[imagesource: EPA-EFE / Anatoly Maltsev]

You have to have nerves of steel to take on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Alexei Navalny ticks that box and then some, because during his time as Putin’s leading adversary he’s dodged more than a few bullets.

The opposition leader, lawyer, and anti-corruption activist is currently imprisoned in Russia but continues to call on Russians to protest Putin’s rule and the war in Ukraine via his social media channels.

The name may also ring a bell due to the infamous 2020 poisoning of Navalny. This helped bring further international attention to the activist’s efforts.

He’s now the star of a documentary which carries his name. The Guardian awarded Navalny five stars, calling it “one of the most jaw-dropping things you’ll ever witness”:

As Putin’s nemesis Alexei Navalny phones up the secret agent who put Novichok in his pants, this terrifying documentary enters the realms of the far-fetched spy thriller – and yet it’s all true…

But he’s still in prison, facing up to 20 years. Sometimes, sadly, realpolitik trumps narrative justice. The film ends in a darkness that is all the more pronounced for our knowledge of where Putin is about to take Russia and the world.

Putin has taken Russia into war and we’re a long, long way from the end of the invasion of Ukraine.

Here’s the trailer:

The Telegraph awarded Navalny four stars, but was still effusive with its praise:

Blending biography, activism and a particularly gripping procedural element, the documentary Navalny homes in on the most notorious episode in these ongoing hostilities – the assassination attempt in August 2020…

It’s now known that a hit squad of FSB operatives had succeeded in planting Novichok in his underwear before he boarded, in what would have been a lethal dose, had an emergency landing in Omsk not intervened.

Incredibly, as mapped out in the doccie, Navalny had been shadowed by Russian agents on more than 30 flights before he was eventually poisoned.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has a 100% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes.

The doccie is currently airing in the UK and the US.

[sources:guardian&tele]