“The Case Is Solved. I Know Who Tried to Kill Me.” — Investigation into Navalny’s Poisoners

Hi, this is Navalny. I know who wanted

to kill me. I know where they live

I know where they work. I know their

real names. I know their fake

names. I have their photographs.

Please watch this video to the end.

I will really need your help in

sharing it, because this is the story

of a secret group of killers from the FSB (Russia’s security service), which

includes doctors and chemists.

It is about how they tried to kill me

several times, and once they almost killed

my wife. They definitely won’t tell you about this on television,

especially considering that

the orders to this group

come from Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.

I order you to act with maximum harshness.

And by the way, I’ll tell you why he decided

to kill me.

[music]

This is not our investigation—rather, we

joined it at the final stage.

The main work was done by

the investigative group Bellingcat,

together with The Insider, and specifically

their lead and very impressive investigator,

Christo Grozev from Bulgaria.

That’s Christo, so my first big

thank-you goes to Bellingcat.

And the second goes to Irina Yarovaya and the United

Russia party, because it is precisely thanks to their

so-called Yarovaya package (a set of Russian surveillance laws)

that corrupt employees of

law enforcement agencies freely

trade in data from our mobile

phones and airline travel data, by the way.

It is also our task as a state

to act proactively, to create those

new tools for our

law enforcement officers and special services that will

protect society from the most criminal

of encroachments—encroachments on life.

That is why our bill—our draft law—

Some time ago, Christo Grozev contacted me

and said, “You know, it looks like we

found the people who tried to

kill you.” I would have thought he was crazy, but

the thing is, it was Bellingcat’s people who

actually uncovered the famous

Salisbury poisoning. Remember when

they showed on TV those two funny

guys talking about Salisbury and

its cathedral spire? He is famous not only throughout

Europe, he

is supposedly famous all over the world.

He is famous for his spy...

at three in the morning... Novichok... nobody...

likes... in my view... Bellingcat... spires...

So I took it seriously, and more than

a month ago our investigations department

first carefully

studied and verified all of Bellingcat’s work,

and then joined in ourselves.

At the same time as this video, there will also be

materials from *Der Spiegel* magazine,

the Spanish newspaper *El País*, and a report by

CNN. These media outlets also

carefully followed the progress of the

investigation and checked everything, so

it is not only Bellingcat

but also three respected independent media outlets

that vouch for the fact that all the facts presented

in this investigation

are true. I want this to be not only

very interesting for you, but also very

clear—how this investigation was conducted. So

now, together with you,

I will reconstruct everything that was done. It is

very much like a Hollywood thriller,

only in real life.

[music]

So, take your phone in your hand, or at least

a cup of tea.

You and I are detectives, and we want to разобраться in

a mysterious attempted murder.

Well, we can’t go to the

crime scene, we can’t question anyone,

we have no access to physical evidence. All we have

is a mask, a laptop, the internet, and

corrupt Putin-era police officers

selling citizens’ data, as well as two

undisputed facts so far. First: a person lost

consciousness on a plane while flying from

Tomsk to Moscow. Second: laboratories in

three countries and the international Organisation

for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons

confirmed that this person had been

poisoned with a military-grade chemical weapon

from the Novichok group. How did it happen? Did he

eat or drink something, or was there something in

his clothes? We don’t know, so

we start with the most basic version: I was

poisoned with Novichok in Tomsk. Well then,

most likely some people came after

me to Siberia, committed the crime,

and left. To check this version,

let’s reconstruct my route at the time. On August 14,

I flew from Moscow to Novosibirsk.

This is Novosibirsk... here everything is dancing...

it’s quite a cheerful region.

Four of my colleagues were already there; they had flown

out a day earlier. Two and a half days of filming.

On August 17, we drove to Tomsk by car.

From there, on August 20, I was supposed to fly

back to Moscow. The probability that

someone would coincidentally, on those same days,

be traveling along exactly the same route

is very low. And here, for the first time,

we turn to the black market for data in order

to get the information we need. It is not

especially secret—it is simply passenger

lists.

Jealous husbands and wives often try

to check who is sitting in the neighboring seats

when their spouses fly, so this kind of

information is bought and sold left and right.

You can easily verify this yourself. Among the

passengers on several Moscow flights...

Novosibirsk, August 13–14. We are looking for those

who had planned to return to

Moscow on the 20th or 21st, but from Tomsk. There were several such passengers.

For example, me.

Also six more FBK employees (Anti-Corruption Foundation)

who were with me on that trip, and also

three fellow travelers whom, to my

surprise, I do not recognize at all. Who are they?

Secret members of our film crew

whom I do not know. The first is a certain Ponyav

Vladimir Alexandrovich. That name

means nothing to us. We need to check.

We find Vladimir Alexandrovich's phone number

and enter it into the well-known

Telegram bot to see how he

is saved in other people's contact lists.

And there he is listed as, interestingly enough, FSB

Vladimir Alexandrovich Ponyav. We run

him through old databases available on

the internet and establish some

additional pieces of his biography. He

worked as a medic in a military unit, and

now his registered address is Lubyanka, building

1. Even more curious: we look at his previous

registered address, and at this point we can hardly

believe our eyes: Lyublinskaya Street,

building 175.

Do you know who else is registered at that address? Me.

So Vladimir from the FSB, living in the

entrance next to mine, for some reason traveled

to Siberia on the same route as I did, on the

same days as me. A coincidence? I do not think so. With

the other two fellow travelers,

the situation is much worse. One of them is

named Alexander Andreevich Frolov,

and the other Ivan Vasilyevich Spiridonov, and

for them, in all the databases available to us—old,

new, any of them—we find nothing. They have no

cars, no driver's licenses,

no real estate.

