Rolling?
We're rolling, yeah.
OK, we are going, guys? Yeah.
OK, Alexei, I want to talk about something
we sort of touched on this morning.
You might hate this, but I really want you to think about it.
If you are killed, if this does happen,
what message do you leave behind to the Russian people?
Oh, come on, Daniel!
No, no way.
It is like you are making a movie for the case of my death.
Like, again, I am ready to answer your question.
But please, let it be another movie. Movie number two.
Let's make a thriller out of this movie,
and in the case I would be killed, let's make a boring movie of memory.
Alexei Navalny is stepping back into another showdown with the Kremlin.
What to do with Navalny presents a conundrum for the Kremlin.
Let him go and risk looking weak, or lock him up,
knowing it could turn him into a political martyr.
APPLAUSE
Mr Navalny, aren't you afraid?
Are you not scared, Alexei?
What do you expect in Moscow?
CHANTING: Nav-al-ny! Nav-al-ny!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Unexpectedly, Vladimir Putin has a genuine challenger,
a handsome 41-year-old lawyer, Alexei Navalny,
who has chosen one of the most dangerous occupations
in the world - running against the man who controls the Kremlin.
More than any other opposition figure in Russia,
Alexei Navalny gets ordinary people out to protest.
CHANTING
If I want to fight to Putin, if I want to be
the leader of a country, I have to do something practical about it.
Well, I have to kind of organise people.
I was banned from everything.
Television, banned.
Newspapers, blacklisted.
Rallies, forbidden.
I realised I can do a lot on my own,
with the support of my wife, Yulia.
Just a small group of people I can rely on.
Zero money, a lot of work,
internet, and that's it.
His youngest fans have turned to TikTok,
which has been crucial in spreading the word.
Navalny's posted hundreds of videos about his corruption investigations,
and they're wildly popular.
The Kremlin hates Navalny so much
that they've literally refused to say his name.
BANGING
Our office, raided.
And they just confiscated everything.
Everything.
They splash a toxic liquid to my face, and my first thought
was, "Jesus, I will be kind of monster until the end of my days."
As I became more and more famous guy, I was totally sure that my life
became safer and safer, because I am kind of a famous guy.
And it will be problematic for them just to kill me.
And, boy, were you wrong!
Yes. I was very wrong.
So, we went to Siberia to make a nice movie about local corruption.
I expected a lot of police.
I expected a lot of people who try to prevent our filming, confiscate
our cameras, or just break our cameras, or try to beat us.
I expected that sort of things, and I was very surprised.
Like, "Hmm. Why is nobody here?"
Why is there a kind of...
I even have this strange feeling, like lack of respect.
"Seriously? I am here, where is my police?"
The whole trip was the smoothest trip I ever had in the regions.
I am a kind of slave of Thursdays.
Because on Thursday I have my online YouTube show.
And then, at weekends, I can spend it with my family,
before another trip to another region.
I was going home and then...
..I died.
CRIES OF PAIN
Passengers on his flight from Siberia
heard Alexei Navalny cry out in agony.
SIRENS
Other passengers, filming just after the plane
makes an emergency landing in Siberia.
Navalny then rushed to the hospital, where he was put on a ventilator.
His spokeswoman saying Navalny was poisoned.
His wife raced to be by his side.
SHOUTING
SHOUTING CONTINUES
TRANSLATION: We've come to the conclusion that,
judging by the fact there were no poisons found in his blood or
other biological materials, he has a metabolic disorder,
lowering of blood sugar levels, to be specific.
We are hearing state news agencies here
that are backed by the Kremlin suggesting that
hallucinogenic drugs may be involved, but not poisoning.
CHANTING
PEOPLE SHOUT
WOMAN CONTINUES SHOUTING
CROWD CHANTS
Um...
CAMERAS CLICK
This morning an air ambulance from a German charity landed.
TRANSLATION: We have to make sure his condition is completely stable.
We cannot transfer him in this state, even if
his family have consented to it.
APPLAUSE
SIRENS BLARE
The moment when I heard the news that Navalny was poisoned,
my first thought was, can this be the Kremlin?
Would they be so dumb to try and kill an opposition figure,
the main opposition figure?
