Navalny Tricks Russian FSB Officer Into Confessing Poisoned Underpants Plot in Phone Call

One of the men accused of carrying out the attempted assassination of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has inadvertently confessed to the plot in a stunning piece of trickery from Navalny himself. According to Bellingcat, a member of the suspected FSB poison squad described the assassination plot on a phone call with a man he believed to be a top-ranking security official—but was actually Navalny. A call recording features Konstantin Kudryavtsev describing how his team carried out the plot and how they tried to clean up evidence of it. Most dramatically, the agent describes how the nerve agent that poisoned Navalny was was applied to a pair of his underwear. Navalny asked: “On which piece of cloth was your focus on?” Kudryavtsev replied: “The underpants.” After Navalny asked for more detail of where exactly on the underwear the nerve agent was applied, Kudryavstev replied: “Well, the crotch, as they call it.”