despite these early symptoms, Dmitry Bykov proceeded to board the plane. During the plane’s ascent to cruising altitude, he began vomiting, his breathing became heavy and his skin was covered with large drops of perspiration.

In his own recollections, corroborated by Ekaterina, his mind “switched on and off” – he would periodically shut his eyes and stoop his head, but would not fully lose consciousness, and continued to react to her speech.

More details of the poisoning can be found in the article, but the symptoms clearly matched to the experience of Alexey Navalny when he was poisoned in August 2020. Things then began to get even stranger.

While Bykov was being treated at the local hospital his colleagues at Novaya Gazeta worked to arrange a medavac flight for Bykov to a specialized neurological clinic in Moscow, the Burdenko Institute.

However, less than an hour before the Yakovlev evacuation plane reached Ufa, the pilot, via air dispatchers, received an instruction from Russia’s Health Ministry to “turn the plane around and return to Moscow”.

At this point Bykov's Novaya Gazeta colleagues initiated a string of hectic calls, including to numbers of Kremlin higher-ups. In the end someone did instruct the pilot to proceed to Ufa and pick up the patient.

Doctors to whom Bellingcat and the Insider showed Bykov’s epicrisis (with his permission) confirmed that the symptoms displayed by Bykov had significant overlaps with those of Alexey Navalny, largely made public via a detailed case study in the Lancet. thelancet.com/journals/lance…

Doctors who treated Bykov never identified the cause of the poisoning, and treated him purely symptomatically. As a precaution against a possible (but not identified) bacterial infection, he was given broad-action antibiotics.

After a few days in a coma, Bykov regained consciousness, but remained in a state of disorientation – similar to that observed in Navalny’s case in the days after he came to.

Back in April 2019, the doctors treating Bykov at the Butenko Institute could not agree on a consensual diagnosis. The hypothesis for organophosphate poisoning could not be tested.

In the absence of early comprehensive tests results and a deeper understanding of the context, Butenko Institute doctors chose to write the incident off as an unidentified food poisoning accompanied by acute ketoacidosis linked to a latent diabetic condition.

Doctors now agree, an endogenic cause for the ketoacidosis would have resulted in much longer effects on the body – yet, Bykov, like Navalny, was able to shed off the severe symptoms in a relatively short time, pointing to an exogenous source of the clinical condition.

This latest assassination attempt, linked to the same FSB assassination team that targeted Navalny, is the 5th case we've reported since our Navalny investigation. In January we reported on how 3 Russian activists had been targeted by the same team bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

In February, we detailed the targeting of Vladimir Kara-Murza, a close ally of Boris Nemstov, who twice fell into a coma while being targeted by the same FSB team bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

The latest investigation expands the scope of FSB assassinations beyond the type of political figures targeted in previous assassination attempts. Currently we are aware of multiple additional cases that we will report on in the future bellingcat.com/news/2021/06/0…

To end, a disturbing story we uncovered during the investigation.