Opposing Russia's president can be seriously bad for your health.
Putin has made it very clear that traitors don't deserve to live.
Assassins can track you down, wherever you are.
In August 2020, Russia's charismatic opposition leader,
Aleksei Navalny, was poisoned with the notorious weapon Novichok.
Miraculously, he survived.
Putin, he's using this to kill me and, you know, terrify others.
This is an extraordinary story of assassination squads...
A murder machine exists in Russia,
and it is killing or trying to kill many people.
..a family risking everything...
..an astonishing confession...
It's the first time in history that a murderer admitted to
the victim that they tried to kill him.
..and poisoned underpants.
It's a tale of two men. One has a team of assassins at his disposal.
The other's only weapons - a sense of humour,
a team of intrepid investigators and the power of social media.
At stake, the future of Russia.
It's the 20th of August, 2020.
Aleksei Navalny is flying home to Moscow from the Siberian
city of Tomsk in Russia's vast hinterland.
He's President Putin's most famous opponent,
so he's recognised everywhere.
This could have been the last photograph Navalny ever posed for.
He doesn't know it yet, but he's been poisoned.
In less than an hour, he'll be in a coma.
Navalny boards the plane for the 3,000 km flight west to Moscow.
His assistant, Kira Yarmysh, is with him.
He starts to watch his favourite cartoon, Rick And Morty.
NAVALNY GROANS
Paramedics are waiting on the runway.
With his heart rate slowing, they give him atropine -
a standard treatment for insecticide poisoning.
But none of the medics know whether he'll live or die.
But why would anyone want to kill him?
Dobryi dyen!
For the last ten years, Navalny's sophisticated YouTube videos
have made him Vladimir Putin's most effective opponent.
It wasn't always this way.
These are his first less than impressive efforts from 2007.
But Navalny's confidence in the possibilities
of the internet was unshakeable.
He told me that this is the future of politics,
and the young generation, they are in the internet,
they are online, and talking to them is the future of Russia.
First, he developed his live journal account, then appeared Twitter...
..Facebook, and then, after some time, YouTube, so it was a very
gradual development and emergence of Navalny's social media empire.
Most Russian TV stations were effectively
mouthpieces for Putin and his party, United Russia.
Hey, hey! The internet, however, was still free.
Navalny's live broadcasts
and investigations into corruption were seen by tens of millions.
Over the years, he's made hundreds of videos from all over Russia.
And on the day before the poisoning,
he's in Siberia to shoot his latest one.
He's here to support two anti-Putin candidates standing for election
and, as always, highlighting local corruption.
Corruption is something that every Russian
sees in their life every single day.
And so that's an issue that sort of gets people's attention,
and that focuses these sometimes desperate public
expressions of discontent against the Kremlin and the Putin regime
into one very clear direction.
Navalny's single-minded focus on corruption has made him
powerful enemies,
and he's not the only person in Tomsk on a special mission.
While he's out filming, a secret hit squad that has been
following him for over three years is breaking into his hotel room.
The next morning, Navalny is in a coma when his wife, Yulia,
is called by Kira Yarmysh.
Yulia heads straight to a Moscow airport
but faces a two-hour delay before the next flight to Siberia.
Yulia Navalny has been by Aleksei's side for over 20 years
and is a public figure in her own right.
The couple met on holiday in Turkey in 1998 and married two years later.
The Navalnys' daughter, Dasha,
was born in 2001 and is now a student at Stanford University
in America, while their son, Zahar, is at boarding school in Germany.
Yulia has supported Aleksei through raids on their apartment,
lawsuits and worse.
She's his closest confidante, his best friend
and the one who packs his bags every time he goes to prison.
She is absolutely part of his journey, both metaphorically,
physically, politically - whichever way you want to call it.
As Yulia waits for her flight,
she knows Aleksei's life hangs in the balance.
While Yulia is in the air, Navalny's YouTube channel broadcasts
a live phone interview with Kira Yarmysh.
Russian state television takes a rather different
view of his illness.
Yulia and Navalny's doctor, Anastasia Vasilyeva,
finally get to Omsk, but they're refused permission to see Aleksei.
After two agonising hours, the authorities finally relent.
