... eric campbell: it's a fight to take down the world's biggest strong man. maria pevchikh: the ultimate victory from us would be russia without vladimir putin. eric campbell: and it's led by the man who claims putin tried to kill him. alexei navalny has flown back to a prison cell and branded president putin the world's biggest thief. can navalny defeat putin? can he even survive?

leonid volkov: he is in custody of the very people who tried to poison and kill him just less than six months ago. arkady ostrovsky: here is a guy of extraordinary courage. it's an absolutely archetypal myth, a hero fighting a tyrant. ♪♪♪ [crowd chanting in russian] eric: in the depth of winter, russia is stirring. since late january, protests have broken out across the country, sparked by the arrest of alexei navalny, who the kremlin insists is a nobody. but thanks to this nobody, people are calling their president a thief.

natasha romi: now the crowd is moving to matrosskaya tishina. that's the prison where aleksei navalny is now being held at. eric: natasha romi is a young moscow lawyer who wouldn't normally risk arrest, but she's come out today to protest what she sees as a lawless regime. natasha: we have a citizen who's been poisoned, even almost killed, and then returned to his homeland and imprisoned. this is over all limits. eric: the kremlin has shut down the center to try to stop people gathering, moving in thousands of riot police and troops. natasha: all the downtown metro stations are closed, and they keep closing them during the day, so we have

to walk our way through. it's around two to three kilometers, i guess, maybe five, i'm not sure. so, already downtown it's a huge concentration of police forces, and they're arresting people. they're arresting protestors, but we'll see how it's gonna go. i hope it's all gonna go peacefully. we're not here to fight. police force is moving towards downtown. eric: they constantly check for messages on how to evade roadblocks. natasha: and there are no coordinators of protest, because the majority of coordinators was arrested after last week's protest. eric: it's as if the all-powerful kremlin is frightened of its own people. natasha: you can see how the power is getting scared.

i think it's not about navalny exactly, it's more about the putin regime that has been present for the past 20 years and it's been enough. eric: three years ago, i followed aleksei navalny as he was building the infrastructure to challenge putin. the lawyer and politician was setting up offices in 40 cities, staffed by passionate aids and volunteers. arkady: he's a completely new type of politician in russia. we've never seen anything like this.

everything about him says look, i'm just the same as you, i've come from the same background. i'm not even a muscovite, i'm not part of this elite, i'm not part of this closed circle of insider deals. eric: at the time, he wanted to run for president, but a trumped up fraud charge and a suspended prison sentence meant he was barred from office. navalny told me it didn't matter.

eric: navalny was clearly working on a long-term plan. at the time, i wondered if he'd survive long enough to complete it. male announcer: we're getting reports that opposition politician, alexei navalny, is in a coma in a siberian hospital with suspected poisoning. eric: last august, navalny fell mortally ill while flying back from a tour of siberia. fearing the worst, his wife, yulia, pleaded to evacuate him to a hospital outside russia.

maria: we straightaway assumed that this is the poisoning, because, i mean, what else? eric: his close aid, maria pevchikh, suspected they wer waiting for the poison to pass through his system. maria: we just knew for sure that if that is the poisoning that no one is going to investigate it. we knew that russian governments, the russian state wouldn't investigate itor sure. eric: maria pevchikh heads navalny's corruption investigations. she and her team rushe to his hotel room to search for evidence. maria: we just asked the hotel administration to let us into his room,t hasn't been cleaned yet, and we just grabbed everythinge could grab from his room. we took trash essentially from his room, packaged it, sealed

it, tried to, you know, not touch it with our bare hands. eric: after intense international pressure, authorities finally allowed navalny to be medivaced to germany. maria took the samples for testing. maria: one of the bottles that i grabbed from his bedside table was later tested at the bundeswehr lab, that's an army lab in germany, and this is where they found a trace of novichok, the chemical nerve agent. eric: now, the significance of novichok, that to you meant the kremlin must be responsible. maria: absolutely, novichok is essentially just-- it's pretty much just putin's signature on ts crime. it's very easy and very obvious that no one but from the state has access to these sort of things.

