‘Navalny’ director blames Putin for opposition leader’s ‘murder’

There’s a striking moment in the documentary “Navalny” in which Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s greatest political adversary, makes a prank call to a Russian Federal Security Service agent who essentially admits to being part of a plot to poison the opposition leader. It was the answer Navalny had been seeking.

In 2020, Navalny suddenly became ill on a plane from Siberia to Moscow. The flight was diverted; doctors in Omsk put him in a coma; and, under international pressure, he was moved from Russia to Germany, where officials concluded that he’d been poisoned by a banned deadly nerve agent associated with past attacks on enemies of the Kremlin. (“Putin’s signature poison,” Navalny’s chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, calls it in the documentary.) As he recovered — and with a camera crew in tow — Navalny and a team of journalists found a group of Russian operatives they believed had been tracking Navalny ever since he’d taken on the government of Putin by announcing plans to run for president in 2017.