The official line is that Navalny's illness is due to low blood sugar
or possibly alcohol, but Yulia and Anastasia Vasilyeva feel
certain that the doctors are hiding something.
Alexei Navalny's road to a hospital bed in Omsk
started in the last days of the Soviet Union.
He was born in 1976 in a small village near Moscow,
the son of an army officer,
and spent his childhood summers with his grandmother, beside the
River Pripyat, in the shadow of Chernobyl nuclear power station.
Russia's radioactivity reaches Britain. Soviet television tonight
accused the Western media of spreading slanderous inventions
about the Chernobyl accident.
But the Moscow Communist Party chief told West German television
that radioactivity around the nuclear plant was still high.
He was ten when the place became a nuclear wasteland,
the result of Communist inefficiency and lies.
Navalny spent every summer there, swimming in the river,
which is the source of radiation.
So there is a personal connection there.
It's a symbol of how dysfunctional the Soviet Union is
and everything that's wrong with it,
that lies cost lives.
At the time of Chernobyl, Vladimir Putin was a minor KGB
spy in Dresden, then part of East Germany.
But by the turn of the millennium,
he'd become one of the most powerful men in the world.
Alexei was just 23 when Putin became President.
Russians had endured nearly ten years of economic chaos
and corruption, since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Many now welcomed a new, young president,
who promised strong leadership,
even if he was the ex-head of the KGB.
And he made friends abroad as well.
I looked the man in the eye, I found him to be very straightforward
and trustworthy.
But some in Russia were not so sure.
Journalist and academic Yevgenia Albats felt that he might not
be as committed to democracy as he claimed.
Mostly, I was terrified he will bring his power from the KGB
and they will take over.
And eventually, they will become the ones who run the country.
It's not just one man who was coming to power.
Albats set out to inspire a new generation of young activists,
with meetings in her Moscow flat.
Navalny was included, but failed to make much of an impression.
Alexei Navalny was not well known
in the democratic movement.
A lot of people would say that he's a nice guy, he's a great organiser,
but he doesn't have any political future.
It was a prediction that Navalny quickly proved wrong.
By 2012, when Putin was elected President for the third time,
Navalny had moved successfully from the virtual world to the real
world of protest.
A powerful orator, he mobilised tens of thousands in opposition to
Putin and his United Russia Party.
By focusing on corruption, he tapped into widespread discontent
and tried to convince the Russian people
that change really was possible.
Throughout 2012, he continued his transformation
from troublemaking YouTuber to troublemaking opposition politician.
Then in 2013, he ran for Mayor of Moscow and incredibly,
almost forced a run off against the United Russia candidate,
President Putin's former chief of staff.
He'd made himself such a nuisance that he had to be stopped.
In 2010,
Navalny had gone to study at Yale University in the United States.
His time there has been used by the state to paint him
as a traitor and a paid agent of the CIA.
Myself and Alexei were at Yale on the World Fellow Programme,
along with 12, 13 other people,
who they identify as being potential global leaders, influencers.
There were two real challenges.
One would be that he was being recruited by the CIA.
The other that's come out is that he would himself be
accused of corruption.
They put together a fake set of exchanges between
CIA agents or something,
where they would refer to Navalny as Agent Freedom.
Anti-corruption activist has to be transformed into the agent
of the enemy. Navalny may be fighting corruption,
but he is a hired gun of the West, to undermine our sovereignty.
And I think some people by now honestly believe this
narrative within the regime.
As predicted by his colleagues at Yale, Navalny also became
the focus of police investigations into corruption.
He was accused of stealing half a million dollars
from a timber company.
Then, a year later, both he and his brother Oleg,
were found guilty of defrauding a French cosmetics company.
It's very advantageous for Kremlin, you know, when somebody is fighting
corruption to say that he's corrupt himself.
To really understand what was going on takes a lot of time.
So when people don't have a lot of time, you know,
they make all kinds of assumption.
Even though, legally, there is nothing there.
The European Court later found that in the first case,
Navalny didn't get a fair trial
and his conviction in the second was arbitrary and unfair.
