MOSCOW—The several sinister mysteries surrounding the murders of people investigating the activities of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his billionaire cronies took a new turn last week. A Russian-Canadian activist collapsed a day after allegedly obtaining key evidence in the now-infamous case of three Russian journalists killed in July in the Central African Republic.
Pyotr Verzilov, 30, is best known as a spokesman for Pussy Riot, a group of performance artists who styled themselves a punk protest band, and also as the publisher of Pussy Riot’s journalistic project, Media Zona. During the World Cup final in Russia in July, Verzilov also gained notoriety running onto the field in a police uniform.
After a court hearing in that case a week ago Tuesday, Verzilov came home deadly tired, his eyesight failing, and quickly lost the ability to speak. When the ambulance arrived, he could hardly move; on the way to the hospital Verzilov did not recognize his girlfriend, Pussy Riot activist Veronika Nikulshina.
ADVERTISEMENT
Family, friends and colleagues of Verzilov had no doubt he was poisoned, an almost automatic assumption given the grim record of murders targeting people regarded by President Putin as “traitors” or “enemies,” which are very broad categories embracing many journalists as well as defectors from the Russian intelligence services. The poisons used often are exotic and hard to detect: a rare radioactive isotope in one case, an even rarer chemical weapon in another.
After more than three days of intensive care in a Moscow hospital, Verzilov was flown to Berlin on Saturday.
At a press conference this Tuesday, Verzilov’s German doctors said his symptoms were strongly indicative of poisoning, with certain neurotransmitters blocked in what’s called “anti-cholinergic syndrome,” but no specific toxin publicly identified as yet.
Reuters quoted Jaka Bizilj, an activist in Germany who helped arrange Verzilov’s treatment there, to the effect that Verzilov was still hallucinating about his cat Rubinstein in the hospital room and had mistaken one of his Berlin doctors for a prison warden. “But he’s getting better every day,” Bizilj said.
Some of Verzilov’s Pussy Riot colleagues, including his ex wife Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, initially speculated that the poison was intended either for assassination or intimidation by authorities embarrassed by Verzilov’s stunts.
But it now appears that the investigation of the murders in Africa was far more dangerous to Russian authorities and the oligarchs who work with them than was a protest disrupting the World Cup.
One of Pussy Riot’s leaders, Maria Alyokhina told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that she believed Verzilov was the victim of a contract murder attempted by some of the same people behind the killings in the Central African Republic.
One of the three murdered reporters there was Verzilov’s close friend, film director Alexander Rastorguyev. Along with Orkhan Dzhemal and Kirill Radchenko, he was in the Central African Republic to film Russia’s secret mercenaries from the so-called Wagner Group who allegedly are financed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman with close ties to the Kremlin who also has been linked to Russian operations targeting U.S. voters in the 2016 presidential elections.
“Neither Verzilov, nor any of us trust the official investigation of the journalists’ assassination in Central Africa,” Alyokhina told The Daily Beast. “We are convinced that the Kremlin has no intention of finding out the truth about who ordered the killing of the journalists.”
“Pyotr realized that the investigative project was full of risks but he found finance, teamed up with several independent journalists and professional investigators,” she said. “They had discovered some sensitive evidence. Shortly before getting poisoned, Verzilov was planning to travel to Central Africa.”
According to two well-informed sources who asked to remain anonymous out of concern for their own security, Verzilov managed to get hold of cell phone records showing the journalists’ driver received multiple calls from a local policeman just before the video crew was murdered.
Tolokonnikova told Media Zona on Wednesday that the day before Verzilov was poisoned, he received his investigative team’s report about the CAR murder investigation in his email inbox. Others told The Daily Beast that Verzilov had quickly sent the phone records to his associates.
“Nobody who is taking part in political activity can feel safe in Russia today,” Tolokonnikova told reporters in Berlin.
Almost every week Russians wake up to reports about the Kremlin putting more pressure on civil activists, or police beating opposition protesters and reporters—layer upon layer of violence.
On the same day Verzilov was hospitalized last week, President Putin’s ex-bodyguard, chief of the National Guard Viktor Zolotov, promised to turn Russia’s key opposition leader Alexei Navalny into “a good juicy beef steak.” Zolotov’s statement inviting Navalny to a duel was posted on the National Guard YouTube channel, openly calling for extrajudicial violence against the opposition.
At that moment, conveniently for Zolotov, Navalny was in jail for organizing an illegal street rally. So Navalny’s wife, Yulia, had to respond to Zolotov: “I despise him as a thief and a coward,” she said in her public statement. “He is a coward [who] dressed up for the video like a general from a Latin American junta.”
Verzilov’s team members and friends disdained those who ordered the alleged attempt on his life. “If Prigozhin’s people poisoned Petya for his investigation, this is ultimately sick,” said Andrey Konyakhin, former head of the Investigation Control Center (TsUR) that employed the journalists sent to the Central African Republic (CAR).
TsUR was a media group financed by exiled Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky. One month after the journalists were killed in CAR, Khodorkovsky ended funding for TsUR but continued to manage an independent investigation seeking justice for his murdered partners.
“According to the working version of the murder [investigation] that we have now, they were Russian killers,” Khodorkovsky told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview in London last week. “They first shot one of the three journalists and then received an order to finish the others.” Khodorkovsky said he has evidence to back up that claim, but did not share it.
Several independent media groups are trying to find out what happened to their colleagues in CAR. Pussy Riot’s Alyokhina is convinced that as soon as Verzilov recovers, he will continue to investigate the “assassination” in Africa.
“If the Russian state ordered and executed the murders of the three journalists, people deserve to know about it,” Alyokhina said. “I am sure that Verzilov is stronger than any poison.”
