In August 2020, Russian politician Alexei Navalny was campaigning in Siberia when he suddenly became ill. He collapsed, was rushed to a hospital and then evacuated to Berlin, Germany, where doctors concluded he had been poisoned by a deadly nerve agent named Novichok.
This was not entirely unexpected. In recent years, a number of Russian dissidents and defectors have been poisoned. And Navalny is the most outspoken critic of the country’s president, Vladimir Putin. In less than ten years, Navalny has risen from blogging about corruption to the face of Russia’s opposition movement. When he was poisoned, he organized a campaign that threatened Putin’s party in elections across the country.
Look the video above to find out how Alexei Navalny built a movement like in recent Russian history, and how he became Putin’s biggest threat.
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