eric: putin denied any involvement. eric: navalny emerged from his coma determined to find the assassins and expose them on his popular youtube channel. eric: working with the investigations group bellingcat, his team soon pointed the finger at the russian security service, the fsb. eric: they identified the fsb agents who'd been shadowing navalny in siberia.

navalny set out to trick them into confessing. eric: sitting alongside maria pevchikh, he called fsb team members, posing as a senior official debriefing the operation. eric: to everyone's amazement, one of the agents fell for it, discussing how they had applied the poison and removed the evidence.

maria: he's the guy who's doing cleanup, so he was going to the place where alexei went afterwards and just clean up. eric: the agent even reveed where the poison had been placed. maria: to be honest, that was the most unbelievable day in my career.

maria: it's sad, and funny, and good at the same time. sad in terms of what level of, you know, security services we really have in russia, and good in terms of the fact that, you know, it helped us to solve the crime, which to be honest, i barely hoped we would ever be able to solve. eric: navalny was now safe in berlin. he had survived the murder attempt and implicated putin's agents. then, astonishingly, he announced he was going back to russia. [alexei navalny speaking russian] eric: now, the question everyone is asking is why

did he go back to russia? why did he leave the safety of germany? maria: you can't be a russian politician and not live in russia. he had absolutely nohesitat. he made his decision straightaway while he was still at t hospital in germany. he said he will co back and he came back. eric: the russian writer and commentator, arkady ostrovsky, was on the plane to witness a moment of history. arkady: it's no ordinary flight. it's part of the transformation of reality into myth. navalny's strength is that he senses that he's riding a wave of history, and th wave cannot turn back.

eric: in moscow, supporters had gathered to greet him. [crowd chanting in russian] the authorities had no intention of allowing a hero's welcome. at the last minute, the plane was diverted to a different moscow airport. police detained him at immigration and took him straight to a police station where they set up a courtroom. [female speaking russian] eric: navalny was now at the mercy of putin. but instead of buckling, he raised the stakes even higher. ♪♪♪

eric: two days after he flew in, his team released a youtube video accusing putin of gold-medal corruption. they had deliberately waited until navalny was back in russia. ♪♪♪ eric: called "putin's palace," the film exposed how a palace costing $1.5 billion u.s. had been secretly built on the black sea, allegedly for the president.

maria: we have investigated its history and how ownership changed to prove that this palace has been built for vladimir putin by his friends, by the oligarchs, and the place is so expensive that it is probably the biggest bribe ever given in the history of bribing. eric: the plans revealed a giant underground hockey stadium, a theater and pole-dancing room, even thousand-dollar toilet brushes. they say much of it paid for with state money intended for healthcare. eric: and all this while ordinary russians were

struggling to make ends meet amidst the coronavirus and a stagnant economy. maria: the main message of r investigation is that putin is probably the richest person in the world. he uses a network, a very sophisticated network of his old friends to hide all of this. eric: within weeks, the video had attracted 110 million views, watched by at least a quarter of the russian population. putin denied any connection to the palace.

arkady: what we know is this palace exists, right? it's real, it's been filmed. it's protected by the fsb, russian security services, and the border guards. it's a no-fly zone. it's linked financially to putin's cronies and his friends. if it looks like a duck, if it quacks like the duck, and looks like the duck, it probably is the duck, right? eric: now, if what you're saying is right, putin can never live in this palace now, can he? thanks to you, because it would show it was his. maria: yeah, he definitely cannot live there, and i think this is probablyhy he is most upset with us. ♪♪♪ eric: protests erupted in hundreds of towns and cities. the young lawyer, natasha romi, felt she had

