Vladlen Los sat in a chair outside Room 239 of the Xander Hotel. It was mid-morning on August 20 in the Siberian city of Tomsk. The lawyer Los was determined that no one get inside the room that his colleague, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, had left hours before.

All that was known at that point was that Navalny was gravely ill – stricken on a plane returning to Moscow. But Los and a handful of other members of Navalny's inner circle immediately suspected a deliberate poisoning.

Washington Post