I was sceptical, I thought, hmm,
maybe it's one of the many oligarchs on whose feet he has stepped.
Either it's a state ordered attack or it is somebody who is
trying to assassinate opposition figures in order to appease Putin.
The closest anyone has come to tracing the poisoning to
Vladimir Putin, the 2018 attack in Salisbury, England.
A defiant Kremlin insisting again they had nothing to do with
the brazen assassination attempt of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal.
Skripal was poisoned by the military grade nerve agent Novichok.
The seriousness of Novichok is that it actually starts
switching off your nerve connectors in your body one by one.
If it's dosed properly, it will just turn you off as a body.
But then within hours, any trace, it will disappear.
So it will always forever look like it was a natural death.
And this is why it appears to be the preferred form of killing for
people whose death will be in the public scrutiny, such as Navalny.
There was a lot of pressure for us to start investigating.
Media partners in Russia reached out to us and said, can you help?
We looked at it and we thought there is no hope in hell
we can investigate a crime that happened in Russia,
in the remote corners of Siberia, sitting here comfortably in Europe.
We didn't even try in the beginning.
Alexei Navalny arrives at this hospital in Berlin
with his wife Yulia.
A spokesperson tweeted, "The struggle for Alexei's life
"and health is just beginning."
Here at the hospital, both inside and out, he'll be watched.
CAMERAS CLICK
To have your dad,
an opposition leader,
being poisoned by we don't know what, we don't
know how, we don't know when,
and just be in a random hospital.
It was just...
It was surreal, it was literally like a book.
PHONE RINGS
The doctors can't say anything about his brain.
To which extent he will recover, even if they manage to wake him up.
Many millions of Navalny supporters are trying to figure out how
to help. We, in Berlin, are a small team.
We have to dive into actually, like, getting things done.
We all were very sceptical about investigating Alexei's poisoning.
As opposed to previous cases,
this poisoning took place on the Russian soil.
So no-one is going to share
CCTV footage with us.
We're not going to have
fancy videos from the airport where
the poisoner is flying in and out.
And as much as it hurts to admit,
while Putin is in power, we'll never find out the truth.
CAMERAS CLICK
Yulia, how is your husband this morning?
It was so crazy, like, it's Putin's signature poison.
We were actually so shocked that he didn't just decide to murder him,
but to poison.
And not just to poison, but exactly with Novichok, like really,
like leaving a signature on the crime scene.
When you come to the room of a comatose patient,
you start doing, you just tell him some news.
Telling him his story, Alexei, don't worry, you were poisoned,
there was a murder attempt, Putin tried to kill you with Novichok.
And he opens his, like, blue eyes wide and looked at me
and said very clear...
Come on, poisoned? I don't believe it.
Like he is back, this is Alexei.
Putin is supposed to be not so stupid to use this Novichok.
His wording, his expletives, his intonation.
If you want to kill someone, just shoot him. Jesus Christ.
Like, real Alexei.
It's impossible to believe it. It's kind of stupid,
the whole idea of poisoning with a chemical weapon.
What the fuck?
This is why this is not smart because even reasonable people,
they refuse to believe - like, what?
Come on. Poisoned?
Seriously?
IN GERMAN:
Traditional journalism implies you meeting with a source,
and that source telling you a story.
In today's world of fake news,
we don't trust sources because we don't trust humans.
SIREN BLARES
We trust data.
Bellingcat is an organisation of digital nerds.
Most of us with almost autistic-like fascination with numbers.
Every time you use your email, you make a phone call, make a doctor's
appointment, take a plane or train, any time you use the ATM, every
time you actually look at the screen of your phone, that leaves a trace.
In a place like Russia,
imagine the person who works at a travel agency that has access to the
flight manifest, they are getting, what, 25 bucks a day as a salary?
And then for another 25 they would be able to sell that flight
manifest to anybody who asks for it.
Just because they'll double their income for the day.
This is a whole industry. Data brokers are on the dark web.
You negotiate a price and within a few minutes,
they'll say, "Yeah, I can get that data for you by tomorrow."
And then you have to send Bitcoin.
Now, Bellingcat can't pay for that data because it's a foundation,
so I have to pay for that data myself.
Over the last five years of me working on data journalism,
I would say I've spent $150,000.