Navalny's brother Oleg served his full sentence of three
and a half years in a penal colony,
while Alexei was paroled after a few weeks on condition that he
report to Russia's prison service twice a month.
More damaging to his reputation as a liberal are two videos that
Navalny himself made in the mid-2000s.
One in support of gun ownership.
And another against immigration.
ROARS AND GUNFIRE
He was naive at that time and I think that this was a mistake
and I think it's still haunting him.
He's not the same guy as he was when he was filming these videos
and I think we have to give him the benefit of changing his mind
and, you know, being mistaken.
Navalny's nationalist sympathies also led him
to march alongside Neo Nazis, so-called Russian Patriots,
and others on the right wing fringe at several rallies.
There's this endless question with Navalny about those
nationalist views, and there's some people who have concerns
about them in good faith
and there's people who have concerns about them in bad faith.
I asked him about those videos and he was quite clear that he didn't
regret them, that they were not something to be taken seriously, but
he was very clear, he wasn't going to say that they were a mistake.
I know him as a person I made friends with.
We sat next to each other in class, we had lunch together,
we went on socials together.
Since then, I hear people attempting to pigeonhole him as xenophobic,
anti-immigrant, racist, hostile and all these other things.
There is always going to be an attack on his character,
an attempt to discredit the work he's been doing to expose
these frauds, just like there was attempts to charge him
with corruption a few years ago.
But even where he has said things that are problematic,
my experience of him leaves me with hope for him.
The Kremlin has capitalised on Navalny's apparent racism
and extreme nationalism and Amnesty International at one point
suspended their support for him.
But in August 2020, as he lay in a coma in Omsk, it was clear that
someone, somewhere had decided a more permanent solution was
required to make the Navalny problem go away.
Nuremberg Airport, Germany.
An air ambulance, paid for by Navalny's supporters,
is on standby to fly 4,000 km to Siberia.
But there's a problem -
the Kremlin doesn't want Alexei to leave the country just yet.
The team of medics set off anyway,
hoping the Russians can be persuaded.
Once in Siberia,
the German team is told their patient is too sick to travel.
The Russians, it seems, are playing for time.
We said, hey, look, gentlemen, it would be great
if our team could visit the patient, could speak to you in person,
face-to-face, discuss the situation, show them our equipment,
to convince them let our team go to the patient and see
if we can discuss it and see if this could change their minds of course.
In the hospital,
Yulia is not allowed to speak to the German doctors.
Whoever ordered Navalny's poisoning
knows exactly what is wrong with him.
But it appears that, having messed up the murder,
they are now trying to cover their tracks.
When the German medics are whisked away to their hotel,
Yulia gives an impromptu press conference.
Navalny is also being talked about in Berlin.
Two days after he was stretchered, dying, from an aeroplane,
Navalny is on the move again.
Vladimir Putin, it seems, has relented,
and we reveal that the crucial intervention came from Finland.
There was a very significant international pressure
applied from French President Macron, from Charles Michel,
the president of the European Council, and I think the final call,
which nailed it, was a call from the Finnish president,
Sauli Niinisto, who has, like,
a more or less trustful relations with Putin.
Probably President Niinisto had found some right words
to persuade Putin to avoid major scandal.
Still unsure what has caused Navalny's illness,
the aircrew are taking no chances.
They put him in a plastic case,
to make sure whatever is on or in him doesn't affect anyone else.
Exactly what that is remains a mystery.
In Germany, a convoy carries Navalny to the Charite Hospital
in Berlin.
Blood and urine samples are sent for analysis to various laboratories
around Europe, and the mystery poison is finally identified.
It is a form of Novichok, the banned chemical weapon infamously used
against Yulia and Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, in 2018.
Russian state television has a very different way
of presenting the latest instalment of the drama to its viewers.
While accusations fly around the world, Navalny is still in a coma.
But miraculously, just over two weeks later,
his condition has improved so much
that his doctors decide to bring him round.
Navalny leaves hospital after just four and a half weeks,
but he is struggling to walk, his hands shake,
and he's constantly exhausted.
A month later, he appears on American television.
It's clear his spirit is unbroken.
We should fight these people because they will never stop.
They will poison someone else, they will poison more people.
