“If you’re a journalist and the government wants to kill you – you’re doing it right”. Those are the chilling words of broadcaster Irina Babloyan, who until Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine hosted Russia’s most popular morning radio show. But stalked by the FSB and taken off the air within days of the war starting, the journalist felt compelled to leave Moscow for her own safety. Little did she realise, like so many of Putin’s critics, she would also suffer symptoms of suspected poisoning that left her skin “burning all the time”. Established prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s sole major independent radio station Echo of Moscow was taken off air in March 2022, during the Kremlin’s clampdown on information, and then shut down completely. Events soon took an even darker turn. Late one evening, near her home, Ms Babloyan was out walking with her close friend, opposition politician Ilya Yashin, when he was arrested. He was later sentenced to eight and a half years in prison, over a YouTube livestream about Russian atrocities in Bucha. From that moment, she says Russian police and FSB agents followed her everywhere – even some 350 miles south to Belgorod – and openly sat outside her home, threatening her that “it’s probably better for you to leave”. It was as she began to investigate early reports of Ukrainian children being forcibly taken to Russia that the personal danger to Ms Babloyan intensified. She approached Russian government officials, who told her they were aware of the situation and that the children would remain in the country until the war was over. While she was initially aware of just one “school” housing Ukrainian children in Russia, the findings soon snowballed until she learned from a fellow journalist of dozens more facilities, holding thousands more. Ukraine’s current figures suggest at least 19,000 children have been taken. “I was really shocked and I understood: okay, probably it’s time for me to leave,” Ms Babloyan said, adding: “I was so tired and felt I couldn’t change the situation.” She returned to her home country of Georgia in October, amid another Russian exodus sparked by Putin’s mobilisation order. With Echo of Moscow set to resume programming via its app from Berlin, the journalist planned to move to there – in a journey requiring her to drive to Armenia, before flying from Yerevan to Moldova, and then on to the German capital. On the eve of the long trip, she suddenly “felt something strange going on”. “In a second”, she began to feel nauseous and tired. “I had dinner with friends – I didn’t want to eat, I didn’t want to drink, I ordered salad and wine, and didn’t [touch] it at all. I decided to go to bed, went to my hotel and fell asleep.” It was the last time she would sleep for three days. She awoke feeling “much worse”, recalling: “I couldn’t move normally – every single movement was very hard.” She felt a metallic taste in her mouth, with “crazy” pain in her head and “in a strange place” in her stomach, while her hands and feet had turned “wine red”. “I couldn’t move my fingers normally, and I felt like [I was] touching fire in [my] hands and feet,” Ms Boloyan said. Blaming hitherto dormant allergies, she bought some antihistamines, packed a bag and embarked on a four-hour taxi journey to Yerevan. Save for the border crossing, she lay on the back seat for the entire journey, unable to move. “Every single piece of my body was burning. I couldn’t think normally, couldn’t concentrate on anything.” At the airport after a sleepless night in a hotel, filled with anxiety, she arranged a phone appointment with a Russian doctor, who told her the symptoms were probably caused by stress. “I was sitting waiting my flight crying all the time I was talking because they didn’t understand what was going on,” she said. Ms Babloyan spent another sleepless night in Chisinau, the Moldovan capital, before flying to Germany, where finally on the third day, she found she could walk, talk and eat again. “It was not all gone, but it was much better,” she said. Without health insurance, it was December by the time she saw a doctor, who prescribed her antidepressants and told her allergy tests would cost €6,000. Soon after, Ms Babloyan was forced to stop doing her radio show, as “something strange started happening with my skin”, which broke out in hive-like red spots, “burning all the time”. She took the tests for all known allergens, which came back negative. At this point, a Russian friend recommended another doctor, who upon seeing her skin immediately told her she needed toxicology tests for heavy metals – and said she knew of two other Russians, a journalist and activist, who had recently fallen ill in Europe with similar symptoms. The two other cases – Novaya Gazeta journalist Elena Kostyuchenko, in Berlin, and US-based Free Russia Foundation president Natalia Arno, in Prague – were being looked into by Riga-based investigative outlet The Insider. Doctors and poison specialists have since told the outlet that poisoning is the only explanation for Ms Kostyuchenko’s symptoms, and is the most likely reason for Babloyan and Arno’s symptoms. She was tested at the Charité Hospital, where the now-jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was diagnosed in 2020. But she was later told that her toxicology tests had been “lost”, and although doctors also took a sample of her hair, she has still not been told the results. Ms Kostyuchenko is also still in the dark, despite claims by a source to The Insider that law enforcement carried out their own secret analysis of her blood. Having announced an investigation last month into Ms Kostyuchenko’s case, German prosecutors are now treating it as attempted murder. However, Georgia is yet to announce its own probe into Ms Babloyan’s case, and she is currently unable to return to Tblisi and formally trigger an investigation herself. For Ms Babloyan, it was while interviewing Ms Kosyuchenko on her radio show in mid-August that the stark reality truly began to set in. “When you are looking into the face and eyes of a person who felt the same [symptoms] and you understand it was real, it feels scary – very,” she said, adding that she is still “just trying to understand how to live when you know that someone wanted to kill you, and probably will do it again.” The journalist – who still has problems with her skin, and suffers pain in her fingers after opening a bottle or even a door – remains even more determined to offer an objective narrative on Russia’s affairs. “Work is like therapy for me,” she said. “I can’t stop working”, and noted that, as a journalist, if the government “wants to kill you, it means that, what you’re doing – you’re doing it right”. Asked whether she believed she had been targeted for her enquries into potential Russian war crimes, Ms Babloyan replied: “I just think that all Russian journalists and activists are a target for the Russian government. “But it’s hard to understand who’s going to be next because if you are trying to find logic, you can’t find it, and everyone can be a target.” Read More Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska’s interview with Bel Trew | An Independent TV Original Dodging a constant assault of Russian missiles – the war-weary keep fighting in Ukraine’s blood-soaked east Putin’s hit list: from poisoned tea to mysterious falls, the grisly fate of the Kremlin’s enemies Russia shuts down human rights group that preserved the legacy of Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov

Former President Donald Trump has finally addressed the reason he allegedly failed to return boxes of classified documents to the federal government: he’d put his clothes in them. “Many people have asked me why I had these boxes, why did you want them?” Mr Trump said to supporters at his golf club in Bedminster on Tuesday evening. “The answer, in addition to having every right under the Presidential Records Act, is that these boxes were containing all types of personal belongings — many, many things, shirts and shoes, everything.” Earlier in the day on Tuesday, Mr Trump was arraigned on 37 felony counts relating to his handling classified documents after leaving the presidency in 2021. For months, Mr Trump has dodged or ignored questions about why he decided to keep custody of a number of boxes of classified documents that the government has alleged he took with him after losing the presidency. On Tuesday, after his arraignment, that changed. Mr Trump unleashed a barrage of false accusations during his address to supporters in New Jersey, including that a widely-disseminated photograph of boxes piled up in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago were staged. He also accused “someone, not me” of dumping the contents of one of the boxes onto the floor. Mr Trump then said that he would have gone through the boxes, presumably to weed out the highly classified material from the contents of his wardrobe and memorabilia, but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. “I hadn’t had a chance to go through all the boxes,” Mr Trump said. “It’s a long tedious job, it takes a long time — which I was prepared to do, but I have a very busy life. I’ve had a very busy life.” Mr Trump has repeatedly claimed that his indictment for refusing to give back classified documents is a politically motivated stunt designed to derail his 2024 presidential campaign and called President Joe Biden a “dictator” — a remarkable accusation considering it was Mr Trump who attempted to overthrow the country’s democracy just more than two years ago. Read More Ivanka and Jared split over attending Trump 2024 launch – follow live Why was Donald Trump impeached twice during his first term? Four big lies Trump told during his 2024 presidential announcement

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House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries sounded confident that Congress would vote to avert a default on the US’s obligations on Sunday, hours after news broke that the White House had reached a deal with Republican leadership to raise the debt ceiling. The “agreement in principle” was announced Saturday evening after much of the House of Representatives and Senate had left for the Memorial Day weekend. A handful remained in Washington to continue negotiations ahead of the deadline; the US Treasure Department estimates that the federal government’s ability to pay its debts will be in question come 1 June — this Thursday. Mr Jeffries spoke on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. While he cautioned that he had not seen the actual text of the bill, which is reportedly set to cap funding for the US government (except for the military) through 2024, he offered a simple “yes” when asked directly if he could guarantee that the US would avert default. It’s a statement that will likely mean a sigh of relief for those Americans worried about the effects that a credit downgrade would have on the US economy, though that remains a possibility thanks to the toxic partisanship that brought the US to this point in the first place, but also one that may frustrate progressives and other Democrats who may see the development as Democrats giving in to the GOP’s demands. The deal does stave off further debt ceiling negotiations until 2025, but many on the left simply wish to do away with the limit altogether. And there’s already signs that many on the conservative right do not like the deal, with some even calling any legislation that raises the debt limit a non-starter. Their opposition within the GOP’s slim House majority necessitates votes from Democrats to pass this deal or any other. More follows...

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