My wife has no idea about this.
My wife suspects I've spent probably 2,000 or 3,000.
If she knew the real quantum, she wouldn't be my wife.
So she's not watching the movie now? She's not watching this movie.
I'm absolutely sure she's not watching this movie now.
Wheeee!
Our expectation was, once he is released from intensive care,
he will have a desire to go to Russia immediately.
To our great relief, he told me,
"I better spend several months here.
"I want to go back to Russia strong and fully recovered."
For the longest time I wasn't sure what to make of Navalny.
I had always wondered how much of an independent figure he is, or is
he one of the many fake opposition figures created by the Kremlin?
I criticised him on Twitter.
I mean, he was known for having flirted with the extreme right in
the early days of his career.
He walked side-by-side with some pretty nasty nationalists
and racists. Had he moved beyond that?
Had he actually become a reverse dark knight?
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Within whole my career, I've been asked the same 15 questions all the time.
Are you afraid? Are you working for Kremlin?
What is your family doing? You have a responsibility for your family.
When, if it is foreign journalists,
they're asking about nationalism and Russian march.
And every one of them,
just, Jesus Christ, just watch previous interviews.
Hold on, were there not a couple of sieg-heilers at that thing? Sorry?
Were there not a couple of Nazi guys at that march?
Certainly a sieg-heiler would be a different category that you
would not want to associate with or march beside.
Well, in the normal world, in the normal political system,
of course I would never be in the same political party with them,
but we are creating a coalition,
broader coalition to fight a totalitarian regime, just to
achieve the situation where everyone can participate in elections.
A lot of politicians will be uncomfortable even
associating or being in the same photograph with one of these guys.
Are you comfortable with that? I'm OK with that
and I consider it is my political superpower,
I can talk to everyone.
Anyway, well, they are citizens of Russian Federation
and if I want to fight Putin, if I want to be leader of a country,
I cannot just ignore the huge part of it.
Well, there are a lot of people who call themselves nationalists.
OK, let's discuss it.
We are living in the country when they are poisoning politicians
and killing people and arresting people for nothing.
So of course, I am totally fine to sit with the guy whose...
whose rally looks kind of not very good for me.
The Russian media didn't find anything
and German investigators didn't have the jurisdiction.
So we realised there's nobody who is going to actually actively investigate this...
..unless we jump into this.
We knew that the poison was Novichok.
And Novichok, we had proven in the previous investigation,
is only manufactured in this facility
called the Signal Institute.
The Signal Institute in Moscow
works under the guise of a R&D centre
that develops advanced form of sports nutrition drinks.
That's the legend.
Yet they employ for this work 12 scientists
whose only experience and background is in chemical weapons.
Our hypothesis -
this is the entity that actually provides the poison for the killers
who travel around the world poisoning people with Novichok.
So what we did is we bought from the Russian black market
the phone records for the head of the Signal Institute.
We looked at numbers that only appear just before the poisoning
of Navalny, and those were suspicious.
But once we have a suspicious number,
you go through a number of Russian apps that allow you to see
how that phone number is listed in other people's phone books.
So, for example, I put in my number
and it will show up as Christo the journalist from Bellingcat.
Because somebody would have put my name into their phone book
and that description would have been shared into this app.
First number I looked up showed up as Alexey,
doctor from FSB.
Well, that was interesting. A doctor from FSB, Alexey?
But that was not enough. We couldn't place a real person behind this name.
Then I would look up if this number
showed up in any car registration databases.
And we found out an actual Alexey Alexandrov,
who owns a car.
And this number was listed for contacting that person.
So then you have a real person with a birth date.
Then you look up his passport file, you see his face.
You repeat that many times with the other suspicious numbers,
and then you have a shortlist of interesting people.
And these became our prime suspects.
Now, we knew when Navalny had travelled to Siberia.
We had the actual passenger manifests of six different flights
that had flown into Novosibirsk,
where Navalny flew from Moscow,
on the day before, during and after
the day on which he arrived there.
So we needed to see if any of those suspicious people
travelled to Siberia at the time of the poisoning,
and we found an overlap.
We found a nest of wasps we didn't know existed.
It's a domestic assassination machine on an industrial scale.
I was absolutely shocked that this was so fast
and the whole plot disentangled so quickly.
