Heads will roll following the Navalny prank call blunder

From vicious tragedy to outright farce, the saga of the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has acquired a surreal new chapter. Pretending to be an aide to the powerful secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Navalny actually rang up one of his would-be assassins and got him to confess, on tape. It’s hilarious; it’s astonishing; it’s embarrassing. Does it prove that Russia’s security agencies are the Keystone Kops of the intelligence world?

Citizen investigator outfit Bellingcat and the Russian journalists of the Insider recently published the results of an extraordinary inquiry into the attempted assassination in August 2020, when he was on a campaign visit to Tomsk, in Siberia. Beyond their own diligence, they appear to have been assisted by the massive Russian black market in data, from phone records to bank details. This allowed them to track the contacts and movements of an eight-man team of medical doctors and chemical weapons experts from the Federal Security Service (FSB), who had been shadowing him for years.