Where did the infamous bottle come from? Let us explain the source of the thing we keep getting asked about. The so-called “Novichok bottle” — or, more precisely, an ordinary plastic water bottle on which traces of a military-grade nerve agent were later found in a German laboratory. It was a bottle from the room in the Tomsk hotel where Navalny himself and our entire film crew were staying. Let’s go back to August 20. That day, part of our team flew to Moscow, while part stayed behind in Tomsk to finish the video. During the flight, Alexei lost consciousness and began to have trouble breathing, and the plane made an emergency landing. Almost immediately, ACF staff (the Anti-Corruption Foundation) who had remained in Tomsk learned what had happened. At that moment, the only possible thing was done. They called a lawyer, went up to the room Navalny had just checked out of, and began documenting, describing, and packing everything they found there, including the hotel water bottles. You can see how this happened in this video. There was no particular hope of finding anything like this. But since it was absolutely clear to us that Navalny had not “just fallen slightly ill,” had not “overheated,” and that a Rafaello candy wouldn’t help here, it was decided to take everything that might even hypothetically be useful and hand it over to the doctors in Germany. It was also fairly obvious that the case would not be investigated in Russia. And that is exactly what happened: nearly a month passed, and Russia still had not acknowledged Alexei’s poisoning. Two weeks later, it was on the bottle from the Tomsk hotel room that a German laboratory found traces of Novichok. Then two more laboratories that tested Alexei’s samples confirmed that Navalny had indeed been poisoned with it. We now understand that this was done before he left his room to go to the airport. Today at 20:00, on the program *Russia of the Future* on the Navalny LIVE YouTube channel, Georgy Alburov @alburov will share the details.