So I just reached out via Twitter and said,
"Alexei, I think we may have found who poisoned you."
CROWS CAW
After I went out of the hospital,
I decided to move to the Black Forest
and live in some small village.
You can just walk for hours and not meet any person at all.
These are my German friends.
Actually, the little pony is my friend
and donkey is Yulia's friend.
And this is the routine of our walk.
Come here, my little pony.
Isn't he sweet? Better than your donkey!
Come here. Everybody likes a small pony. It's, like, usual.
But donkeys... Come to me.
You're scaring him. Go away. Go away.
Oh, my poor guy.
Donkey, hi. Of course you like me.
Oh, come on. He doesn't see you.
This is a very evil woman.
YULIA LAUGHS
Come on, my mighty horse, come here.
More carrots. You will grow big.
They are cute, but they are not very smart,
so they decided, for their fence,
not to provide electricity. Stop doing it!
Ah!
Yulia want an apple
and asked me to take it.
But it's Germany, so it's...it's someone's apple,
and there is police over there.
I'll come there when it would be dark.
And no police.
So, you're a Russian criminal who arrived to Germany?
No. It's like, it's OK...
It belongs to... I don't know.
How do you know? How do you know that it belongs to a village?
Because there's open place. There's not anything which...
This is a very Russian style, you know,
thinking about property like it belongs to everyone...
THEY LAUGH ..because it's an open place.
Just come and get it.
The story of this guy who lives in Vienna but is Bulgarian,
but worked in Russia, and that he has all of his own money
and he spends it on investigating Russian crimes.
He just sounded too suspicious,
too good to be true, too, er...capable.
He sounded a bit, you know, made up.
Are you confident that he is not MI6 or CIA?
I'm pretty confident. I wouldn't say that I rule it out,
but I'm pretty confident that he's not.
I was suspicious about this guy from Twitter. Ha-ha!
I just saw his old laptop
and all these tables with data.
It turns out, and I was very surprised,
that the whole thing about Bellingcat,
it's just one smart guy.
No CIA involved, no MI6.
He's just a...a nice and very kind Bulgarian nerd with a laptop.
I will show you photographs.
You will tell me if you recognise
any of the people in those photographs.
Getting through emotionally to Alexei was a piece of cake.
Took literally an hour.
Getting through to Maria took much longer.
She was very tough, she never smiled.
She was the one vetting me, whether I am a spy or not.
But we needed the information that only his team would be privy to.
So we found a very workable arrangement,
which was completely ethical and acceptable to us.
We agreed that Maria Pevchikh would be working as part of our team,
and she would not be sharing with Alexei all the information in real-time,
so that we wouldn't be influenced by the bias of the victim.
When we discovered this clandestine operation,
it was so shocking that even to us, it looked unbelievable.
I mean, come on,
the government is paying a whole team of 20-plus people
whose only job is to poison other Russians?
That sounds improbable.
So we need other journalists to look at it.
I would like to share the limelight with some global media
so that it is validated by more than just us. Yeah, yeah.
So CNN and Spiegel are fine with you? Yeah, absolutely.
That means that we need to film
exactly, like, a week from now, maybe, like... Yeah.
We had a nightmare trying to get everybody to stick to the same time.
It's all timed for a simultaneous release.
All the media journalists are going to drop the bombshell simultaneously.
There's a huge debate as to whether this was intended
to incapacitate or kill.
Incapacitate or kill? Yeah. I would say kill. 100% kill.
If, for example, Navalny had laundry returned to him
while he was staying at the Tomsk Hotel the afternoon before he left,
would that be a point of access?
It's definitely a possibility.
The question is how well he can dose the agent that way.
You put, let's say, ten times the daily dose on the clothing,
you must be sure, however, that at least one lethal dose
gets into the body.
Tomorrow, I will set up a phone with fake ID.
So if we can call them through this number, we can try to...
We pretend to be someone else. Yes, we can try to prank them.
Yes, of course.
Navalny will call personally these poisoners one by one,
and we will record this.
Hi, this is Navalny. You may remember me from trying to kill me.
It's so great to see you. Thanks very much for coming.
Is it your contention
that Vladimir Putin must have been aware of this?
