Novichok Nerve Agent Poisoning

The palace is just one event. Lots more money gets stolen not for the sake of building a palace but enriching few individuals in various other ways.

It is a hyperbole indeed and thank you for the detailed breakdown. The truth is, if not 'nearly all', it's certainly a very sizable portion of the tax budget that gets stolen. Enjoyed this video on the topic from one politician in Moscow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMWyzudWioY

Also on the topic of breakdowns that you cited, I have hard time believing things that get written in these 'official reports'. There are many ways to hide where money actually gets spent. This also gets talked about in the above video.

That extracted wealth should flow back into the country and translate into well-being of your citizens.

Not just continue lining the pockets of the president's closest friends.

I'd rather have our military strong on the borders of our country and outside of it. Instead of having that military power used to strong-arm Russian citizens (and yes, the opposition is among them).

I think that specific agent was a chemist who was in charge of applying the poison (which is apparently so dangerous that experts have to do it). He likely didn’t get the full GRU/FSB training.

A fish rots from the head. These GRU/FSB boys enjoy complete immunity from prosecution, why would they stay professional if only loyalty is rewarded?

I think when you have so many FSB agents it is hard to maintain the quality.

See for example here, where a bunch of FSB agent graduates decided to celebrate in the open: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/11/world/geliki-russia-fsb-j...

Consider the assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabbouh. It was intended to look like a natural death, without raising suspicions. To do this, they snuck into his hotel room, injected him with a muscle relaxant, then suffocated him. It took local authorities ten days to realize it was actually a murder. They did eventually figure it out, but I don't think it's hard to imagine intelligence agencies have done similar things before and gotten away with it. In the case of Litvinenko, authorities were pretty sure he'd been poisoned from the onset. The poisoning drew a whole lot of attention that Russia probably could have avoided if they intended to be subtle.

The paper discusses this a bit:

Identification of an individual organophosphorus compound is a complex and time-consuming process. [9] In fact, ascertaining the involvement of a novichok agent and its biotransformation products in this case was only achieved several days after establishing the diagnosis of cholinesterase inhibitor poisoning and did not affecttherapeutic decisions.Organophosphorus nerve agents exert the same mechanism of action as do organophosphorus pesti-cides (ie, inhibition of acetylcholinesterase) and clinical management is largely based on experience with organo-phosphorus pesticide poisonings, which still pose a major health burden in southeast Asia, with more than 100000 deaths per year. [10] Clinical diagnosis of organophosphorus poisoning should be straightforward.

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[9] John H, van der Schans MJ, Koller M, et al. Fatal sarin poisoning in Syria 2013: forensic verification within an international laboratory network. Forensic Toxicol 2018; 36: 61–71.

[10] Mew EJ, Padmanathan P, Konradsen F, et al. The global burden of fatal self-poisoning with pesticides 2006–15: systematic review. J Affect Disord 2017; 219: 93–104.

That was just one example.

My point is that there are not other users of Novichok and using Polonium is also extremely rare. Ricin is relatively easy to get. They continue using these techniques for high valued targets who are immediately tested for these two.

Security agencies of democratic regimes (that happen to be marginally accountable to the people elected) don't have the ability to synthesize known molecules and use them for political purposes? They don't have the ability to lie under the piercing eyes of lady liberty? That's sort of what they exist for.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/04/cia-director-used-fake...

Sure, here's an example of the CIA flatly lying about a separate novichok incident.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/04/cia-director-used-fake...

Well, yes and no. Like "The traces were found in passenger jets[44][45] BA875 and BA873 from Moscow to Heathrow"

Damn, this is worth a read. Among many other things, the day after poisoning his body temperature was 34 deg C (!) and heart rate only 44 bpm. The poor guy was on a ventilator for 24 days, and would almost certainly have died if not mechanically ventilated within 2 hours. It's downright astonishing that he recovered as well as he did.

How many people would willingly return to the lion's den where this happened to them?

Well if you watch that carefully, you'd see that Navalny pushing hard his version of events on that other guy, who pretty much responds mostly "I don't know much".

Now imagine a situation that bellingcat picked up this poor guy, who might be nothing but part of surveillance team and carefully staged this phone record to create an impression that the guy is some sort of a hitman.

In the West people might think that Navalny is a prominent opposition hero, but in reality he's known to be a some sort of "attention whore", has a limited popularity