no choice but to join. natasha: it's about putin's palace that he built for himself in gelendzhik. there are lots of people who are really angry about the amount of money that has been spent. eric: police detained more than 11,000 demonstrators, then moved onto navalny's associates. lyubov sobol from his investigations team was grabbed in the street. scores of campaign staff were arrested. many more went into hiding. even navalny's personal doctor, anastasia vasilyeva, found police storming in to search her apartment. she defiantly played piano, insisting she would not sign anything until she saw a lawyer. leonid: it more and more rends of the, like, stalin era

criminal cases, because, like, the remaining people are put to trial simultaneously on quite ridiculous and made-up charges. and vasilyeva was, i would say, pretty much of a collateral damage. eric: navalny's command center is now outside russia in the lithuanian capital, vilnius. russia has issued an arrest warrant for navalny's key strategist, leonid volkov, but for now, he's safe. leonid: it's actually quite a psychologically challenging thing, that i'm enjoying a freedom in a nice european city while your colleagues are there in detention centers or under house arrest. it's not easy. i've been detained, like, nine times. i've spent over four months in jails.

eric: on february 2, navalny was brought to court for sentencing. the charge is related to the old fraud conviction which the state had used to stop him running for president. absurdly, the court found navalny had breached parole by not reporting to russian police while recovering in germany. he was sentenced to two years and eight months in a penal colony. defiant as ever, navalny made a love-heart gesture to his wife before declaring his contempt for putin, his speech recorded on a mobile phone. eric: the kremlin has unleashed a media campaign to discredit navalny and his team

eric: navalny is a controversial figure. in the past, his declarations of support for democracy and rule of law have been mixed with hardcore appeals to nationalists. in this 2007 video, he likened chechen militants to cockroaches and suggested they be killed.

arkady: i was shocked by the video, and we started off on a very bad note. i was and still am very critical about that period. what earned my respect is actually how much he matured and evolved, how much he changes, how much he is capable of cnge. leonid: i am pretty sure that alexei navalny would not do such a video, not in 2021, but evenne was running for mayor of moscow. not even probably in 2011 when we started to work together. eric: on february 5, leonid volkov called a halt to further street protests in the wake of mass arrests. the strategy now is to focus on defeating putin's candidates in the september parliamentary elections. leonid: we will see the electoral campaign going full steam in russia ju in a couple of months.

the thing that we are discussing already for a very long time, targeted sanctions against putin's close friends and allies, against his wallets, against actually putin's money. eric: the pivot from winter street protests is welcome news for natasha romi. sheltering from a -15° night in the apartment she shares with her mother and two cats. natasha: i have this glimpse of hope that maybe in september elections, maybe something will go different than the usual pattern. i have this belief. i have this hope. because you see, the main thing here that the amount of people today whfive years ago.his regime is much higher than, say, now, this majority of people who were pro-putin, they're against, they're turning. you can hear the movement, you know.

eric: but when her mother, marian, joins the discussion, it's clear there's a huge generational split. she's appalled natasha joined the protests. natasha: our parents and our older generation, yeah, they're right that we don't know how bad it can be, but they

don't know how good it can be. eric: navalny's deeply personal attacks on putin have left no room for retreat. his team is locked into a fight to the end, a fight that could last for years. leonid volkov believes the best way to keep navalny alive is to keep his struggle in the public eye. leonid: well, as kremlin hoped, the dust settled a little bi it's so easy to stage something when a person's in prison. like, okay, it was a conflict with a cell mate or something like this. this is something that could unfortunately happen. so, our task is not to let dust settle, not to let navalny disappear from the radars of public opinion and awareness. eric: from her base in london, maria pevchikh will

continue producing invtigative videos on kremlin corruption. maria: we are of course affected, but by the time that aleksei has been to prison, it's not nice, it's not good, we prefer to work when he's around, but it's not going to stop us from doing what we're doing, and it's not going to make our work less noticeable or less effective. ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ eric: before stopping the protests, volkov engineered one last demonstration: people shining lights on valentine's day to show love is stronger than fear. natasha: i feel so inspired, and it's so empowering to see

all those people and i think it was a great idea to let people face their neighbors. you can see people from the same house, from the same building with you, who are sharing the same views. honestly, i'm speechless. it was great.