Alexei was quite a famous blogger back in the
day. He had a big page in LiveJournal. This is something like
MySpace but it was huge in Russia. He was writing about
corruption a lot. And he was writing about corporate crimes
about state owned companies abusing the powers that they
have. And stealing essentially from the state. He was writing
about boring stuff but in a very fun way. It was very, it was
very cool to read him, he was very noticeable.
The Anti-Corruption Foundation is an NGO that was established
about 10 years ago by Alexei Navalny. A group of people,
lawyers, investigators and managers got together to make
investigations fun again. And we did stories like they do in
magazines and newspapers, something about Russian
officials stealing money in different ways. And there are
plenty of ways and buying themselves; cars, yachts, houses
private jets. We would wrap those stories nicely, make either an entertaining
text out of it. Later, we started to produce
videos and then we would also sue.
We were in Tomsk. Well, Alexi left. In fact, my colleagues they
traveled to Moscow earlier than everybody else because Alexei
has this TV—YouTube show. An online YouTube show, every
Thursday that starts now at 8, he needs to be in Moscow.
So he flew back. And we stayed to wrap things up, prepare the new
investigation because it was meant to be cycle of regional
investigations and I came down for breakfast at around 9:39
Two of my colleagues were already downstairs having
breakfast and one of them, Georgy Alburov was monitoring
Alexei's flight on flight radar.
Alexei Navalny became desperately ill aboard a flight
forced to make an emergency landing, groaning can be heard in
this unconfirmed cell phone video.
And he saw that the plane made an emergency
landing in Omsk. Couple of minutes later, we got a text
from Kira saying that Alexei is unconscious and that they are on
the way to the hospital. We knew straightaway that this is
poisoning. We went upstairs we asked administrators of the hotel to
let us in the room where Alexei just checked out from because
later we found out that Alexei was indeed poisoned in this room
because they have found—the German labs found traces of novichok
on one of the bottles. So actually two of the bottles. That's
Alexei left behind in the hotel, which kind of is a very good
timestamp of when the poisoning happened. So he was poisoned
before he left to the airport. Together with Bellingcat with
Christo Grozev from Bellingcat. We investigated the poisoning
and arrived at a group of people who we consider were part of
this specific operation where some of them were generals, high
level, some of them were medical people with medical backgrounds,
some of them worked in chemical labs and had this sort of
background. And just before the publication, just before the date
on 14th of December. We were meant to be live at the same
time with CNN.
We decided to make calls just to, we had all of
their numbers because we located them through their numbers. We
called 10 people at least. It was pretty fruitless. To be
honest, we had absolutely no hope to come on. They are secret
service agents like they should be resistant to pranks. And I
think they were most of them. And they even started—look like
as we were calling, going down our phone book. It looked like
they are less and less willing to talk and they wouldn't buy
into the legends that Alexei used that he's an aide to Patrushev
or something like that. And but I think they forgot about one
game to this chemist called Kudryavtsev. As the conversation was
enrolling, and as he was given details that thing up that
they applied poison to the underwear, a specific area of
underwear. And how he is upset that the operation to kill Navalny
failed. And that next time things will be better.
And that the failure only happened because the airplane was
landed too quickly and he wasn't in the air for a long enough
time. I just remember sitting there and being just called
completely and ultimately shocked.
This is the first time the direct question has been put
to President Putin. Did you order Alexei Navalny's
assassination?
Of course not. We don't have this kind of habit of
assassinating anybody.
To Russia now, tonight Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been
detained after flying back to Moscow, five months after the
nerve agent attack that nearly killed him.
There was absolutely no decision making
process in Alexei's decision of going back but from the day zero,
from the date he opened his eyes, he was completely and utterly
sure that he will go back to Russia. He announced it in his
first video, in his first interview, and the first
Instagram post, I think. That wasn't a tough decision to make.
It is unthinkable for him to continue to voluntarily take a
decision to withdraw from Russian politics so much and
like live abroad and lose touch with it. That's what makes him a
great politician. He—that's such a big part of his life, such a
big part of his personality that he would rather be in prison in
Russia than free elsewhere.