Novaya Gazeta journalist Kostyuchenko believes that they tried to poison her in Germany in the fall of 2022

Novaya Gazeta journalist Elena Kostyuchenko believes that they tried to poison her in the fall of 2022, when she arrived in Germany after a business trip to Ukraine. She spoke about the typical symptoms. According to her, law enforcement agencies of Germany opened a criminal case on the fact of poisoning.

“I woke up with pain in my stomach. It was strange – very strong, but not sharp, as if it was turned on and off. I tried to sit up and lay back down. The head was spinning so that the room seemed to be spinning. The symptoms have changed. The stomach hurt not so much, the head was spinning less. There was no strength at all. The face began to swell. Then edema appeared on the fingers. I took off the rings with difficulty and could not put them on again. The fingers looked like sausages. Feet started to swell. The swelling got bigger, the jaw line disappeared, my face was not my face,” said Ms. Kostyuchenko, who posted a text about the incident on her Facebook page (owned by Meta, recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation).

Elena Kostyuchenko said that two months after the onset of symptoms of poisoning, she underwent rehabilitation at the Berlin clinic “Charite”. “Doctors advising The Insider and Bellingcat (included by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation in the registers of foreign agents and undesirable organizations) said that the most likely explanation for what happened to me was organochlorine poisoning,” the journalist said. According to her, the Berlin police initially opened a case under the article “attempted murder” on the fact that happened to her, but in May 2023 it was terminated. At the end of July, the investigation was resumed after Elena Kostyuchenko handed over additional information from the doctors to the security forces.

May of this year reportedthat the German police launched an investigation into the alleged poisoning in Germany of Russian human rights activist Natalia Arno (Budaeva) and journalist Irina Babloyan. According to them, the poisoning, presumably, could have happened in April, when they participated in a conference in memory of lawyer Yuri Schmidt in Berlin.

Elena Kostyuchenko has been working for Novaya Gazeta since 2005. She gained fame thanks to materials on criminal cases against representatives of the LGBT community, the massacre in the village of Kushchevskaya and the Pussy Riot case. After the start of the military operation of the Russian Federation in Ukraine, she left Russia. In Novaya Gazeta, in 2022-2023, she published several materials about the life of Ukrainian cities in the context of a military conflict.

Alexander Kislov