Nevertheless, these three—Ponyav,

Frolov, and Spiridonov—fly on the same flight

to Novosibirsk and book the same

return flight to Moscow, but from

Tomsk, for August 21. And all three of them

cancel that booking. It seems that in

Tomsk, something went wrong for them.

[music]

In an attempt to learn at least something about these mysterious

people, we request data

on their movements over several years. This is

also a very accessible service on the internet.

So, had they flown anywhere recently? And

we find out that in 2020, Ponyav left

Moscow only twice. Once, he went

to Siberia with us, and before that, on July 2, to

Kaliningrad. On that same flight to

Kaliningrad, Frolov was also flying. And what

a coincidence—on July 3, I also flew to

Kaliningrad with my wife Yulia.

So what does that mean? These people are no longer

just our secret staff members—they are

secret members of my family. So, we have

a group of three mysterious

travelers who fly to the same places

I do, and one of them is a doctor or medic

from the FSB.

At the same time, they are not surveillance agents. They

do not follow me around or tail me.

They simply arrive in the same places.

An intriguing beginning, isn't it? And here

I need to tell you about two strange

episodes from my life that

I did not speak about before, so that no one would

think I was crazy. A couple of years ago, I

do not remember exactly when, I boarded a plane in

Moscow and flew on one of my regional

trips. An hour after takeoff, I

broke out in a cold sweat and felt that

I was very, very unwell—so unwell that I

thought I was about to die. Since I was drenched in sweat,

I barely made it to the lavatory, washed myself

with cold water, sat there for about 15 minutes, and then

it all passed. I returned to my seat.

I shared this story only with my

press secretary Kira, who was sitting

next to me,

and later with my wife, because

how do you even tell a story like that?

The story sounds wild: I felt like I was

about to die, but nothing hurt, and after 15

minutes it all passed. People's natural response

to a story like that is: go get your

head checked, because that is clearly not normal.

And

[music]

But that incident, of course, stayed with me precisely

because of that. As I have said many times

in interviews, when I felt unwell on

the plane flying to Tomsk, I went

to wash with cold water, and only later, from

numerous interviews with chemists

explaining how

Novichok works, I learned that something like that could easily

happen. The dosage is critically

important.

If the dose of Novichok is too large, you

will die, and instantly. If it is insufficient, then

you may feel nothing at all

or experience a brief attack

like the one I had. On July 6, my

wife and I were in the village of Yantarny, near

Kaliningrad.

In the morning we went for a walk, walked for a long time, then

went back to our room, and then went to have lunch at a

cafe on the beach, and on the way Yulia started to feel

unwell. Yulia, please tell us what

happened to you in Yantarny.

One day, we walked along the beach for a long time,

came back to the room, and I started feeling

not very well. I thought that in

five or ten minutes it would pass, and we decided to go

to the beach

to eat. While we were walking there, I kept feeling worse

and worse.

We sat down in the cafe, and

I decided not to order food, just

something to drink, because I was no longer feeling

I felt really awful. Alexei had ordered something.

And at some point I started feeling so

unwell that I decided ոչ to even

wait for him anymore and go back to the room. I was walking through

the park and

it was so awful that I sat down a couple of times

on a bench and even leaned against a tree

so I wouldn’t fall. I got to the room, and about

an hour later I felt a little better, and I

fell asleep. And in the morning I woke up and everything was

completely normal, as if nothing had

happened.

Now imagine this: a person tells me,

“I feel terrible, I can’t function at all.”

You ask them questions: what hurts? Maybe

their heart? Maybe we should call an ambulance? And they

answer: “Nothing hurts.” It’s only now,

after going through it myself, that I

understand how someone can feel terrible and yet

be unable to explain what’s happening. And

back then I thought: well, some kind of nonsense, just a

bodily malfunction. To check,

I actually went to the trouble of finding

the manager of the Cactus café on the beach in

the village of Yantarny and called him to ask

whether he remembered any strange

episodes involving us. “When you said

you went for a walk and then

started feeling worse—

there was something like that. I want to ask: so, did you

because that day, if I’m not

mistaken, walk back along the entire promenade?

On the way back—was there a moment when you wanted to

ask whether anyone had offered to bring you something,

maybe water or some kind of medicine?”

To be honest, I don’t remember the details exactly.

I only remember that, of course, we didn’t tell anyone about it

because, I’ll say again, it sounded like

the story of two crazy people. But all of that was

a digression. At this stage of our

investigation, we know nothing yet about earlier attempts

to kill me. For now, all we have is

a strange group of three people

who are following me around. Clearly, all of this

is not a coincidence, but we can’t make sense of any of it. We’ve

basically hit a dead end.

So for now we’re leaving that trio alone

and starting to unravel the case from another

angle: Novichok. As chemists write,

it is possibly the most toxic substance

ever invented by humanity. It

cannot be produced independently without the involvement of

serious state

laboratories. So we simply have to

figure out who in Russia could possibly

obtain

or develop this chemical weapon, and

whether there might be a connection between these

people and our paramedic Vladimir from

the FSB (Russia’s Federal Security Service). Chemical weapons are banned.

Having survived Novichok poisoning, I understand perfectly well

why it is such a terrifying way

to kill people.

It can have no beneficial use.

In 1997, Russia

joined the international convention

banning the development, production,

stockpiling, and use of chemical

weapons, and requiring their destruction.

