At Russia - Ukraine peace talks, Chelsea owner Abramovich, two others poisoned: Report

Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and Ukrainian negotiators were targets of a suspected poison attack, potentially by Moscow hardliners seeking to sabotage peace talks, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The allegations surfaced on the eve of the first face-to-face peace talks in weeks, amid fears that the Kremlin was not ready to compromise, despite the stiff resistance its forces have encountered since the invasion began.

The poisoning claims were first reported in the Wall Street Journal and by the investigative journalism outlet Bellingcat, although a US official told Reuters on Monday evening the evidence did not point to poisoning.

The Chelsea FC owner - who has now recovered - reportedly suffered sore eyes and peeling skin. Two Ukrainian peace negotiators were also said to have been affected.

One report said the alleged poisoning was orchestrated by Russian hardliners who wanted to sabotage the talks.

Shortly after the allegations emerged, an unnamed US official was quoted by Reuters as saying that intelligence suggested the men's symptoms were due to "environmental" factors, not poisoning.

And later an official in the Ukrainian president's office, Ihor Zhovkva, told the BBC that while he hadn't spoken to Mr Abramovich, members of the Ukrainian delegation were "fine" and one had said the story was "false".

The conditions of Abramovich and the other negotiators have improved and their lives are not in danger.

Bellingcat said the symptoms included eye and skin inflammation, and piercing pain in the eyes, and added that the three men recovered quickly. They left Kyiv the next day, drove to Poland, and then flew to Istanbul.

“The three men experiencing the symptoms consumed only chocolate and water in the hours before the symptoms appeared. A fourth member of the team who also consumed these did not experience symptoms,” wrote Bellingcat, which said one of its investigators had been asked to provide an opinion on the incident by chemical weapons specialists.

“Based on remote and on-site examinations, the experts concluded that the symptoms are most likely the result of … poisoning with an undefined chemical weapon,” said Bellingcat.

The tests showed that if the illness had been caused by poisoning, it was unlikely to have been at a dosage intended to kill, Bellingcat said.

Allies of the poisoned men reportedly blamed hardliners in Moscow, who allegedly “wanted to sabotage talks to end the war”.

Much about the story remains murky.

"It was not intended to kill, it was just a warning," Christo Grozev, an investigator with open-source collective Bellingcat, said in the Journal after studying the incident.

Grozev, who determined after an investigation that Kremlin agents poisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny with a nerve agent in 2020, saw images of the effects of the apparent Abramovich attack, but no samples could be collected in time for forensic experts to detect poison, the paper reported.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that his government had received offers of support from Russian businessmen, including Abramovich, who owns and is seeking to sell Chelsea Football Club and has had longstanding links to Putin.