As he heads to the Black Forest to recuperate,
attention turns to who tried to kill him.
The revelations that eventually emerge are astonishing.
A secret poison lab,
a state-sponsored assassination programme,
and a team of James Bond wannabes
with the competence of Johnny English.
You will not see us run.
You will not see us hide.
You will not see us give up.
This is our country.
We have to fight for it.
While Navalny recovers in Germany,
Vladimir Kara-Murza knows exactly what he's going through.
An outspoken critic of Putin,
he has twice been the victim of suspected poisoning.
I suddenly felt difficulty breathing, my heart began to race.
I felt my blood pressure drop. I began to sweat, I began to vomit.
It's painful and terrifying, to be feeling
that you are dying at this moment and to not be able to breathe.
And after that, I don't remember anything for more than a month.
Like Navalny, Kara-Murza survived,
but he knows he is one of the lucky ones.
It's a strange statistical model,
that people who happen to oppose the regime of Vladimir Putin...
..happen to just walk into these strange accidents
and suffer from really bad health and just be really
not careful with what they do and how they live their lives.
There is a long list of victims.
Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, shot on her doorstep.
Whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky, dead after a beating in prison.
Defector Alexander Litvinenko,
poisoned in London with polonium-210,
served to him in a cup of tea.
Politician Sergei Yushenkov, shot dead near his house.
And there are many more who have perished suddenly
or had lucky escapes.
Putin has made it very clear that he thinks traitors don't deserve
to live and we have seen people he considers to be traitors,
like Alexander Litvinenko or Sergei Skripal, you know,
the denials they have had anything to do with those murders,
those attempted murders in the case of Skripal, they have been
sort of almost denials with a bit of a wink and a nod.
The Russian state media alleged that Litvinenko himself
was illegally trading in polonium and accidentally swallowed it.
When Viktor Yushchenko,
the Ukrainian presidential candidate, suffered a horrible
poisoning, Russian state television said that he ate bad sushi.
With me, it was too much alcohol in combination with some medicines.
With Alexei Navalny, it was low blood sugar.
Every time, the Kremlin and its propaganda machine
immediately starts to throw out these "alternative" explanations.
They immediately start to muddy the waters.
One assassination that hit Alexei Navalny particular hard
was the murder in 2015 of his political mentor, Boris Nemtsov.
Nemtsov had been the Deputy Prime Minister in the '90s,
but fell out with Putin and joined the opposition.
My father and Navalny got closer.
There was one moment when they found themselves locked in one prison
cell and they spent the whole night together, talking to each other.
My father was a political visionary.
He was very experienced as a politician.
He was...
..a person who united opposition leaders
because he didn't have personal ambitions.
That's what many other opposition leaders later admitted -
he was like a unifying figure in the Russian opposition.
In February 2015, Nemtsov was walking home
over the Bolshoy Moskvoretskiy Bridge,
within sight of the Kremlin, in central Moscow.
Despite the site's strategic importance,
all CCTV cameras in the area had conveniently been turned off.
But a distant view from a local TV station captured the hit.
As a truck draws up alongside him, a gunman shoots Nemtsov
in the back before making his getaway in the circled car.
I went to bed at around 11 o'clock,
and I had a habit to switch off all my smartphones, not to be disturbed.
My mother, for some reason, did not do that on this night.
In the midnight, I heard her crying and yelling,
and I didn't understand what had happened.
And then she came to my room and she said, er...
"Our father is dead."
This was the most brazen,
the most high-profile political assassination in the modern
history of Russia and to this day, the organisers,
the masterminds of this crime continue to enjoy full protection
from the highest levels of the Russian state,
for reasons that I think are obvious to everyone who is watching this.
He mentioned that he could be killed,
but I don't believe that he believed in it, really.
He thought like that I was in the government in the '90s,
I'm one of the most high-profile politicians in Russia.
It's impossible.
Whoever ordered Nemtsov's murder has never been identified.
And five years later,
as Navalny recovers from the Novichok attack in the Black Forest,
it looks as if whoever poisoned him is also going to get away with it.
But Bellingcat, a loose alliance of citizen journalists,
founded in a bedroom in Leicester, has other ideas.
