True Thriller: Top Oscar Nominee ‘Navalny’ Investigates Poisoning of Russian Opposition Leader

The award-winning documentary film Navalny may be awarded an Oscar nomination later this month, but the man whose story is being told has never seen the film. Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, remains behind bars on a lengthy prison sentence after daring to criticize President Vladimir Putin.

“It’s a very bitter part of it for me,” director Daniel Roher told Deadline. “It is very sad that he could not see the film. One thing I always think about Navalny is how excited he was to be a subject in the film. He’s a very curious man and he’s very, very curious about the filmmaking process…I really hope that one day I’ll show him.”

Unfolding like a political thriller, the CNN Films documentary examines the August 2020 poisoning attack that nearly killed Navalny.

The charismatic politician gained a large following in Russia by fighting the corruption of oligarchs, government officials and Putin himself (in 2011 he dubbed Russia’s main political party, United Russia, the “Party of Thugs and Thieves”). The police once threw a poisonous green liquid in his face; Despite this, Navalny felt that his growing fame in Russia and abroad would protect him from assassination. But then he traveled to Siberia to organize opposition candidates before local elections.

On his way back to Moscow he fell seriously ill. “Just a few hundred miles into its nearly 2,000-mile flight, the plane crashed,” the New York Times reported at the time. “Mr. Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, who moaned in pain before losing consciousness, was taken on a gurney to an ambulance waiting on the tarmac.”

As the film shows, Russian doctors who initially treated Navalny denied that he had been poisoned. They attributed his condition to a blood sugar imbalance or some other metabolic problem. Pro-Kremlin commentators accused him of drinking moonshine. But after Navalny was taken to Germany for treatment, doctors there said tests showed he had been poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent originally developed by the Soviet military and still used by the Kremlin to this day as a means of to expel opponents.

Because the attack took place on Russian soil, there was little hope of finding out who planned and carried out the assassination until investigative journalist Christo Grosev arrived on the scene. Bulgarian-born Grosev works for Bellingcat, “an independent international collective of investigators, detectives and citizen journalists” that uses data and other forensic techniques to uncover wrongdoing. He was in Vienna working on another project with Roher when he began handling the Navalny case.

“One morning Christo came to a meeting we had and said he had a lead on who was trying to poison Navalny. And of course it was amazing to hear,” Roher recalls. “A week later, Christo, [producer] Odessa Rae and I snuck across the German-Austrian border to go to the Black Forest to basically pitch Alexei Navalny and his lead researcher Maria Pevchikh the merits of a documentary film project and why they should make the film with us.

Grosev connected the dots by obtaining phone records of key personnel at the Signal Institute, the Russian facility that produces novichok.

“We thought ok [Putin] must go through the same scientists he used before for other poisonings. Let’s see who these scientists called at that moment,” says Grosev. “We followed the scientists’ example and found that they communicated with some on the phone [Russian] FSB security officers around the time Alexei Navalny left for Siberia. And then at the exact time, in the middle of the night, that he was actually poisoned.

Grosev also obtained flight lists confirming that a number of suspects were flying to the same destination in Siberia as Navalny at the time of the poisoning.

“We found a wasp nest,” Grosev confirms in the documentary, “a local hit squad.”

The filmmaker faced the challenge of presenting the complexity of the research in such a way that the viewer could participate.

“My management request to Christo was: ‘Explain it to me as if I were a golden retriever. That’s what I’m looking for here,” Roher recalls.

Using phone numbers obtained by Grosev, Navalny himself called one of his poisoners, posing as a Russian official. The man spilled the beans throughout the operation. Grosev and Bellingcat teamed up with major journalistic institutions such as CNN, Der Spiegel and El País to break the astonishing news. For Roher, Navalny’s attempted assassination fits a disturbing pattern.

“I think our film shows above all that Putin solves his problems with violence and murder,” says the director. “And in a way, this is exactly what we see happening in Ukraine. He had a political problem at home and started this horrible, disastrous, stupid, useless, idiotic war because that’s the language he speaks. He is a KGB thug at heart. And when your worldview matches the KGB world of 1982, you see things differently and solve problems differently.”

Putin’s bloodlust extends to Grosev, journalists heard.

“I have some back-channel communication with people close to Putin because we need context for a lot of our investigations,” Grosev explains. “One of these sources came to me after the film came out and he said that Putin was quite upset when the investigation came out, but now he really wants you killed because of the film.”

Deadline and other media reported that Grosev had recently become a wanted man in Russia.

“This is Russia’s federal search warrant. It is anonymous. One day you wake up to find your face on Russia’s most wanted list and have no idea what the crime is. Literally, it says: ‘For committing the crime under Russian law,'” says Grosev. “There’s no way you can defend yourself in public because you don’t know what you’re accused of. It’s ‘ a very, very dark system of [creating] the image of an enemy of the state.”

After recovering from his poisoning in Germany, Navalny insisted on returning to Russia in January 2021. It can be seen in the film that he was arrested upon his arrival. His fate remains dark.

“A lot of people may not know that Navalny is still in the gulag, he is still in prison,” notes Roher. “And his personal situation was relegated to the most appalling condition of solitary confinement.”

Roher keeps all the awards for the documentary and the possibility of an Oscar nomination in perspective.

“I equate any attention to the film to attention to Navalny,” he says. “And that makes a lot of sense to me.”