How to make the “Impossible” possible - Saving Alexei Navalny’s life
At a joint press conference Chancellor Merkel and President Macron declared support for Navalny.
Cinema for Peace brought Alexei Navalny to Berlin
The Evacuation
To get a plane that could fly the same day with a full medical crew, three things were needed: an emergency plane available immediately, confirmation from Charité in Berlin that they would accept the patient, and approval from the German government. All of this I had to get simultaneously, in hours.
I sent a message for Chancellor Merkel to her party vice chair and member of cabinet Julia Klöckner, who I have known for 30 years. Merkel was with Macron at this moment and after receiving my message, both announced in a press conference that France and Germany are both offering medical treatment to Alexei Navalny.
My tactic was to use the public announcements by Chancellor Merkel and President Macron to provoke a statement by the Kremlin that they care about their citizens and that they can be treated outside Russia. This was exactly what Kremlin speaker Peskov did in order to make his regime look humanitarian and caring, and not like an assassin. Putin had an interest in looking good in front of the world and his spokesperson stated on the record that a Russian citizen can be treated wherever his family wishes. This was my opening to get Navalny out of Russia! And I let all contacts with ties to Putin and Russia know: if they don't want to look like the assassins, they are much better off to let me evacuate Navalny to Berlin.
I booked the air ambulance with the same person I had booked two years before the emergency plane and medical crew to evacuate Peter Verzilov from Moscow - a Challenger medevac jet, flight “IFA 1344” - and guaranteed the cost with my credit card of more than 70,000 euros for someone I had never met in my life, before Mr. Zimin from London by request by Navalny’s team came forward to make the payment at some point. As I used the same line of action like two years earlier for Peter Verzilov after his own suspected poisoning. I knew it could be done.
Then the obstruction began.
The Russian doctors declared Navalny untransportable. Condition unstable. The Omsk hospital refused to release him. The toxicologist who had privately confirmed he could fly - Alexander Polupan - suddenly stopped answering calls. Leonid Volkov, Navalny's chief of staff, said it simply: "Their idea is to cover up the poison." The FSB had poisoned him in Omsk precisely because it was far from everything - far from witnesses, far from specialists, far from the world. And now they wanted to keep him there. I activated all our networks, everyone who had any connection to Russia. My argument was simple: tell Putin this is the best option for him to prove that he did not try to kill Navalny.
The Russian doctors' claim that the flight would kill him was the political cover for blocking the transfer.
So I organised an ad hoc press conference in Berlin. We tried to create as much media pressure as possible - to motivate politicians to act, to keep them updated, to keep the spotlight burning on Omsk so the plane would not leave empty. I told the crew of the plane and the company: Under no circumstances leave without the patient - no matter what it costs. My instincts told me: once the emergency plane leaves without the patient, Navalny would die in Omsk.
I asked the German government to intervene - to help get the medical crew's visas to let the medical crew visit Navalny in hospital and examine him - to apply political pressure. The communication to Merkel went through Julia Klöckner, a dear friend for 30 years, current president of the German Parliament.
We organised a press conference in Berlin to create as much media pressure as possible.
Every hour the plane sat on the Omsk tarmac without Navalny on board was an hour in which the patient and the momentum could die.
Yulia Navalnaya was not permitted to see her husband anymore. The hospital had turned from a medical place with people in white into a high security prison with military and officers with arms - it was guarded like a prison with high security, soldiers at the entrance. She could no longer get to her husband.
I had to get the doctors the crucial permission to examine the patient for a “Fit to Fly-evaluation” as the Russian doctors said he would die on a plane.
When I succeeded to get the “Fit to Fly-evaluation”, I was shocked: I had never seen a human being with such low temperature.
When they sent me the medical reports,I spoke directly with Charité doctors. They told me: “Mr Bizilj, the patient is in a very, very, very serious condition.”
I had to make a decision. I knew that if he flew, he might die on the plane. The Russian doctors were insisting on exactly that - that the flight itself would kill him. Would I let Putin's enemy No. 1 , the world's most famous dissident, die on my watch, could I bear such responsibility?