Bellingcat has an incredible record of solving global whodunnits.
It tracked the Russian missile launcher that brought down
flight MH17 over Ukraine,
and named the Salisbury poisoners, identifying them as Russian spies.
As Navalny recuperates, its researchers are piecing
together the evidence to stand up a sensational accusation.
The big picture that we got was that, yes,
a murder machine exists in Russia and it is killing,
or trying to kill many people, and the question is, how many?
Following on from its investigation into the Salisbury poisoning
of the Skripals, the Bellingcat team found
a secret Russian chemical weapons plant called the Signal Institute.
With mobile phone records bought on the Russian black market,
they discovered links between senior staff there
and a team within Russia's secret police, the FSB.
The FSB has this scary second service which is
the equivalent of Hitler's Gestapo.
It is essentially the political police that goes after
opposition figures.
We had just completed an investigation
into the Signal Institute,
which we found continued to engage in production
and upgrading of chemical weapons.
And what we started doing then was looking at metadata
and call logs of people at the top of this scientific institute,
and trying to find if there is any interconnection
with somebody from the FSB.
This information is important in two ways.
First of all, of course, we understand that this person
speaks with another and we can link two different agents together.
And through GPS, we see where this person is located.
And we found that one of the most frequent counterparts
of the scientific institute guy from the FSB side was communicating
frequently with five people that have a chemical weapons background
or a medical background, or a chemical engineering background.
Then we started tracing their travel.
And we found that there had been significant overlaps between
their travel and destinations that Alexei Navalny had travelled to.
At the outset, we found three or four overlaps and we thought,
well, this could still be a coincidence.
By tracking their flights and using facial recognition software,
they found that members of the team were travelling under fake names
and several were using passports with consecutive serial numbers,
a giveaway that they were produced in a batch by the FSB.
We delved further and deeper and we found a total of more than 35
overlaps and then we thought, OK, well, this cannot be a coincidence.
This must be the team that has been tailing him,
and this could not be just a political surveillance team
because a political surveillance team would not include a doctor,
a chemical engineer and a chemical weapons specialist.
Either they were creating a pattern of his movements
so that they can plan an assassination operation when needed,
or they were always on standby, waiting for a political decision
from somebody high up, who might have decided, hmm,
now is the time because he becomes a risk or a danger.
The Bellingcat investigators then discovered a direct connection
between the FSB poison team
and Navalny's last journey, to Tomsk.
One of the FSB unit, Alexandrov,
he switched on his cellphone for only one second in Tomsk.
I think he was just changing his Sim card,
because he wanted to work secretly.
But he didn't know that even if you turn on your phone, it's enough
to send one byte of information to your telephone operator.
Bellingcat's painstaking research has found enough evidence
left behind by the would-be assassins to prove beyond reasonable
doubt that there is a team of chemical killers stalking Navalny.
And coming up, for the first time,
the man who invented Novichok shares a shocking revelation.
This is Shikhany, a closed military town 1,000 km southeast of Moscow.
It's been a centre for chemical weapons research for decades.
British intelligence believes the Novichok used on the Skripals
in Salisbury was manufactured here.
It might even have been made by this man.
Uglev's knowledge of how Novichok works
meant that he recognised Navalny's symptoms
long before lab tests proved it was the poison used on him.
Uglev thinks that the Russians have secretly made
his original invention more deadly.
This suggests Russia has not only been violating international
chemical weapons treaties by storing and using old nerve agents,
it's also been covertly developing new poisons
as part of its assassination programme.
Uglev also believes he knows how the Novichok was administered.
As soon as Navalny's team in Tomsk got news of his collapse,
they went to his hotel room to collect anything that might
be evidence of foul play and sent it to Germany.
Novichok was later found on the outside of a water bottle,
but not in the water.
Uglev knows why.
A secret chemical weapon...
..poisoned underpants and a crack team of assassins.
What could possibly go wrong?
It's six weeks before Putin's poisoners
very nearly kill Navalny in Siberia,
and Yulia and Alexei have decided they need a summer holiday.
What better romantic getaway can there be
than a week in the Baltic resort of Kaliningrad?
Coincidentally, three FSB secret agents have exactly the same idea
and book a vacation to the same destination at the same time.
