Both U.S. and Ukrainian officials on Monday denied an unsubstantiated rumor that negotiators working to end the war in Ukraine, including Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, were poisoned this month.
The poisoning rumor was detailed by “people familiar with the matter” in a Monday report by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which cited an investigation by the open-source journalism collective called Bellingcat:
Mr. Abramovich, Ukrainian lawmaker Rustem Umerov and another negotiator developed symptoms following the March 3 meeting in Kyiv that included red eyes, constant and painful tearing, and peeling skin on their faces and hands, the people said. Mr. Abramovich has shuttled between Moscow, Belarus and other negotiating venues since Russia invaded Ukraine.
Mr. Abramovich was blinded for a few hours and later had trouble eating, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Some of the people familiar with the matter blamed the suspected attack on hard-liners in Moscow who they said wanted to sabotage talks to end the war. A person close to Mr. Abramovich said it wasn’t clear who had targeted the group.
The WSJ’s sources said everyone involved has “improved” over the past four weeks and “their lives aren’t in danger.”
The alleged sources added that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not affected by the alleged attack, which “Western experts” speculated could have been carried out with anything from chemical weapons to biological agents or electromagnetic energy, as with the long-rumored “Havana Syndrome” illness experienced by U.S. diplomats in several postings around the world.
The Bellingcat inquiry was led by Christo Grozev, who also investigated the chemical weapons attack on Russian dissident Alexei Navalny in 2020. Grozev said that the diplomats who allegedly became ill in Kyiv could not be examined quickly or thoroughly enough to definitively establish that they were poisoned. He felt that given the relatively mild symptoms, if the negotiators were maliciously attacked in some way, it was “just a warning.”
The WSJ felt that warning might have been primarily directed at Abramovich, a half-Ukrainian billionaire with ties to Russian leader Vladimir Putin who has been working independently to negotiate a peace deal with Ukraine. The poisoning theory suggests “hard-liners” loyal to Putin and eager for the war to continue are unhappy with Abramovich’s efforts.
The Washington Post on Monday quoted an unnamed associate of Abramovich who suspected a “third party,” persons not directly controlled by the Russian government, carried out the alleged attack. This source, like those quoted by the WSJ, said Abramovich has fully recovered and is “okay.”
Mykhailo Podoliak, an adviser to President Zelensky, on Monday dismissed the WSJ report and Bellingcat allegations as “speculation” and insisted all of Ukraine’s negotiators are “working as usual.”
“There is a lot of information speculation, various conspiracy theories and elements of one or more information games,” Podoliak said. “Therefore, I will repeat once again: The members of the negotiating team are working full-time today.”
Ukrainian media noted on Monday that one of the allegedly poisoned Ukrainian negotiators, Rustem Umerov, explicitly dismissed the poisoning rumor as “yellow news” and part of an “information war” on his Facebook page. Umerov implied the poisoning rumor was the work of Russian propagandists.
An unnamed U.S. official told Reuters on Monday that the illness experienced by Abramovich and the Ukrainian negotiators was probably “not poisoning.”
“The intelligence highly suggests this was environmental,” the official said, without elaborating further.
During a nationally televised interview on Tuesday, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba advised his country’s negotiators “not to eat or drink anything” and “preferably avoid touching surfaces” while meeting with the Russians.
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