I took the risk and said we need to follow the wishes of his wife. Yulia had made it clear that: He needed to fly under any circumstances.
Our medical team - Dr. Philipp Jakoby, Kai-Simon Roloff, Michael Trautner - conducted their assessment in Omsk: "Aus unserer Sicht ist der Patient absolut fliegbar."
The plane touched the tarmac of the airport in Berlin, one of the happiest moments I ever experienced, Yulia Navalnaya thanked me on the tarmac for the evacuation - and especially for making sure the plane did not fly back empty when the patient was not transported to the airport after the arrival of the emergency plane. It was crucial that it stayed.
To avoid a spectacle that could affect the transfer, the landing in Berlin was changed to the military section of Tegel airport - directly adjacent to the aircraft of the German President. No cameras. No spectacle. Navalny was prepared for transportation to Charité for one hour. Because of Covid, we had placed him into a kind of transparent "Snow White coffin". After preparing him, we moved with blue lights and a motorcade of 20 cars to Charité hospital.
When Alexei Navalny arrived at Charité hospital, I introduced Professor Kai-Uwe Eckardt to Yulia and the team in a special meeting room in the emergency section.
My mission impossible ended.
The Poison, and the Regret
Immediately after the evacuation I began working on identifying the substance used. In Peter Verzilov's case it had been extremely difficult to determine the specific poison. I called my friend Bill Browder, who recommended I approach Porton Down - the UK government's secret defence laboratory, the facility that had identified polonium in the Litvinenko case and Novichok in the Skripal case. So the Skripals could be saved. Perhaps Porton Down could find even more than Charité alone.
This required the German government to formally request the analysis from the UK government - a government-to-government channel.
I sent the request through Merkel's vice-chair that same night.
For undisclosed reasons, Navalny's team subsequently asked that the process not continue and that no further activity be taken from my side.
Later, Novichok was confirmed on 2 September 2020, the German government announced "unequivocal proof" that Navalny had been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent, with Chancellor Merkel calling it an attempted murder. On 6 October, the OPCW formally confirmed the findings, with independent laboratories in France and Sweden corroborating the results. The world knew. But what came next, none of us could control.
Unfortunately with no security guarantees Navalny's team let him fly back to Russia where the winter had minus 20 degrees- making it impossible to ignite mass demonstrations.
Alexei Navalny was arrested immediately at the airport on his return to Russia in January 2021. He was imprisoned, transferred to increasingly brutal conditions, and on 16 February 2024, he died in the Arctic penal colony IK-6 Polar Wolf. He was 47 years old.
I did not know that governments had been trying for two years to negotiate his release in a prisoner exchange, but the Navalny team never told me. I did not know that a prisoner exchange was being discussed. I feel great remorse about this. If I had known, I would have initiated the exchange from summer 2024 - not only to save Kara-Murza and the others, but to save the life of Navalny a second time. We saved him once. We could have saved him again.
There were two more parties who gave him a few additional years of his life, to make a film, prepare his legacy, and inspire many millions with his bravery and opposition to Putin and then the Ukraine war:
a) the first responders at the airport in Omsk who treated him with atropine despite bomb threats and commands not to let the plane land
b) the doctors at Charité first of all, but also the doctors in Omsk - two of whom died mysteriously: Dr. Sergei Maksimishin, the deputy head physician who originally confirmed Navalny had been poisoned before backtracking; and Rustam Agishev, head of the trauma and orthopedics department, died in March 2021 from complications after a stroke. One doctor was fired, and chief physician Alexander Murakhovsky - who had obstructed the evacuation by blocking the transfer and declaring Navalny's condition a "metabolic disorder" - was rewarded with a promotion to regional health minister.
The Prisoners Exchange
After Navalny's death, fearing for the lives of Vladimir Kara-Murza and others wrongfully held in Russian and Belarusian prisons, I acted again.
All official negotiations had failed for more than a year. Diplomats were stuck. Bureaucrats were in the way. So I sent a back-channel envoy - Detlef Prinz, confidant of former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder - to the German Chancellery to Scholz, to Moscow to Putin, and to Ankara to Erdogan, to find the window that official channels had missed.