Of course. 100%.
It could have not happened without.
Who's the most stupid?
Most stupid of them? Yeah. Well, definitely...
..these are Spetsnaz guys with no real training.
I think it makes sense to try to prank stupid guys.
And, er...and maybe this non-military guy.
When you were a kid, did you have any political awareness?
Was it a political family? Did your family talk about politics?
Yes. Um...my...my family talks about politics all the time,
and it was, er...er...very, er...er...
They start to talk much more after Chernobyl disaster.
Because actually, my father and his family, they are from Chernobyl.
From the small village two kilometres away,
I would say ten kilometres away from the nuclear station.
Everyone knows that there was an explosion of the nuclear station,
but news keeping silence.
And so, all this nuclear and radioactive dust
was on these fields and they were forced to go, er...
not to plant potatoes,
just to prevent rumours, just to explain population
that everything is fine, everything is OK.
Go and work in the fields.
And with the first appearance of Putin on the screen, er...
I just felt it.
I have the same feeling.
Like I'm watching TV and I'm watching political leader
and he's looking into my eyes and lying to me.
This is the biggest challenge for me.
I tried to practise juggling for about a month.
And because of coordination and balancing,
because you need some balance here, it's...
I'm very bad in it.
One, two, three.
I think he wants to make sure this hits home in Russian media,
and he thinks that's best done if he does it.
So we're not being journalists reporting about some politician,
but we're reporting about a politician
who has his own YouTube show with over 30 million followers,
and who considers himself half a journalist.
Yeah, baby! Ah!
APPLAUSE
Yeah! Actually, the first time. You're lucky.
That's a very unusual situation and it doesn't make things easier.
Mum, is this yours? No.
LAUGHTER
Hold my beer while I'm making a TikTok.
No, no, no, no. Just, er...the second one.
You're just, er...filming me and I'm asking, "How bizarre?"
OK. OK.
MUSIC PLAYS # How bizarre... #
Stop. Again.
MUSIC PLAYS
# How bizarre... #
You should remove the second one.
Oh, we can do that? Yes, of course.
Oh! This is a, you know...
I don't know how to...I don't... I don't know how to do that.
Who's 19? You, apparently.
# A smile from the past
# Elephants and acrobats Lions, snakes, monkeys
# Pele speaks righteous Sister Zina says funky
# How bizarre
# How bizarre, how bizarre. #
THEY LAUGH
You know that Christo call it Moscow Four?
Er...you know what is Moscow Four?
No. What is that?
Huh!
Well, the email of the very top brass guy from intelligence
was hacked several times,
and his first password was Moscow One, and they hacked him.
So his second password was Moscow Two,
and they hacked him as well.
And so, the third time, he had password Moscow Three,
and just guess what was his fourth password?
So Moscow Four is the explanation of the stupidity of the system.
Dasha? Mm?
You take my phone
and we'll be at the kitchen pretending you're...
Can I see...? ..General Bogdanov.
I have no idea.
INCOMING CALL
OK, cool. Super.
Super.
Tomorrow, we will make these calls.
Honestly, I don't think it will work,
because, well, FSB guys,
they're supposed to be resistant to pranks.
Er...but Moscow Four. Moscow Four.
Er...yes. And then, we're ready to push the button
and everything will be published exactly at 12.
And also, I will publish my TikTok I recorded today.
THEY CHUCKLE Er...
and we'll have a kind of 15 minutes of shame with it.
THEY CHUCKLE
OK, see you tomorrow.
NAVALNY EXHALES
HE SIGHS
FAINT CHATTER
Now I totally feel like I'm an undercover agent wired up.
Are you not nervous?
Sorry? Are you nervous? No.
Please, come on! A little bit?
PHONE RINGS OUT
MAN ON PHONE: Hello?
Hung up.
Oh, my God, you ruined their day!
LAUGHS: Oh, it's not just the day, I guess!
PHONE RINGS OUT
MAN ON PHONE: Alexey.
Hung up. Maybe try the prank way?
OK.
PHONE RINGS OUT
MAN ON PHONE: Mikhail.
Hung up.
That was a freaking scared guy.
He recognised your voice. Yeah, yeah.
Muscle is not stupid.
I really think a scientist might talk to you. 1% chance.
