Alexei Navalny poisoned with Novichok (medevac to Berlin)

On 20 August 2020, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny fell critically ill during a domestic flight from Tomsk to Moscow. The aircraft made an emergency landing in Omsk, where he was hospitalised in serious condition and placed in an induced coma. On 22 August he was medically evacuated by chartered aircraft to the Charité hospital in Berlin, Germany, for further treatment.

On 2 September 2020, the German government announced that a Bundeswehr (German armed forces) toxicology laboratory had found unequivocal proof of poisoning with a nerve agent from the Novichok group. Chancellor Angela Merkel said Navalny was the victim of an attempt to silence him. Germany referred the case to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). On 6 October 2020, the OPCW transmitted a report stating that biomedical samples analysed by its designated laboratories confirmed a cholinesterase inhibitor from the Novichok group. On 14 December 2020, an investigation by Bellingcat and The Insider, with media partners, named operatives from a specialised chemical unit of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) as having tailed Navalny, based on telecom and travel data. Russia denied any involvement and declined to open a criminal investigation.

The use of a Novichok-class nerve agent is an established fact, independently confirmed by German government laboratories and by OPCW-designated laboratories. Responsibility is an assessment rather than an adjudicated fact: the open-source investigation by Bellingcat and The Insider, alongside Western government assessments, attributes the operation to an FSB team specialising in chemical agents, consistent with Russian state involvement. Russia denies any role and opened no investigation. Novichok is a military-grade agent associated with state programmes, and the targeting of a prominent opposition figure on Russian territory fits a pattern of attacks on Kremlin critics.