Let me stress once again: developing new

chemical weapons was out of the question; it was unthinkable. But

all existing stockpiles

also had to be destroyed. The main person

responsible for eliminating chemical

weapons in Russia was Sergei Kiriyenko.

At the time, he held the post of chairman

of the State Commission for Chemical Disarmament.

In an irony of fate, he was recently placed

under European sanctions in connection with my

poisoning. In September 2017,

Russia announced the complete destruction

of its chemical weapons. “We have a very important,

one could say historic, event today,

because today the last

chemical munition

from Russia’s chemical weapons arsenals

will be destroyed. This means our country will fulfill

its principal international

obligation under the convention on the prohi-

bition of chemical weapons and will completely

eliminate its chemical arsenal.”

Russia was among the first to sign this

document and has worked, and continues to work closely with

its partners to rid humanity

of the threat of the use and spread

of such barbaric, deadly weapons.”

This is important to understand: you cannot steal

old Novichok from a warehouse, a base, or a

laboratory. According to official data, it has been

completely destroyed, and not a single

milligram of the substance exists.

It can only be produced anew, which

is also prohibited. But if you really want to,

you can.

Especially if the country’s president really wants to.

That barbaric, deadly weapon—

chemical weapons in Russia—not only

continued to exist, they were also

developed further: new ones were devised, existing ones improved.

And recently, Bellingcat and several of its

partners published a major and important

investigation. They figured out how

this work continued.

The supposedly abolished scientific institutes

working on chemical weapons—I’m not going to

retell all of that in detail; you can

read it yourselves. But the essence is this: in

Soviet times, in the town of Shikhany

in Saratov Region,

there was the main scientific institute where

chemical weapons were developed, including

organophosphorus nerve agents,

and Novichok was developed

there in particular. This has been described many times in detail

by Novichok’s creators, Vladimir

Uglev and Vil Mirzayanov. After

Russia joined the convention on

the prohibition of chemical weapons.

Shikhany gradually lost its importance, and in

the end it was stripped of its status as an independent

institution, becoming a branch of the Moscow

Institute of Organic Chemistry. However,

the Shikhany scientists did not disappear anywhere.

They simply moved to other workplaces.

Bellingcat found where several of them ended up:

some landed at the Signal Scientific Center in

Moscow. It is at Signal that

specialists in cholinesterase inhibitors work,

a category that includes Novichok. Several others

went to the 27th Scientific Institute of the Ministry

of Defense in Moscow and to the St. Petersburg

Military Medicine Testing Institute.

It was through the director of this

testing institute, Sergei Chapur,

that journalists uncovered the entire clandestine

Novichok story. Novichok first entered

the public spotlight because of the poisoning of the Skri-

pals, thanks to the analysis of telephone

calls and Chapur’s geolocation data.

It turned out that he took an active

part in preparing that special operation.

Several months before the assassination attempt,

he was constantly in contact with the director

of Signal, Zhirov, and other leading

staff members. At the same time, he

was communicating with GRU officers and personally with

Alexander Mishkin, the would-be poisoner,

the failed operative and admirer of Salisbury’s sharp

spires. From the very beginning, he

was planning the operation, and thus

we have a clear case in which the GRU was carrying out

an assassination attempt while Signal was involved in every

phase of preparing the operation. They

develop Novichok, refine it,

and know everything about it. They advised

the teams on how to use it,

because it is very difficult and dangerous. Let me

remind you that the Skripals, who were

targeted, survived, but an entirely

innocent woman died, and dozens of people suffered various

injuries. Therefore,

it is logical to assume that if someone

decides to use Novichok in order to

kill me, they will certainly be in contact

with people from Signal. And here we come to

the main part of Bellingcat’s investigation.

They obtained the phone billing records of the director

of Signal, Zhirov, and looked at whom

he spoke with on the days before his

poisoning and afterward. What opened up before them was

a new and astonishing world of state

killers, this time from the FSB. That kind of work

is a real contribution to strengthening the unity

and cohesion of our multinational

society. In the list of people with whom Zhirov

communicated in the summer of 2020, there were

several numbers belonging

to FSB employees. Some were simply saved in

a phone book under the label “FSB,” some

were registered at the addresses of military

units of the FSB, and some parked their cars at Lubyanka (the FSB headquarters in Moscow).

But the FSB nowadays is

a gigantic organization; it employs

thousands of people across hundreds of different departments. So how

do we identify the ones who matter?

In Zhirov’s case, that turned out to be easy,

because most of those who called him

worked in the same place:

the Institute of Criminalistics

of the FSB’s Special Technology Center. In a single

day, Zhirov was called by the director of this

institute, General Vasilyev; the director

of the entire Special Technology Center, General

Bogdanov. “Our institutes are the leading

forensic divisions

of the state security agencies,”

whose experts and staff are on

the front line in the fight against espionage,

extremism, and terrorism.” And several more

employees of the Institute of Criminalistics

of the FSB, including a certain

Stanislav Maksakov, who is very

easy to google. He is a scientist; here is one of

his patents, and the application was filed by his

employer, military unit 61469,

which was located in those very same Shikhany facilities.

How interesting: another man from Shikhany.

found at the FSB Institute of Criminalistics.

We look more closely at this institute

and almost despair, because it seems

like a false lead. But what do they actually

do? One of the first links shows that

employees of this institute analyze

YouTube videos by student Yegor Zhukov for

signs of extremism, and of course they

find it. They are also the ones who found mephedrone, phenyl-

pentane, and cocaine on the hair of journalist

Ivan Golunov. In general, this institute was

in Soviet times simply called the

KGB of the USSR; it is the main place where examinations are carried out

for the needs

of the FSB. “The Federal Security Service’s unique

unit has turned 30,”

the Federal Security Service.

