LETTER FROM WASHINGTON

Her bedroom door was open. Natalia Arno hesitated for a moment. Had a cleaning lady at her Prague hotel been distracted? On May 2, the president of the Free Russia Foundation, an organization opposing the war in Ukraine and promoting human rights in Russia, had just spent the day discussing strategy and funding in the Czech capital. She decided to go in. No one was there. She checked her suitcase, the clothes on the hangers: Nothing. No signs of theft, no hidden microphones. Nothing but a sweet smell, like a cheap perfume.

That night, Arno, 47, went to sleep late, at around 2 am. An intense pain in her jaw woke her up at dawn. She also felt a kind of numbness in the extremities of her limbs. Her vision was blurred. She blamed it on a ferocious toothache. The activist canceled a trip to Berlin and returned to the United States. Her main concern was whether her new medical coverage would work. Despite her experience of Russia's repressive apparatus, she did not think she could have been the victim of a poisoning attempt, like former agents Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal and many other opponents. She was wrong.

On board her plane, the symptoms intensified. The pain spread from one end of her body to the other: Eyes, ears, chest, arms, stomach. "It felt like all my organs were affected," she told Le Monde, sitting at a café in Washington DC. Arno was admitted to an intensive care unit upon her arrival in the US. The chairman of her organization's board of directors – former deputy secretary of state David Kramer (2008-2009) – alerted the FBI.

Poisoning has become the most likely explanation. FBI agents went to her room to take blood samples and examine her personal belongings. Novichok was ruled out. This nerve agent was used against opponent Alexei Navalny and Free Russia's former vice-president, Vladimir Kara-Mourza, who are imprisoned in Russia. Experts also ruled out the possibility of natural illnesses such as hepatitis. But it was impossible to identify the product allegedly used on Arno, even if one hypothesis remains the weaponization of marine toxins.

Arno suffers from peripheral neuropathy, a term describing damage or disease affecting the nerves. "The doctors recommended more exercise and less stress. Exercise, OK, but stress, I can't promise," she said. The activist is firmly committed to opposing the Russian regime and has no intention of giving up. Looking back, she believes she was attacked for the first time in 2021 in Vilnius, in her first post-pandemic trip abroad. She had traveled to meet other Russian exiles in the Lithuanian capital. That sweet smell already lingered in her hotel room. In the evening, she felt a kind of searing skin burn. "It went from one part of my body to the other as if my skin was boiling."

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