Even hit men deserve a break now and again.
Three days into their holiday, the Navalnys are walking along the beach
when Yulia starts to feel unwell.
By the next morning, Yulia had recovered,
so we'll never know if this was just some bad sushi
or if the three men who were following the Navalnys -
all with chemical weapons expertise -
had made a botched attempt to kill Alexei
and almost poisoned Yulia.
We cannot be 100% sure that that's what happened, but what we do see
is that the team was there exactly on the time when she fell ill,
and that immediately after that, there was a spike of phone calls
between this team and people at the Signal Institute,
which produces Novichok.
The Bellingcat dossier shows that a chemical weapons hit squad
had been following Navalny for years.
But what is it about the summer of 2020 that makes someone, somewhere
decide that Alexei Navalny must die?
CHANTING
REPORTER: The March to Freedom, attended by tens of thousands today.
This was a remarkable display of people power without fear.
Nine days before Navalny's poisoning, Minsk,
the capital of the former Soviet republic of Belarus, was in turmoil.
CROWD CHEERS
SIRENS BLARE
SHOUTING
EXPLOSIONS
700 km east of Moscow, and not even part of Russia,
Belarus has been ruled for the last 25 years
by a man many call Europe's last dictator, Alexander Lukashenko.
As he sought a sixth term in office in 2020,
an opposition movement seemed to appear out of nowhere.
Its figurehead was a previously unknown English teacher,
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.
CROWD CHEERS
For decades, Putin watched and supported
Belarus's oppressive throwback to Soviet rule.
Could his reaction to the protests have sealed Navalny's fate?
What happened in Belarus may be a coincidence,
but certainly I think there was probably a feeling
that when you have latent discontent,
having any outlet to express it is dangerous.
And a charismatic politician,
with a network of dedicated campaigners
in cities across the country,
if he is someone that, at the crisis moment, pops up
and is offering an alternative, I think that's very dangerous.
REPORTER: For the past week, this country has been the latest arena
in the tussle between autocracy and democracy.
As the protesters in Belarus threatened to topple their leader,
the question in the Kremlin of what to do about Navalny
became increasingly urgent.
I think that Vladimir Putin believed that
this is a very, very likely possibility.
And he understood that, of course, Navalny would be the person who
would bring hundreds of thousands of people in Russia to the streets.
REPORTER: The revolution is in seductive mode.
And who knows if the soldiers' awkward blushes
will translate into a failure to fire?
They were hugely unnerved by the protests.
And he saw it as an omen of similar things coming to Russia.
So, the connections were not hard to build.
With Navalny on his way to Siberia,
the order went out to eliminate Putin's turbulent tormentor.
But ultimately, the quick decisions of a pilot who wasn't in on the plot
and paramedics who were just trying to save a life
led to yet another botched assassination.
And from his German retreat,
Navalny - armed with Bellingcat's research -
begins to taunt Putin and his team of poisoners.
It's one thing to understand something intellectually,
as it were, and it's quite another to be shown the faces and names
of the actual people who tried to kill me.
I was looking at the photographs,
and I was seeing just normal, ordinary faces -
you know, the kind that I would see here on the streets of Moscow
every single day. And yet these people are professional murderers
in the employment of the state.
I was thinking to myself,
"What do these people talk about at the family dinner table?"
What do their kids ask them about -
"How many people did you poison today, Daddy?"
It's mind-boggling.
REPORTER: We enter a rundown apartment building
on the outskirts of Moscow where operative Oleg Tayakin lives.
With the help of Bellingcat and Navalny, a journalist from CNN
decides to track down one of the alleged assassins.
My name's Clarissa Ward. I work for CNN.
Can I ask you a couple of questions?
No surprise that Mr Tayakin didn't want to chat.
But his boss, the president, was more forthcoming.
He admitted that there had been FSB people tailing Navalny.
Interestingly enough, he also said,
"If we had tried to poison him, we would have finished the job,"
which is one of the most shocking things to come from a head of state,
because he did not even try to argue that "We don't kill people."
He just said, "If we want to kill people, we do it properly."
As 2020 draws to a close,
Navalny has another surprise lined up for the president.