Its specialists know how both to solve the high-profile

crimes of our day and to delve into

cases from the distant past.

They took part in investigating virtually

all the high-profile cases you can

remember, from the apartment bombings

in Moscow

to the investigation into the sinking of the Kursk submarine.

When they are not investigating terrorist attacks, they

are busy with no less important matters. For example,

they investigate the death of Christ. According

to the scientists’ conclusions, the wounds sustained by the man

wrapped in

the cloth exactly correspond to the sufferings of Christ described in

the Bible. On the right shoulder there is

a broad stripe indicating

the carrying of a heavy object,

possibly a cross. Strange that in the end they

did not open a case against Jesus for

extremism, since all he was doing was

just a classic attempt to overthrow

the existing order. So, what do you think?

Do you think such powerful experts could

have been involved in an attempt to murder me

with Novichok

Let's check Maksakov, a scientist from Shikhany (a Russian military research town)

who seemed like the most promising figure

in this story, and the journalists obtained billing records from

they got his phone billing records too

and in this way compiled a list of his

contacts. Let's start from the beginning and sketch out

the overall picture of who is communicating with whom. Here is Zhiraf

from Signal; his main contacts in the FSB

are Blagdanov, director of the Center

for Special Equipment and also

deputy head of the Scientific

and Technical Service of the FSB. Next is

General Vasilyev, head of the Institute

of Criminalistics of the FSB, and Maksakov from Shikhany, and

he, in turn, communicates most often

with a group of about 10 people

I'll tell you about some of them

Alexandrov, Alexei Alexandrovich

worked in emergency medical services, then in the FSB

Osipov

Ivan Vladimirovich; in address books he appears

as Ivan Doctor. Krivoshchekov

Alexei Leonidovich

used to work at the Ministry of Defense, and

now parks at Lubyanka. Then there is Yakin

Oleg Borisovich, who served in an FSB military unit

and later became a surgeon. Kudryavtsev

Konstantin Borisovich

is a chemist from a military unit in Shikhany. Then Shvets

Mikhail Mikhailovich

is registered in Balashikha at the address

of the FSB Special Purpose Center. Panyayev

Vladimir Alexandrovich is also from a military

unit and is listed as a paramedic. Hold on

who? Panyayev?

The first one is a certain Panyayev, Vladimir

Alexandrovich

And there it is, our puzzle comes together. This is the very same

Panyayev who flew with me to

Novosibirsk, Tomsk, and Kaliningrad

together with all the others I just

named. He is an officer in a special

secret unit for murdering

people with chemical weapons

To be completely precise, this is specifically

my team—that is, the people whose job

in the FSB, a state agency, let me remind you,

is to kill me. As

you can see, the chain from the makers of Novichok

to the people who were near me at the

moments when I was poisoned

turned out to be very short. If you

were listening carefully and remembering from the very

beginning of the video, then right now you're thinking: okay,

but where are Frolov and Spiridonov, the ones you

told us about, who also flew together with

you? They do not exist. These are

cover passports for real people from

our list. Look, we cracked

the simple principle behind this coding. Frolov

Alexei Andreevich

16.06.1980. Spiridonov, Ivan Vasilyevich

21.08.1975

The first name stays the same; from the patronymic we keep

only the first letter

The day of birth stays the same, the month too; the year

is changed, but only slightly, so it is easy

to remember. And for the cover surname

they use the maiden names of the wives

of the real FSB officers

again, so that it would be easy to remember

Spiridonova

is the maiden name of the wife of the FSB officer

who is a doctor

Osipov. The same goes for Frolov: the wife

or girlfriend of the medic Alexandrov is named

Yekaterina Frolova

So what do we have? A group of people from the FSB

who are constantly called by a chemist from

the FSB, Maksakov. They are constantly in contact

with one another

and they also very often

travel together on the same flights

buying tickets under the same booking in

different combinations

but with the same core group unchanged. There is already

enough evidence. We know the key players

we understand how the organization works, we see

that FSB doctors receiving Novichok at a

secret institute

using official cover passports

twice traveled with me, and in both

places poisonings took place. But your mind

still refuses to believe it. But

seriously—did someone really give the order

to kill me or my wife and deploy

an entire FSB directorate for it? We

understand that our country is run by

criminals

but not to that extent... Or what if these are

just coincidences—one in a million

But coincidence or not, we need more

evidence. And here is that evidence:

we take a leaked air travel database, we take

the list of all the people we consider

connected to the FSB poisoning group—8

names, 6 of them real and 2

fabricated identities with cover documents

The moment of truth has come

We analyze where exactly they flew together

in all possible combinations

At the top of the list is what we have already

discussed: Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Kaliningrad. And

you can see very clearly, visually, a great

many joint trips in 2017

very many. And now the most important part

we add the list of my flights for the same

period and compare them. On September 18

the already familiar Panyayev, in the company of medic

Alexandrov, under his real name,

returns from Omsk to Moscow. I depart

at 5:50; they leave right after me. On June 9

I fly from Moscow to Perm. Panyayev

and Alexandrov, under the alias Frolov,

are waiting for me there; they flew out at

to Perm a day earlier, and on the 8th

So I fly to Penza, and my marmot is with me.

Spiridonov, who was with us in Tomsk,

and he is in fact Dr. Osipov in

the company of another one, from the tower, K

Krivoshchekov, also in Penza.