OK, let's...let's... I-I... ..let's try to reach some scientists.
Kudryavtsev more interesting?
PHONE RINGS OUT
Mm-hm.
Boom! Now we got everything!
How could you do this? Yes. How could you do this?! Yes.
THEY MUTTER IN DISBELIEF
Moscow Four.
Oh, my fucking God!
He's not a muscle, he's a chemist.
He's a chemist? Yes.
He spilt the whole story. The whole story.
This...is unbelievable!
Poor guy. Poor guy?
They will kill him. They will kill him. Literally.
I think you'll be President, seriously, after this.
No, no. I can't believe... I think after this...
NAVALNY LAUGHS
..they will definitely kill me.
Poor Kudryavtsev.
Poor Kudryavtsev, yes.
He's a dead man.
Let's offer him to defect.
Let's arrange for him the whole thing.
Seriously... Cos I think that's a humanitarian thing to do.
He will be in a ditch by...
No, they'll kill him. They'll just... No, no.
They will kill him. They'll kill him.
OK. Well, Spiegel have been begging me to call them since the morning.
Can I tell them this already, confidentially?
Oh, let's just decide - are we going to publish this conversation?
Yes. Because I think we should wait for a...
Putin's press conference, at the very least. Sorry?
To Putin's press conference, at the very least. Yes.
It is on Thursday, or...? Thursday. The 17th.
Christo, before pushing this button, I want to say
that was an amazing job.
Thank you, everyone, for your contribution, guys.
COMPUTER CHIMES Yeah! Yeah!
High five. High five.
OK. Good. Good, good, good, good, good. Let's go.
REPORTER: Now an exclusive investigation can reveal
a top-secret mission. An elite team of operatives has been
tracking Navalny's every move for more than four years.
Oh, thank you very much. It's an honour for me to be on such a big
television of Spain, and I'm very pleased that you are paying
attention to this situation, so thank you very much.
This scheme, which looks like it's from the movies,
but in this particular case it's a real scheme with real people,
Putin on the very top.
In mid-August, Navalny and his team travel to Siberia.
At least five members of the FSB unit make the same
journey on different flights.
Well, they can't be tailing him now,
but of course I'm sure they're trying to.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Back in Tomsk, there was a surge in communication
among the FSB unit and their bosses.
If it was expected that Navalny would die on the flight,
they were now scrambling to deal with a very different situation.
We enter a run-down apartment building
on the outskirts of Moscow,
where operative Oleg Tayakin lives.
My name's Clarissa Ward. I work for CNN.
Can I ask you a couple of questions?
Was it your team that poisoned Navalny?
So, you've said that you want to go back to Russia.
You're aware of the risks of going back. Definitely.
Why do you want to go back? I don't want these, you know,
groups of killers exist in Russia. I don't want Putin being President.
I don't want him being Tsar of Russia.
I want to go back and try to change it.
That was a fantastic piece. Yeah.
For the team.
ALL: Cheers.
"He opens his mouth with American songs"! On TikTok! By the way...
Their line... Their line is crazy stuff, yeah? Crazy stuff.
Crazy, funny stuff, like...
Who's he?
Think about it. They're talking about this all the time. Yes!
They're talking about you, and their version, it's, "Ha-ha-ha,
"this is very funny." But the main point is they have the problem,
otherwise they would not launch it. Right. Because it's cross-channel.
They allowed the state number-one channel,
that has never mentioned his name, to only talk about him now. Yeah.
You're absolutely right. This is the main point.
It's not affordable for them to keep silent.
QUIET CONVERSATION
She plays chess. Chess. Better than all others in our family.
Better than everyone in our family.
And because of this series, Queen's Gambit,
she's demanding that everyone should play chess.
But nobody's playing. That's why I'm playing with the phone.
But I definitely prefer Call Of Duty. I definitely prefer chess.
I prefer shopping.
MACHINE HUMS
Ready for a 12-hour flight.
We have to sit down for good luck.
Da.
Starting from 13 years old, I would think about what would I do
if my dad was killed.
Whenever I had, like, THE talk, you know,
it's not anything that you can, like, sit at the table and discuss.
So, it's a nice opportunity for you, Dasha, to see the snow,
so much snow, before you go to LA, right?