Navalny's newest video blows apart Putin's claim
that if the FSB had been involved, they'd have done the job properly
and Alexei would be dead.
Navalny calls up one of the team involved in the poisoning,
posing as the assistant to one of Putin's most senior advisers.
For a long time, I thought, "There's no way that this guy wouldn't have
"recognised Alexei's voice. There's no way that he's not fooling us."
Probably at any given moment in time, we will have the FSB
break down the door in this German house we were in and just kill us.
And then I thought, "Well, this is real, this is happening.
"The guy really thinks he's talking to the aide to the boss."
And he's spilling the beans in real time.
It's just unbelievable.
I mean, I assume it's the first time in the history of criminality
that the alleged murderers actually admitted to the victim
that they tried to kill him,
describing exactly how they did it and where they put the Novichok.
Like me and you, we thought Russian secret services
are professional and they're scary.
The underpants story created a stream of memes
that make fun of the Kremlin, but also of secret services,
and equate them with underpants washers, underpants cleaners,
underpants poisoners.
And this is probably the worst damage
done to the Russian secret services that I have seen in my career.
After Navalny throws his latest YouTube custard pie
at Putin from the relative safety of Germany,
people start to wonder if he'll ever return to Russia.
Some of his supporters want him to stay in the West,
part of the ever-expanding Russian opposition-in-exile.
But on the 13th of January, 2021,
Navalny ends the speculation - he's going home.
I challenged him whether that was smart,
whether that was expedient, and he said it doesn't matter.
He said, I have to return to Russia because the alternative means
soon I will be just an emigre who's just yelling at Russia.
I need to be where my followers are. I need to be there.
Aleksei and Yulia board a flight to Moscow.
The plane is packed with journalists.
The master of social media is stage managing his return
for maximum impact.
He's even chosen a Russian airline called Pobeda, meaning Victory.
Seated a few rows behind the Navalnys is Arkady Ostrovsky.
I knew this was a big political act.
It was no ordinary flight and, with real history,
you sensed it was happening there and then.
It's a flight carrying him back into politics and turning him
into sort of a mythical figure.
Hundreds of supporters gather at Moscow's Vnukovo Airport
to welcome their hero home.
But at the last moment, the flight is diverted to another
airport where a rather different group is waiting for him.
He's arrested as he clears passport control
and spirited away to a police station.
He's charged with violating the terms of his parole
from 2014 by not reporting immediately to the authorities
in Russia on his discharge from hospital in Germany.
With Navalny behind bars and facing a lengthy prison sentence,
Putin seems to be holding all the aces.
But Aleksei still has at least one more card up his sleeve,
and it's something Vladimir Putin will never forget or forgive.
Awaiting trial inside one of Russia's toughest prisons,
Matrosskaya Tishina, some people would be cowed.
Not Alexei Navalny.
Via his lawyers,
he greenlights the release of his most audacious video yet.
His team have been secretly working on it for months.
Navalny is about to be sent away for a long time,
and he lobs this missile attack at the Kremlin from behind bars.
In ten days, the film - Putin's Palace -
racks up over 100 million views.
By February, it's been seen by a quarter
of Russia's adult population.
It combines biting satire with forensic investigation,
in a direct attack on Vladimir Putin.
For many people across Russia, this was like a big eye-opener.
It reveals the existence of a secret palace on the Black Sea
that allegedly belongs to the Russian President.
Putin, for years, has maintained this ascetic image, you know,
like he only works for Russia 24/7
and he doesn't care about riches, material things, you know?
Putin's approval rating has a six percentage point dip
in three, four weeks after the movie was released.
CASH REGISTER DINGS
People actually realised that this is essentially a maniac
preoccupied with luxury.
As damaging as the revelations of personal greed
are the details about the palace itself.
Gold toilet brushes worth 700 euros each,
a retractable stripper pole
and a room for playing with toy cars.
The film questions not just Putin's greed but his sanity.
Putin denies he has any connection to the palace, let alone owns it.
Then at the end of January 2021, his former judo sparring partner,
the oligarch Arkady Rotenberg, steps forward to claim that it's his.