They flew out a few hours earlier

than I did. The next day I was in Ulyanovsk

opening a campaign office, and we stayed there overnight until the 21st

as it turns out, in the company of

FSB poisoners.

They were also in Ulyanovsk and flew

back from there to Moscow. If these

coincidences seem surprising and

even shocking to you, wait — this is only the

beginning. On March 3, 2017,

I flew from Moscow to Samara. Like the most

devoted fangirls, the FSB officers

Krivoshchekov and Alexandrov set off there by

train a day earlier, on March 2. I went by plane, not

by train. That same day I boarded the

Samara–Ufa train.

They boarded a plane on the same

route.

And on March 4, both we and they were in Ufa, and I opened

a campaign office. I don’t know what they were doing there. From

Ufa, on the 5th, I flew to Kazan, and our

FSB slimeballs flew with me on the same flight to

Kazan. After my event there, I boarded a

train to Nizhny Novgorod. On the 5th,

Krivoshchekov and Alexandrov flew that same

day on exactly the same route and

met me in Nizhny on March 6. And I and

my poisoners traveled back to Moscow by

train, a few hours apart.

Four days, four cities — they were traveling

literally right on my heels, afraid

to miss even the briefest stop. I used to

joke that probably no one except me and

the band Laskovy May (a hugely popular Soviet/Russian pop group)

traveled so much and so intensively on tours

around the country. I was wrong — the killers from the FSB

traveled just as much. Here is the full

list for 2017: these are all the trips where

officers from the FSB’s

poisoning unit were there alongside me.

Novokuznetsk, Arkhangelsk, Kirov,

Vladivostok, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk.

In all, 15 cities, 30 routes — they were everywhere.

Over the whole period, 36 coincidences. And here the question

comes up again: maybe this was

just surveillance?

Maybe some

political department of the FSB happened upon me, and they traveled

just to watch, to make sure I wasn’t doing anything

“extremist” in Penza? Absolutely not.

First of all, these people are not ordinary

camera technicians.

They have either medical or chemical

training and specialization. Second,

what kind of surveillance team would every

time

depart and arrive on different days from the people

they are following? And third, during that same

period I often made

one-day trips to various cities — flying out of

Moscow in the morning and returning in the evening — and on not a single

such short trip without an overnight stay

did they follow me. They were interested only in

the places where I stayed in a

hotel. And here is another puzzle that

an outside observer, if not paying close attention,

could wrestle with for a very long time. On April 27,

Panykh and Alexandrov went to Astrakhan, but

I wasn’t there. It was the only joint

trip by the FSB slimeballs that year that did not

coincide with my being at their

destination. So what was that? Maybe

the guys had become such good friends that they decided to

go fishing together? Here’s the catch:

on April 27 in Moscow, someone splashed me with

brilliant green antiseptic mixed with some kind of acid.

I almost lost an eye. You remember that these

ridiculous poisoners always fly out

a day or half a day in advance. On April 28 I

was supposed to fly to Astrakhan — here were the

tickets already bought — but because of my eye, the trip

had to be canceled.

The poor FSB slimeballs were already there and waited for me

in vain. They were probably bored and

watched my Thursday livestream, which

looked rather unusual.

So in this way, it is now an irrefutable fact: we

are dealing with a state operation.

This is not some fixer in Bishkek working on behalf of an

oligarch or official whom I offended

with my investigations. This is an entire

department of the FSB, under the leadership of senior

bosses and generals, that for three and a half

years conducted an operation during which

they tried several times to kill

me and members of my family, obtaining

chemical weapons from secret

state laboratories. Of course, an operation

of such scale and such

duration could not have been

organized by anyone other than the head of the

FSB, Bortnikov, and he would never have

dared to do it without Putin’s order.

Look in a dictionary and read the

definition of state terrorism.

That is exactly what this is: the unlawful killing

of citizens without trial or investigation.

I said before that the attempt on my

life was carried out on Putin’s orders, and now, with

all the facts in hand, I state that on the orders

of President Putin, FSB officers

organized a terrorist act

and proceeded to eliminate

me. And of course, now you are

watching this and asking yourself: but why?

Well, it is obvious that Putin does not like me,

but something pushed him to take such

radical actions. Previously, in my

interviews, I said it was the strategy of

Smart Voting. All Kremlin

insiders say directly that Putin

personally is very afraid of it, but now

It is clear that the team of killers started traveling

with me long before I came up with

Smart Voting, and I sat there thinking and

racking my brain. It turned out to be fairly

easy. I travel around the country a lot. At the end of

2016 and the beginning of 2017, I

was constantly traveling

to Kirov for the second trial in the

Kirovles case. From the tickets

of these killers, we can see that at first they did not travel

with me, and then one fine

day, it all began.

They were with me on every trip after that, which means

that between the trip without them and the trip with them,

something happened after which Putin

said:

"Kill him." I went to my YouTube channel

and found the only video related to

that period that could explain

everything.

Will I, and those who support me, be able

to make Russia better by taking part in elections? I

came to the conclusion that yes, I would take part in

the race for the post of President of Russia. I did

promise you it would be just like a detective story.

Here is the villain.

Here is the motive, here is the trigger, the killers, and the murder

weapon. And since this is a detective story,

make yourselves comfortable. By all the rules

of the genre, I have gathered you all in one room to

connect the dots we have and reconstruct

the picture of the crime.

