VLAD’S POISON PLOT
Exposed at Sundance in chilling ‘Navalny’ doc
A scathing new documentary about poisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny premiered at the Sundance Film Festival Tuesday.
Called “Navalny,” it’s a no-holdsbarred indictment of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, and insists that Navalny’s brush with death was the result of a secret staterun operation to assassinate him.
“As I became more and more famous guy, I was totally sure that my life became safer and safer because I am kind of famous guy — and it will be problematic for them just to kill me,” Navalny, 45, says in the film. “I was very wrong.”
The doc, heading to HBO Max, was added to the Sundance slate just as Putin had stationed more than 100,000 troops along the Ukrainian border. The day it premiered, Russian authorities added Navalny, who has been jailed since last February, to a list of “terrorists and extremists.”
A State Department spokesman said, “This . . . represents a new low in Russia’s continuing crackdown on independent civil society.”
But it’s just another day in the life of Navalny, who has dared to challenge authoritarian strongman Putin by advocating for a free press, transparent elections and more local autonomy.
‘I knew they were lying’
Canadian director Daniel Roher began secretly making the film in November 2020, three months following Navalny’s dramatic removal from a flight to Moscow after he became severely ill. The plane made an emergency landing. Navalny was rushed to a hospital and allowed no visitors.
His wife Yulia Navalnaya, as popular online as her husband, wasn’t allowed to see him because, security said, she was not wearing a mask during the pandemic.
“When I finally entered the ICU, his eyes were slightly open and he was convulsing and he was bending,” she recalls in the doc. “I knew that these people were lying to me. I had to do everything I could to get him out of there.”
Putin relented and allowed Navalny to board a medical flight to Germany, where it was discovered he had been poisoned with Novichok, the same deadly nerve agent the Russian government is accused of using on former spy Sergei Skripal in 2018.
When Navalny awoke and was informed of this, he was incredulous. “Come on? Poisoned? I don’t believe it,” he says in the doc. “Putin is supposed to be not so stupid to use this Novichok! If you want to kill someone, just shoot him. Jesus Christ!”
In Germany, he recovered and attempted to solve the crime with the help of Christo Grozev, of the datasleuthing group Bellingcat.
The truth comes out
The most jaw-dropping moment of the doc comes after Grozev has tracked three men who work in the facility where Novichok is thought to be produced — Moscow’s Signal Scientific Center — and who had followed Navalny to Siberia. One by one, Navalny calls them pretending to be a government official asking why the murder operation went wrong.
“I have been wondering the same thing myself,” says one who we’re told is Konstantin Kudryavtsev. “The medics on the ground acted right away. They injected him with an antidote of some sort. So if they were in the air longer, things would have gone as planned.”
He reveals that the poison was applied to Navalny’s blue underwear at a laundromat. Then, while he was in the hospital, the agent claims the Omsk police provided his team with Navalny’s belongings, so they could wipe off any remaining evidence.
Navalny’s group, listening in on the conversation, stare wide-eyed in disbelief. After video of it was released in 2020, Kudryavtsev went missing and has yet to be found.
Navalny returned to Russia on Jan. 17, 2021, and was immediately detained in Moscow. He has been imprisoned for “violating probation” of a previous sentence that he claims was trumped up by the Kremlin.
Video footage shows the dissident totally bald and gaunt after going on a hunger strike.
Before that, he filmed a message for his followers.
“You’re not allowed to give up,” he says. “If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong.”