Russian riot police lead a charge on demonstrators protesting the arrest of Alexei Navalny – hero of the democracy movement – following his return from Germany, after his first poisoning with the banned chemical Novichok in 2021. (Photo by Olga MALTSEVA / AFP) (Photo by OLGA MALTSEVA/AFP via Getty Images)

AFP via Getty Images

Russia’s “theatrical assassinations” of Vladimir Putin’s critics, even those who made it to seeming sanctuary in the United Kingdom, via exotic state-concocted poisons could presage the mass deployment of chemical weapons by Putin’s armies in a future war with NATO, says an eminent scholar at King’s College London.

Elena Grossfeld, a world-leading expert on Russia’s shadow war on the West, including the killing of democrats and defectors stretching from Siberian prison camps to the British capital by Moscow’s intelligence operatives, says these ongoing attacks could one day morph into chemical assaults on NATO troops.

A scholar at the prestigious King’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence, Grossfeld told me in an interview that across the blogs of fervent Kremlin nationalists and “Russian propagandists, they are already in a war with NATO.”

The recent joint finding by five European governments, of the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands, that Russian democratic torchbearer Alexei Navalny was assassinated via a poison banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention underscores Moscow’s contempt for international treaties constraining its weapons of war or its macabre statecraft of extrajudicial killings.

The assassination of Putin’s foes, whether in Britain or inside Russia, via internationally prohibited chemical weaponry, “is a form of statecraft, conducted by intelligence organizations on behalf of the state,” Grossfeld says.

Russia’s use of banned chemical weapons along Ukraine battlefronts, and dispatch of poison-armed hit squads transnationally, all continue the Kremlin’s assaults on the UN-backed world order based on rule of law.

Russia’s flouting of treaties like the Chemical Weapons Convention could escalate ahead, during any full-scale war with the West.

“I don’t believe that in case of full on war with NATO Russia will care about conventions it repeatedly ignored before,” Grossfeld says.

“In case of war with NATO,” she adds, Russian deployment of chemical munitions could explode.

In a doctoral dissertation titled “The Strategic Culture of KGB and its Legacy,” Grossfeld traced a century of Russian state-ordered assassinations, starting after the communist revolution of 1917, spiking first under Joseph Stalin, and then again during Putin’s reign.

Stalin orchestrated the macabre murder of his onetime rival, the Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, a continent away in Mexico, while executing his fellow revolutionaries across the Soviet Union.

These days, while Kremlin-dispatched assassins still sometimes use pistols to target “enemies of the state” like political reformists and journalists calling for a post-Putin democracy, the most prominent critics of Russia’s Neo-Tsar are subjected to poisons that are held only inside the highest rings of power, including the president and his closest military and security lieutenants.

Using specialized state-perfected poisons, like the extreme toxin Novichok developed by Soviet weapons designers, or the radioactive polonium that can only be produced inside a nuclear reactor, sends out a powerful message that the Kremlin has hand-crafted this instrument of terror to Russian dissidents, and to government leaders around the world.

“Poisoning in general is a particularly frightening and intimidating form of assassination,” Grossfeld says.

“I think the majority of Russians are terrified of joining protests regardless of the method of assassination, and repression within Russia is quite effective, but of course those theatrics add on.”

“Russian, and before that the Soviet intelligence in certain periods, did indeed carry out assassinations worldwide.”

Killings by Kremlin operatives skyrocketed under Putin, who outdid all of his Soviet predecessors in lethally targeting his critics.

The most theatrical hits, with the most bizarre poisons, she says, are reserved for “those that are considered traitors,” like the former Russian intelligence agents Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal, who both found asylum in the UK.

Litvinenko died in agony after being poisoned in London with radioactive polonium, with the British government reporting, following a years-long investigation, that the Kremlin-orchestrated assassination was probably personally approved by President Putin, a former KGB mastermind.

The coalition of European nations that investigated Alexei Navalny’s death, via bio-samples smuggled out of Russia, stated two weeks ago that: “The UK, Sweden, France, Germany and The Netherlands are confident that Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a lethal toxin.”

“Navalny died while held in prison, meaning Russia had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this poison to him.”

“Russia’s repeated disregard for international law and the Chemical Weapons Convention is clear,” they added.

In the earlier Novichok poisonings of Navalny, and before him Sergei Skripal, they added, “only the Russian state had the combined means, motive and disregard for international law to carry out the attacks.”

“These latest findings once again underline the need to hold Russia accountable for its repeated violations of the Chemical Weapons Convention.”

“We and our partners,” they vowed, “will make use of all policy levers at our disposal to continue to hold Russia to account.”

During our interview, scholar Grossfeld told me “the operatives in charge of developing and executing the assassinations should be named and sanctioned.”

Yet she added that any prosecution of Vladimir Putin would depend on regime change in Russia.

Yulia Navalnaya, Alexei Navalny’s wife and now head of the Russian democracy movement in exile, said in a powerful video recorded on the sidelines of the just-ended Munich Security Conference that the leaders of the five-power European coalition had personally delivered their finding that her martyred husband had been murdered with a rare banned poison.

“I will do everything in my power to fight for change in Russia,” she vowed. “The rule of thieves and murderers must end.”

“Alexei devoted his life to this. He died fighting for the truth.”

“I promised that I would continue his fight. I promised that the truth would be revealed.”

“And I will do everything to ensure that Putin and everyone involved are held accountable.”

Meanwhile, the Netherlands-based International Criminal Court has already prepared an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin on charges of crimes against humanity committed during his invasion of Ukraine.

One of the top American scholars on war crimes, and on the International Criminal Court, told me in an earlier interview that if Russia’s long-persecuted democrats somehow managed to gain power – perhaps the liberal coalition headed by Yulia Navalnaya – the Kremlin’s new leaders could hand Putin and his generals over to the ICC for trial.