Now you know how this

investigation was conducted and where the data came from,

so do not doubt that when I say

someone drove somewhere, flew somewhere, or made a call, it

is confirmed by tickets, passenger

lists, and billing and

cell phone geolocation data. We are all

drawn to hotels: some for reasons of

health, exercise, and rest; others

for murder. In mid-December 2016,

I announced that I was running in the election. Putin

decided that I should be killed for that and

assigned it to the FSB, so that the cause of death

would be unclear. The villains chose

poisoning with the chemical weapon known as

Novichok. Back then, that name would not have meant anything

to any of us. This was a year and a half before

the Salisbury operation. On my first trip

of 2017, accompanying me were

members of a specially organized group

of killers made up of FSB officers, mostly

with backgrounds as doctors and

chemists. At first they traveled under

their real names,

but by March they already had cover

passports. A group of two or three people, in

different combinations, accompanied me

continuously—at least 30 trips

together. It appears they

prepared the operation and then simply

waited for the order to carry it out.

The order came, and they tried to kill

me for the first time on a plane flying from

Moscow. I am referring to that very incident

when I suddenly felt very ill, but not for long.

They must have messed up the dosage. The second

attempt on my life took place that summer in

the Kaliningrad region.

On July 2, 2020, I was completely

unsuspecting in Moscow, but the tickets had already

been bought and the hotel booked. In

the FSB's poisoning department, work was in full swing.

Calls were being made at the highest level. Maksakov, the chief

chemical weapons specialist from the FSB Criminalistics

Institute, first spoke with

his boss, General Bogdanov,

and immediately after that with General Kirill

Vasilyev. Later, one by one, he

called Alexandrov, Panyaev, and

Shvets, who immediately bought tickets to

Kaliningrad and left on July 2. On July 3, Yulia and I

flew to Kaliningrad, arriving on July 3 at

11:40. On July 5, Panyaev, Shvets, and Alexandrov

returned to Moscow. On July 6, Yulia

fell ill. Either they wanted to kill

her, or she touched some

object or food

that had been intended for me. On that

same day, the phones in Moscow were ringing off the hook.

Maksakov spoke with Zhirov, the head of

Signal. Then Zhirov, in turn, called

FSB generals Bogdanov and Vasilyev. At the

same time, Maksakov called the three would-be poisoners

from Kaliningrad over and over

again.

Bogdanov, the highest-ranking boss of them all,

the director of the FSB's Special Equipment Center,

flew urgently to Kaliningrad in person and

spent several days at the local

FSB branch. It is fairly easy

to guess what was happening there: they were conducting

a postmortem of the failed operation, figuring out why I remained

alive, clarifying with Signal what had gone wrong with

the dosage, drawing conclusions, and preparing for

a new operation.

And so we come to August 12. On that day, we

gathered for the first time at the FBK office in the full

team of people who would soon travel

to Siberia to film the investigation, and

for several hours we wrote the script for

the videos right there in my office, and we

discussed out loud where and when we were going, where

we would stay, what we would film, and so on.

It was unquestionably an important day for FBK, but for the FSB

it was even more important. Everyone was in a frenzy. Maksakov

called Generals Vasilyev and

Bogdanov one after the other,

and then started calling again

Alexandrov and Osipov. Osipov called

Panyaev. All of them were in contact with their

colleague Oleg Tayakin. He is a graduate of

the 27th Institute of the Ministry of Defense and

a chemical weapons specialist. We deliberately

placed him at the center—he is the chief

coordinator of my murder.

Over the next few days, Tayakin would

to spend the night in the building of the Institute of Criminalistics

the FSB continuously communicates with the killers and

immediately reports up the chain to Maksakov

and then further up the chain, this will

be repeated every time. He is key to

this operation—the person serving as the link

connecting everyone to everyone else. That same day, Alexandrov

Osipov and Panyaev buy tickets to

Novosibirsk. In the evening, at 9:30 p.m., they call

the FSB officer on duty at Sheremetyevo Airport

to get inside without going through any screening

The operation to murder me officially

began on August 13 at 5:00 a.m.

Alexandrov, Osipov, and Panyaev fly from

Moscow to Novosibirsk

Maksakov is in phone contact with them. These

three are definitely part of the team that

directly tried to kill me

They brought Novichok, chose the location

applied the poison to some surface, or

possibly placed it somewhere else. Whether there was

someone else with them is possible, but under false

documents. The coordinator, Tayakin, remains

in Moscow. Intensive surveillance begins

of members of our team

Here is a frame from one of NTV's broadcasts. It was filmed

that day, August 13. Maria Pevchikh

the head of our investigations department, is standing

near her home with a suitcase, waiting

for a taxi to the airport. She had been under surveillance since

the morning, and later this surveillance footage

ended up in the hands of propagandists. At the same

time, coordinator Tayakin leaves and

the FSB institute building on Akademika

Vargi Street

and heads to Domodedovo Airport, apparently

to personally make sure that Pevchikh boarded

flight 855. He contacts the duty officer

of the FSB at the airport

obviously to get inside, and immediately

after her plane departed

he leaves the airport and departs. August 14

Before the trip to Novosibirsk, the poisoners

turned off their real phones and

began using temporary ones, as required by

protocol

In fact, they were supposed to leave them

at home so they could not be tracked at all

but they did not

Doctor-killer Alexandrov switched on his

real phone in Novosibirsk only

once, and that was enough to

determine where he was. At 3:30 p.m. local time

his phone was here, and here

is the Park Inn hotel, where

a couple of hours later

I would be staying. On August 15–17, coordinator

Tayakin spends two nights there. The FSB

At night, he actively exchanges messages with

someone using messaging apps

This is visible from the detailed phone

billing records and the phone's geolocation. Every

morning he speaks with his superior

Aksakov, who in turn speaks with the generals. On August 18–19

we moved from Novosibirsk to

Tomsk. The poisoners followed us. For the next couple

of days, we do not understand exactly where they

are, but we see constant communication

between the team on the ground in Tomsk and

coordinator Tayakin, and he

continues reporting upward through the chain

August 19, evening in Tomsk, 11:00 p.m.

