(Op-ed) Chris Friel
03 Jun 2022, 07:49 GMT+10
It was widely reported on Monday March 28 that Chel;sea FC owner Roman Abramovich was involved in the peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine about to take place in Turkey.
Hitherto, nothing in the public domain suggested that he had taken part in earlier rounds, although on February 28 the Jerusalem Post said he would feature. There is certainly no evidence that Abramovich was in Brest, Belarus on March 3 for the second round. These began at 3pm, and contemporaneous video clips and photos show who was really there, at least at the start. Abramovich was likely in the vicinity of Ankara at that time where his jet was parked, having flown from Istanbul a few days earlier. One suggestion widely canvased was that he was meeting with Muhsin Bayrak with regards to the sale of Chelsea FC, and indeed, two weeks later Reuters reported that Bayrak had confirmed that he had met in person with the Chelsea owner around this time.
However, in a carefully coordinated “scoop” on Monday afternoon, the WSJ broke the news about a strange happening in Kyiv: in early March the now sanctioned oligarch had actually taken part in the talks where he suffered symptoms consistent with poisoning. Abramovich was one of three victims, so the story went, and they were so alarmed that they called in the investigative journalists Bellingcat who arranged for two toxins experts and a medical doctor to examine them. This was on Friday March 4.
Bellingcat confirmed the news in a prepared thread commencing with this tweet:
Many greeted the revelation with skepticism and sarcasm, not least as it elicited denials from the Russians, the Americans, and the Ukrainians. The BBC, for example, although they originally boosted the story, had to retract claims that a spokesperson for Abramovich had even commented on the matter, without, however, publicising the retraction from BBCRussian with any prominence in the UK.
Still, Bellingcat’s British founder Eliot Higgins doubled down, and in several tweets and in interviews for the London Times and Sunday Telegraph claimed that Bellingcat had had direct, first-hand experience of what had been a highly surprising turn of events. Bellingcat’s Executive Director based in the Netherlands Christo Grozev did the same, accentuating the take-home message: ultimately it must have been Putin who was the poisoner, to issue a warning lest Abramovich becomes too much of an “honest broker” in the talks. And one month later the Twitter account repeated the claim that Bellingcat had been called in to help:
I do not think the story was to be taken too seriously, though. For one thing, the lack of contemporaneity encourages radical skepticism (as to whether anything at all really happened), and for another, the variations in the story with its different circumstances are riven with tension and contradiction.
Here we can draw attention to discrepancies relating to: which talks Abramovich participated in (where and when); the number of men poisoned; what they drank; the nature of their symptoms (and how many were blind); how long they lasted; whether and what traces were collected; what medical tests were performed (and where and by whom); and the route of the journey home (from Kyiv, possibly via Lviv, and eventually to Turkey).
Should anyone persist in taking the story seriously and try to iron out the discrepancies they will find themselves committed to construction along the following lines:
On the evening of March 3, back in Kyiv, four members of the Ukrainian negotiating team got together and retired to the same apartment. Having consumed only water and chocolate, three of the men started to show symptoms consistent with poisoning through the night. These had abated by the morning, but even so, someone felt the need to contact Bellingcat (or perhaps a partner organisation) and the men were examined by experts (one of whom was on-site). The men had to go to Turkey, however, and this meant flying from Warsaw, and so they started out, probably on the Friday afternoon, and drove for around fourteen hours, possibly via Lviv. They flew to Istanbul on Saturday morning March 5. Two of the victims were Rustem Umerov and Roman Abramovich, and the other two included an unnamed Russian businessman and a senior Ukrainian peace negotiator.
The construction is a concoction, of course. Bizarrely, Higgins and Grozev did not always have a firm grasp of their own story, with Higgins later describing how the tea cups were bagged and tagged despite the men only consuming water and chocolate. Grozev even got the date of the poisoning wrong. This suggests that the variations derived from some earlier, not-too-well-understood account – which is what appears to have happened.
The earliest account of the poisoning, then, emerged from Agentstvo (“The Agency”) in Proekt media, early in the morning on March 28, and the story was also reported on by Meduza, again at first in Russian.[1] Significantly, Bellingcat’s partner organisation, The Insider promptly reported the same.[2] This damages irreparably Bellingcat’s claim to direct involvement.
