Russia's doping program is run by the same FSB team that poisoned Navalny

FSB colonel Dmitry Kovalev has traveled the world to support Team Russia, sitting with his colleagues in the stands at hockey matches in South Korea and appearing before Swiss courts to argue, in his professional capacity, against the decisions of international authorities to punish Russian athletes over their state's systematic doping programs. Most notably, however, Kovalev is not only a prominent player in Moscow's sports chemistry schemes, he and his colleagues also play a key role in the Kremlin's efforts to eliminate political opponents via the use of weapons grade poisons like Novichok, the nerve agent that was deployed against Alexei Navalny and Sergei Skripal, among multiple others. As The Insider has discovered, Russia's doping program and its political assassination program not only share personnel — they also share a physical address and the same director. This is not by coincidence. For Vladimir Putin's Kremlin, beating the "collective West" in the medals table and suppressing dissent at home are part of the same struggle for power.

WADA v. FSB

In November 2020, Dmitry Kovalev testified before the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland as an expert forensic witness for the Russian Anti-Doping Agency, or RUSADA. His testimony, delivered virtually owing to the COVID-19 lockdown, was meant to help convince the convened panel that the World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) proposed four-year ban on Russia's participation in most international sporting events, including the Olympics — a penalty based on credible, widespread allegations of a state-sponsored doping program for its athletes — was unjust.

WADA maintained that data provided to it by the Moscow anti-doping laboratory had been manipulated between November 2018 and January 2019, following formal proceedings to sanction Russia for athletic cheating. RUSADA's counterclaim was that a prominent Russian whistleblower, Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, an analytical chemist and former director of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory, may have doctored this data himself in an effort to level false accusations against the Russian authorities — a scandal dating back to 2016, when Rodchenkov confessed to being part of an elaborate government-administered doping program.

During the Sochi 2014 Games, Rodchenkov explained, he had provided a tripartite cocktail of banned substances to dozens of Russian athletes via the sports ministry. Many of the athletes went on to win top medals while avoiding being caught in real time thanks to cloak-and-dagger methods for evading drug tests. Russia's domestic security service, the FSB, had systematically swapped tainted urine samples for clean ones through a purpose-built "mouse hole" in a wall connecting a makeshift, unlit lab adjoining the testing site in Sochi, with FSB officers somehow cracking supposedly tamper-proof specimen bottles and resealing them perfectly.

The scandal, when it burst into the open in a lengthy New York Times exposé in May 2016, cost Russia its flag and anthem at subsequent Olympic Games. It also prompted Rodchenkov to defect to the United States. Two months after his defection, in February 2016, two other senior RUSADA officials - Vyacheslav Sinyov and Nikita Kamaev - died in Moscow within ten days of each other under unexplained circumstances.

Directorate of Poison and Doping

Kovalev, The Insider can now reveal, is an FSB colonel attached to the Directorate for the Protection of the Constitutional Order, the unit responsible for the Novichok poisoning of slain Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny and of other Russian dissidents. The U.S. Treasury Department has described the directorate as being responsible for "managing internal political threats on behalf of the Kremlin."

Throughout his participation in Switzerland at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, Kovalev was supervised by Maj. Gen. Vladimir Bogdanov, the head of the FSB's Special Equipment Center. Travel data and phone records show that while Kovalev was testifying in Lausanne, Bogdanov was managing the poisoning incidents involving Navalny. During the week Navalny was poisoned in Tomsk in August 2020, Kovalev made repeated phone calls to Bogdanov, linking the timeline of the doping defense with the assassination attempt.