I returned after swimming in

the famous Kaftanchikovo (a local recreation spot), and I am sitting with

colleagues in the hotel restaurant

I do not eat; I order one cocktail. It is so

bad that I take only a couple of sips

and leave it on the table. At midnight I go

to bed. Immediately after that, at 12:08 a.m.

coordinator Tayakin receives a call

from a member of the FSB team, Alexei Krivoshchekov

For the next 40 minutes, Tayakin

is intensely messaging someone through

a messenger app while simultaneously speaking with

Maksakov. At 12:44 a.m., the calls stop

Most likely, the active phase of the operation

is complete. By that point, I have already been poisoned

and all that remains is to wait for the result. Apparently

having relaxed, at 12:48 a.m. Tomsk time

Alexandrov makes the same mistake

as in Novosibirsk: he switches on his

real phone literally for a second, and

that is enough to determine his

location. He is in Tomsk, a 5-minute drive

from the Xander Hotel

where all of us were staying. On August 20, I

wake up

get dressed, take a sip of water from a bottle, and leave

my room. At 6:00 a.m., I meet with my

press secretary Kira and my aide Ilya

A couple of minutes later, we get into a taxi. At

6:05

Krivoshchekov calls Tayakin in Moscow

Apparently, he is somewhere near us

can physically see us, and reports: Navalny

is alive and heading to the airport

What happened next is well known. After

two and a half hours, I begin to feel

unwell on the plane. I lose consciousness and fall

into a coma. I am taken to Omsk. I am suspended

between life and death

The FSB team watches the developments with alarm

A day later, I am still

alive, which means the operation has failed

Another operation begins: covering their tracks. On August 21

the first thing the group must do

is make every possible effort to ensure that

Novichok is not detected anywhere. Maksakov

starts calling specialized

experts—anyone who might

help conceal the traces of the operation. Among his

consultants is the scientist Vasily Kalashnikov

He specializes in detecting

traces of toxic substances in blood

Then come calls to Oleg Demidov, also a former

employee of Shikhany (a Russian chemical weapons research center)

specializing in organophosphates

the class to which Novichok belongs, and very important

a call to the Institute for Problems of Chemical

and Energy Technologies, located

in the city of Biysk, and can you imagine what

the scientists at this institute specialize in?

Removing traces of chemical

contamination. Guess where, at that very moment,

our trio of killers — Alexandrov, Osipov, and

Panyaev — were. They returned their tickets from Tomsk to

Moscow and immediately headed to

Gorno-Altaysk. We know this because

our old and very useful friend Alexander

turned on his phone again and gave away

his location. The operation’s coordinator, Tayakin,

also rushed to the airport at 2:30 a.m.

and flew to Gorno-Altaysk.

Why Gorno-Altaysk? Because it is the closest

city with an airport to Biysk, and in Gorno-Altaysk

the local FSB directorate is perfectly suited as

a meeting place. At the very least, Tayakin’s phone

stayed within this area for the whole day,

and this here is the FSB directorate building.

FSB

It is easy to assume that together with

specialists from the nearby institute,

the team of killers was discussing how

to cover up the traces of the failed operation. And it is not

hard to understand why they suddenly sprang into action.

The political situation: I am lying in a coma, everyone

is writing that I was poisoned and demanding

an investigation. Putin says to Bortnikov (head of the FSB),

"What the hell, how did this all fail? Make sure

that

no Novichok is found." And Bortnikov, in turn,

repeats the same thing to his

generals, Vasilyev and Bogdanov.

And they, for their part, send their

FSB subordinates to people

who know how to get rid of traces of Novichok.

At the same time, more traditional

methods of covering up the crime are being used.

In Alexandrov, CCTV recordings are seized; in

an unknown direction, my clothing disappears.

Quite possibly, they also take away one

of the group’s members, Kudryavtsev. On August 25,

he flew to Omsk. Doctors in Omsk

receive instructions and begin lying that

there was no poisoning involved.

PR people are brought in, and the story is floated

that I had been drinking samogon (homemade spirits) the day before and

using drugs in general. I am

forbidden from being transported and kept in the hospital,

waiting either for me to die or for the traces

of Novichok to disappear from my body. Only

after 48 hours does Putin, who had been

guaranteed that there would no longer be any Novichok in my blood,

allow me to be taken out. What happened next, you

know better than I do: Novichok was, after all,

detected in my blood — first by German

scientists, then Swedish ones, then

French ones. And then the international

Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons

conducted its investigation and issued

a special report whose conclusion was:

Navalny was poisoned with a substance from

the Novichok group. Here it is worth discussing

the question everyone asks: what kind of

helpless idiots work at the FSB? For three

and a half years they followed me around and

poisoned me at least three times, and I am still alive.