The original article made the link with two incidents that “happened” in early March. Proekt’s second incident was about a poisoning, but in this version just one man had suffered: Umerov. Abramovich was certainly mentioned in the article, but there was no suggestion that he was poisoned, nor was it ever said that Bellingcat had been called in by the victims for assistance.
Worse, Proekt had asked Umerov to comment, but he declined, though shortly after the article came out he tweeted:
This denial was noted at the time and was one reason why Bellingcat was ridiculed. But since it was made before the Abramovich story was put out, Umerov must have been responding to Proekt’s fake news.[3]
In their article Proekt recalled another incident that, unlike the poisoning, was widely reported: the death of Denis Kireev. He was shot by the Ukrainians in Kyiv on March 5. Kireev was a Ukrainian banker who had taken part in the first round of talks in Gomel on February 28 where he was photographed next to Umerov. He did not feature in the second round.
Exactly what happened is contested. Perhaps Kireev was executed as a traitor or else killed on a special mission, or maybe he was shot resisting arrest, or perhaps it was a dreadful mistake. Intriguingly, it was Proekt who reported on the role of Ukrainian special forces in the killing. Again, intriguingly, Grozev took an early interest at the time, being the only person to tweet the official line on the Ukrainian Facebook that Kireev was a hero who had died on a special mission (in the evening of March 5). The Insider did the same.[4]
This was the linkage, then: one killed and one poisoned. Bellingcat is nowhere on the scene, and later that evening, when The Insider reported on the scoop in the WSJ, we are told only that the poisoning “became known” to Bellingcat and The Insider with no clue that either were directly involved.[5]
Even before I discovered these accounts, however, it had dawned on me that the story was connected to Kireev. This was because although four men shared an apartment just three had got ill. Setting aside the water (which we know was on the tables at which the real negotiators sat) the hint was that the chocolate they all shared was contaminated.
Indeed, Grozev made the point, pace the Americans, that the illness could not be put down to “environmental factors” as all four men had shared the same locale. Not an allergy, then.
But from the first, the very idea struck me as ludicrous. Why choose a mechanism that would be impossible to control, especially if the point was to issue a warning via a low dosage? The only way to make sense of this, of course, was to suppose the fourth man was the poisoner: he would know which ones to eat and which ones to avoid! But who was the fourth man?
Bellingcat declined to say, though they could affirm that he was a “senior Ukrainian negotiator.” The fingers of the storytellers pointed tendentiously in one direction, one that we can suppose provides further exculpation for the death of Kireev.
Nor is it overly cynical to guess that one day that the super-sleuths might chase home all the clues and reveal to the world just who had poisoned the oligarch (he had been blinded for hours, in some reports, his skin was peeling, and he was convinced he was dying).
Bellingcat’s story will not be the same as ours, freely available here: (16) The Poisoning at the Peace Talks | Chris S Friel – Academia.edu, but perhaps the mainstream will prefer it.
Experience shows that journalists are as ready to read our version of events as they are to eat confectionery laced with poison.
Negotiators allegedly poisoned during RussiaUkraine talks – Meduza
[2]One participant in the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine was poisoned, the other was killed by “misunderstanding” – “Agency” (theins.ru).
[3] Proekt also claimed that Umerov had been accused of being an American spy, and had temporarily dropped out of talks, though it is not clear when. Umerov was certainly reported as being part of the March 3 team, but it is not clear to me from video clips that he arrived with the leader Mykhailo Podolya at the start, at 3pm. According to Proekt Umerov was poisoned in Kyiv, and the article also claims that Abramovich had flown to Kyiv “by a difficult route.” Thus, although Proekt makes no suggestion that Abramovich was poisoned with Umerov, the early article does form the basis for the later embellishments. Podolyak also denied that there was any truth in Bellingcat’s story.
[4]The Insider on Twitter: ” , . , , . (: https://t.co/VQyN9SZKiK) https://t.co/zrjJCZpLJO https://t.co/SyHbGcr3b5″ / Twitter
[5]Roman Abramovich and two other members of the Ukrainian delegation showed signs of poisoning with a chemical substance after negotiations with the Kremlin (theins.ru)
The writer Doctor Chris Friel taught maths for many years before undertaking, first, a masters in Philosophy, and second, doctoral research on value and credibility in the thought of Bernard Lonergan. In 2018 he investigated at length the “purposely timed hysteria” of the pro-Israel hawks in the UK amidst the antisemitism crisis, and commencing in 2019 has devoted an equally lengthy exploration of the Cardinal George Pell case and its context.
