The Man Putin Couldn't Kill

This programme contains strong language, scenes of violence

and graphic injury that some viewers may find distressing.

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