There's snow in California.
There was a point a year ago where my dad was almost not there
for my high-school graduation. He was in jail once again.
And, like, the whole day I was just thinking about how my dad
would have been... I'm sorry.
..my dad would have been proud to see me walk on the stage
and get my certificate. And he wouldn't get that option,
because he was in jail for doing the right thing.
I know that my dad misses Russia...
..even though it's scary to go back.
And if he didn't go back,
I would say, "You need to go back and fight."
It's something worth fighting for.
CAMERAS CLICK
His favourite ultimate answer for everything - "It's CIA."
Of course. Because this is just an amazing pass to us.
Now we have a ball, because he said, like,
"Well, if we want to poison him, of course we would have poisoned him."
So...
Just... We will, I mean, the whole argumentation,
we will smash it with Kudryavtsev.
That was my defence.
I'm just very curious how people will react to it,
whether they will be as astonished as we are.
Hopefully will be, because nothing like that's ever happened to anyone.
Well, it's totally unbelievable.
I would never believe it if I wasn't part of it!
Three hundred...
300,000 views for 20 minutes.
One hour later, one million views.
Georg?
Maria? Cool!
The poisoning of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny has taken
an even more bizarre turn.
If this was a Hollywood movie, you would say it was over the top.
But this is not. This is real.
And, boy, does this conversation punch a giant hole
in the Kremlin's narrative.
Surely this is hugely embarrassing for the Kremlin and for the FSB.
Oh, absolutely.
It's embarrassing for Mr Kudryavtsev,
it's embarrassing for the FSB, it's embarrassing for the Kremlin.
The FSB has said that a video of the conversation posted on
Navalny's YouTube channel was fake and that the phone call
was a provocation aimed at discrediting the agency.
Navalny is suffering from delusion of persecution.
Otherwise, there's a Freudian fixation on his own crotch area.
This is probably how all this should be treated.
How is President Navalny different from President Putin?
Well, my major task as a president, just to prevent, you know,
this damn circle of re-establish of authoritarian regime.
In authoritarian country, you're pro authoritarian leader or
you are against authoritarian leader.
So we are in more primitive politics, like human rights,
freedom of speech, fair election.
The power and money, tax money, they're supposed to belong to
the local communities, and in Russia,
everything decided in Moscow.
So being a president, I just have this, you know,
big pie of my power, and I will cut it for the future of Russia.
VOICES NEARBY
I apologise. I'm sorry, for the record.
I just five minutes ago told Daniel
to get the fuck out of here with his camera.
So, like, I apologise for that, because, well, it's...
Everything is, like...
Everything is happening in the last ten minutes,
and I have to make, like, millions of emails.
Have a seat. Maria, have a seat.
Just put your things in the office. Sorry.
Ha-ha-ha-ha...
Sorry, you have to sit.
It's a Russian superstition, but it's important.
WOMAN SCREAMS
The entire, wide police just tried arresting everybody,
including journalists live on the air. This is crazy.
Jesus! Jesus!
I've never seen anything like this.
MAN CRIES OUT
There's no way they're not going to arrest him.
I don't think that they will let him come out to the front.
I think they're going to yank him away
before anybody else is let off the plane.
This is the plane. This is Moscow.
And this is the plane. And this is Moscow.
CAPTAIN: Thank you for your co-operation.
LAUGHTER
It's a hot potato. Really. I mean...
They realised that it's not possible to control the crowd.
And they chickened out.
SHOUTING AND CHANTING
CHANTING CONTINUES
SHOUTING
CAR HORN BLARES
HORNS BLARE
Navalny!
LAWYER'S VOICE FADES OUT
APPLAUSE
CHANTING: Yulia! Yulia! Yulia!
CAR DOOR CLOSES
MAN: Yulia! Yulia!
CHANTING: Navalny! Navalny! Navalny!
SHOUTING
MAN SHOUTS
CROWD SHOUTS
CHANTING: Navalny! Navalny!
Alexei, if you are arrested and thrown in prison,
or the unthinkable happens and you're killed,
what message do you leave behind to the Russian people?
Erm... My message...
..for the situation that I am killed is very simple.
Not give up.
Do me a favour, answer this one in Russian.
Um...