When Christo Grozev, executive director of the investigative collective Bellingcat, recently re-watched the new documentary “Navalny,” about the imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, he was struck by how much the film affected him differently since Vladimir Putin launched Russia's war in Ukraine.
“Navalny," directed by Daniel Roher, is a gripping portrait of the Russian dissident beginning with the 2020 poisoning that nearly killed him, and which Grozev traced directly to the Kremlin. Grozev uncovered that Navalny had been attacked with the nerve agent Novichok and that the alleged assassination attempt was the work of a Kremlin spy unit. (The Kremlin has denied it.) At the time, Grozev wondered if it would seem too far fetched that Putin would go to such Bond villain extremes.