I knew that Putin wanted two people back: Viktor Bout - the notorious arms dealer known as "the Merchant of Death," who inspired the character in the film “Lord of War” and had already been exchanged for basketball star Brittney Griner in December 2022 - and Vadim Krasikov, the FSB assassin who had executed Georgian-Chechen dissident Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in broad daylight in Berlin's Kleiner Tiergarten park in August 2019, using a false identity and a silenced pistol, and who was serving a life sentence in a German prison.
The Green party and my friend Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, had questioned the coalition government about whether the Tiergarten murderer would be released. I texted her that I originally agreed with her but after Navalny's death and the likes of Kara-Murza dying too, changed my mind , and that I had a solution.
I texted Christian Lindner, the head of the Liberal Party and suggested that his justice minister Buschmann creates an expert evaluation that the Russian murderer could be bought from a German to a Russian prison as part of a prisoner exchange - being naive again: like I lobbied Putin to let Navalny go the first time in order to prove that they had not tried to murder him - as proven later in the documentary film by Daniel Roher when Navalny called his own murderers - I did not expect that Putin would embrace the murderer at arrival in Moscow publicly with open arms on the front pages of newspapers.
Detlef convinced Chancellor Scholz that this was the right way to go, and also did a favour to US President Joe Biden, who announced later the prisoner exchange which included marine Paul Whelan and Wall Street journalist Evan Gershkovich. And travelled to Moscow with the letter and names suggested by Cinema for Peace and the world forum. As we could not speak undisclosed, I had told him to let me know if it's bad or good weather - if the exchange will happen or not? I did not reach him for four days even though he had planned to visit only two days. On day four he texted “Sehr gut, aber stressig!”.
I learned later that Western bureaucrats endangered the mission, but courageous heads of state proved decisive. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Minister of Justice Dr. Marco Buschmann acted, and I was told that it was particularly President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who made the parties execute the exchange.
Two weeks after Detlef Prinz's mission, US President Joe Biden and Chancellor Scholz announced the largest prisoner exchange since the Cold War.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan. Ilya Yashin, Andrei Pivovarov, Oleg Orlov. Lilia Chanysheva, Alsu Kurmasheva and Sasha Skochilenko. Nine people who would otherwise still be in Russian prisons - or worse.
I thank Detlef Prinz for masterfully executing a mission impossible in a rare and small window of opportunity.
We honoured Vladimir Kara-Murza with “The Noble Prize” as Guardian of Democracy and he has become a board member of The World Forum, angering him a bit when we called him “potential president in exile of Russia”. I will never forget his facial expression and the emotion in his eyes when he described his feelings in the early morning in Siberia when he was led out of his prison cell towards a bus - “I cannot describe the feeling, it was unbelievable, I had been convinced that I would die in that prison.”
Coda
Cinema for Peace was founded on the belief that film and culture can change the world. But sometimes the world does not wait for a film. Sometimes it requires a phone call at night, a credit card number, a contact at the Chancellery, to know the right doctors and emergency plan - and the willingness to make a decision about another person's life alone, in the dark, with no guarantee of the outcome.
We saved Alexei Navalny's life in 2020. We could not save it in 2024. We will never stop asking what might have been different, if Leonid Volkov would have shown better responsibility and judgement.
The 100 WhatsApp screenshots of the conversations have been kept confidential and classified and are published to motivate other NGOs and private individuals to the same: everybody can save somebody's life. Just do it.
Follow the call to action, work through the nights, don’t let anybody obstruct you, go for the breakthrough in the window of opportunity outside official channels. When governments cannot act, you must make the difference.
by: Jaka Bizilj
Five years ago, on the morning of 20 August 2020, I received a WhatsApp message from Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot: "Jaka! Peter is trying to contact you - Navalny is poisoned."
Minutes later, Peter Verzilov wrote directly: Russia's most prominent opposition leader had lost consciousness mid-flight over Siberia. He was now in a coma, on artificial ventilation, in a hospital in Omsk - thousands of kilometres from any specialist care, surrounded by doctors who would not release him, in a city where the FSB was present and watching.
I replied: "I am on it." What followed was a breathless thriller over 48 hours without sleep and distraction
