NAVALNY CALLS NOVICHOK POISON-COCKTAIL PUTIN'S `PERSONAL PLAN'

Several members of a Russian elite intelligence unit trailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny for days before he was poisoned with a deadly nerve agent last August, a joint investigation by the forensic intelligence group Bellingcat and various media outlets has revealed.

Navalny, who spent weeks in a coma in Germany before recovering, said he backed the findings, released Monday, and blamed President Vladimir Putin for the attempt to kill him.

He also revealed that he had taken a drink at the bar of his hotel in Tomsk, Siberia, the night before boarding the plane on which he first fell ill. He said the cocktail, which was the bartender's recommendation, “tasted like the most disgusting thing I've had in my life.”

“With all the facts that we have now, I can say that FSB agents were plotting a terrorist attack on Putin's orders,” Navalny, 44, said in a YouTube video in which he described the botched poisoning as Putin's “personal plan and his personal failure.”

Phone records, flight manifests and other documents obtained by Bellingcat, the Russia Insider news website, CNN television and Germany's Der Spiegel magazine identified a team of eight agents of the FSB who were in close contact at various stages in the days ahead of the alleged operation to poison Navalny with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok. Bellingcat said the unit specializes in working with poisons.

Navalny once led massive anti- government protests in 2011-12 and mounted an impressive presidential campaign to oppose Putin, before he was barred from running in 2018.