And what fool decided to use

Novichok if it is so difficult

to use? But if you think about it, the plan was

not bad. Just look: they tried twice

to kill me, and I did not even realize

what was happening. And even if I had realized it,

no one would have believed me. The story itself —

"I almost died, but in the end I didn’t" —

sounds absurd. It was important for them to calculate

the dosage, so it was better to use less

rather than more. If they overdid it, the person would die on the spot,

and it would be obvious: this food

was poisoned, or this object was poisoned, and it would become

easier to get to the truth. But in our case,

what we have is this:

in all the poisoning cases, we do not understand at all

exactly how it was done — where

I came into contact with Novichok, and then

grabbed the bottle on which traces remained,

and that is why we know that everything

happened at the hotel.

But how exactly —

that is still unclear. If you shoot someone or

run them over with a car, those are traditional

crimes, and it is more or less

clear how to investigate them: here is the body, here are

the bullets, here is the evidence. Poisoning gives

you an amazing opportunity not to conduct

any investigation at all and instead do

the Kremlin’s favorite thing: simply lie.

Come on, listen: I was in a coma for 18 days, and to

this day there is still no criminal case, as if

nothing happened. You cannot argue with a hole in the head,

but here, even now, half

the country still doubts it and repeats, "Well,

if they had wanted to poison him,

they would have poisoned him. But he’s alive, so they

didn’t poison him."

"Well, he fell into a coma because of diabetes, and

actually no — first diabetes, and then he was

sprinkled with Novichok on the medical plane."

Then Putin says that I poisoned

myself. Then they thought it over and said that

I was poisoned by colleagues. And the latest version

is that I was poisoned by the Germans. You can

put forward any version you like, say

whatever you want. "Why did you poison the man?" — "We, we

didn’t poison anyone."

"You poisoned him." Go prove it. But we

have heard this many times about poisonings

here and there; this is not the first time

we’ve heard the second argument: if the person whom

you say

the authorities really, at least according to you,

wanted to poison, they would hardly have

sent him to Germany for treatment,

right? Poisoning with chemical weapons is, in

a certain sense, the perfect murder,

because even if it fails, you can

batting their eyes and saying nothing happened

this is quite a different matter

however, overall, it's true that the operation

was a failure, which makes me very glad—and not at all surprised

You don't need 20 years under the leadership of

Putin for everything to degrade

If Rogozin is in charge of space

and Chubais is in charge of nanotechnology, then why would you

think the FSB is organized any differently? Why would you

think Novichok would work any better

than the space robot Fyodor?

[music]

And that's exactly what happened. Putin asked the screw-ups

at some secret institute how long it would take

for Novichok to dissolve in the body

They scratched their heads and said, well, in about two

days. But it didn't dissolve, because

everything in the country has fallen apart, and officials

think only about how to steal. The system

is degrading completely, at every level, and

if, for example, healthcare is now

at such a level that people die in

hospital corridors, then in the sphere of secret

operations the same thing is happening. I want

to say a few words to FSB officers, and

to law enforcement officers in general:

aren't you ashamed yourselves to work for this

system? You can see perfectly well that you've simply

turned into servants for thieves and

traitors.

For 20 years, Putin has systematically turned

the FSB and the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) into structures whose main task

is to help him steal

for himself and his friends—and this is the only

national project that has actually been completed, and brilliantly so.

Excellent.

A very rich country with enormous resources

has become impoverished. Millions of pensioners are in tears

comparing their pensions with store prices.

Meanwhile, all of Putin's daughters are billionaires,

his friends, neighbors, and former colleagues are billionaires,

our oligarchs have the most expensive yachts, and

you are expected to protect all of this—and even

kill those who are unhappy. Don't

take part in this national

betrayal. Those who support Putin

and his system

are not patriots but traitors. They have betrayed

the people of Russia. This attempted murder

has been exposed, and now you understand perfectly well that

officially, no one is going to investigate it,

because otherwise they'd have to jail half of

the FSB leadership—and Putin, who gave

them the orders. That's exactly why, look,

they're squealing at every level, from

United Russia and Lavrov

to TV propagandists. They understand

that they have been exposed. But all of that was

nothing compared with what

comes next. At this very moment, the whole

gang is watching this video and realizing that

they have been caught committing

a terrorist act—with names

and surnames, ranks, positions, and

the thought that they've been caught red-handed

will make them squeal a million times

louder. You will see hysteria on an unbelievable

scale. State TV hosts will

simply explode on live air.

They'll open a criminal case against me for

the fact that they failed

to kill me. And who was it that headed the FSB here?

Remember whose main brainchild this is?

Who still runs it personally, by

direct manual control? A group of FSB officers

sent by you on assignment

to work undercover under government cover, at

the first stage,

are coping with their tasks.

Remaking the FSB to serve himself

is Putin's main project, and now everyone

has finally understood that he uses it

to murder political

opponents. And Putin, of course, will stomp his feet

more than anyone, because this is his

personal plan and his personal failure. His anger

toward me and the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation) will be very strong. Whoever

sees this on day three—I can count

only on you.

There may be no investigation, but I want

the whole country to know what these

people are doing, how they use the state

system, what they have turned the security

services into. No one should

have any illusions left. One last, most

important thing: if you know anything at all about

this Novichok poisoning operation,

if you recognize these people, have encountered them,

worked with them, studied with them, or simply

seen them somewhere, write to us either through

the Telegram bot, or, if you want to remain completely

anonymous, through Black Box—a special

website through which you can send us

a message. We won't even see who

sent it.

Any information will be useful to us, and you

can help solve this crime

completely. Let me remind you that in September there will be

elections to the State Duma, and we all want

as few thieving United Russia members as possible

in it. To make that happen, you need to take part in

Smart Voting—register right

now and support us. And of course,

subscribe to our channel

—this is where the truth is told.