Alexei Navalny expected the fate that awaited him when he boarded flight 936 back to Moscow from Berlin on January 17, five months after his poisoning. Most passengers were already seated when he walked through the plane cabin, wearing a bright green jacket and blue face mask, and wheeling a suitcase behind him. Like his great adversary Vladimir Putin, Navalny knows the power of spectacle. People clapped. Cameras flashed. Reporters, including myself, got up to see the man who had risen from the dead. He was happy to be returning home, he told us. Then he slid into 13A – his “lucky” seat – next to his wife, Yulia.

In August 2020, Navalny nearly died after Russian agents smeared Novichok, a nerve agent, on his underpants during a campaign tour in Siberia. Navalny collapsed into a coma on a flight to Moscow. The pilot made an emergency landing and a medical team gave him an antidote, probably saving his life. A few days later, an air ambulance transported him to Berlin: Navalny was so toxic that he was carried in a sealed stretcher that looked like a coffin. He remembers nothing of his weeks in a coma. When he woke, he didn’t even recognise his wife.