With just two weeks to go before Navalny is due in court
for sentencing, this deliberate baiting of Putin
seems calculated to ensure he will become a martyr.
Far away from the excess of Putin's palace,
the next scene in the battle between Navalny and the Kremlin
plays out in a dingy Moscow courtroom.
The outcome is never in doubt.
Navalny is sentenced to three and a half years in prison
for failing to comply with the terms of his parole.
Before he's led away,
he makes an impassioned speech that's secretly recorded,
mocking his would-be assassins and their master.
He saves his final gesture for his wife, Yulia.
There is always this double optic with Navalny.
He is talking to the nation, he is talking to all his supporters.
But actually, he is talking and addressing himself
to Yulia Navalnaya.
And then they are separated
and he is standing behind the bulletproof glass in this cage,
and he makes the heart symbol with his hands.
Navalny is moved to Pokrov Penal Colony No 2,
100 km east of Moscow.
THEY CHANT
It's one of Russia's harshest prisons.
Konstantin Kotov spent four long years here,
sentenced for taking part in political rallies.
Navalny gets Instagram messages out to his supporters
through his lawyers.
But as the prison regime takes its toll,
the effects of the Novichok mean his health starts to fail.
The authorities refuse to take him to hospital.
He spends 24 days on hunger strike, demanding better health care.
What we see now is that he's in jail,
with a seriously deteriorating medical condition.
Some of the symptoms we see are neurological symptoms.
He doesn't feel his right leg.
He cannot control the muscles of his right leg.
But because the Russian authorities refused to recognise
he was poisoned in the first place,
doctors are not even allowed to take that previous poisoning into account
when they are diagnosing what's wrong with him now.
And this itself is criminal and can be fatal.
The months since Navalny's imprisonment
have seen Russia face deepening oppression.
In June, Navalny's anti-corruption foundation,
Fond Borby s Korruptsiyey,
was designated an extremist organisation,
making it equivalent to Al-Qaeda and Isis.
Supporting Navalny in any way can now get you arrested.
His allies had hoped to use tactical voting to beat Putin's party,
United Russia, in September's elections.
Now, they're just hoping to stay out of prison.
SHOUTING ON VIDEO
Over the course of making this film,
our contributors have been outlawed and imprisoned.
In Tomsk, Ksenia Fadeeva has been arrested twice
and had her computers seized.
Roman Dobrokhotov's home was raided by the police,
and he was taken in for questioning.
Vladimir Milov has chosen to go into exile in Latvia.
Kira Yarmysh was put under nightly house arrest
and has now gone into exile in Finland.
Politician Ilya Yashin has been barred
from contesting future elections.
Dr Anastasia Vasilyeva was arrested on September 1.
And in Moscow, police have used hacked data
to find and question Navalny's low-level supporters,
rounding them up in alphabetical order.
Though they are both children of the Soviet Union,
Vladimir Putin and Alexei Navalny have radically opposing visions
for Russia and its place in the world.
The poisoning and imprisonment of Alexei Navalny
means Vladimir Putin appears to have won.
Navalny's organisation has been reduced to rubble.
And yet the attempt to destroy Navalny
has drawn the eyes of the world to Putin's most persistent critic.
We know from Russia's own history
that major political change usually comes like this,
suddenly and unexpectedly.
And I myself am old enough to remember that no-one
at the beginning of August of 1991 predicted that the Soviet regime
would not exist by the end of the month
and that one of the most repressive and horrific totalitarian systems
in the history of humanity will go down in three days.
This is how things happen in Russia.
None of us can tell exactly when or how
political change is going to come.
The only thing we know is that it will -
because nothing is forever.
And Vladimir Putin is not going to be an exception.
His regime is not going to be an exception.
Both Vladimir Putin and Alexei Navalny want to be remembered
as the man who defined 21st-century Russia.
Only one of them can succeed.
Alexei Navalny will become President of the Russian Federation.
He will become the leader who is going to turn Russia
back on its democratic path.
On an aeroplane one morning in August 2020,
Alexei Navalny stared death in the face.
He has survived...for now.
I think it's a good thing.
It's very useful for a politician, maybe, facing death once.
Maybe ironically, I became kind of more human after this facing death.