Daniel Roher’s Navalny (CNN Films) is an utterly fascinating study of Vladimir Putin’s nearly lethal persecution of chief opposition leader Alexei Navalny over the last two or three years. At Putin’s direction, Navalny (whose English is as good as Tatiana’s) is currently doing time in a corrective colony in Vladimir Oblast.

In 2020 Navalny was poisoned in Tomsk, Siberia with an agent called Novichok. He recovered in Berlin and returned to Russia in early ‘21. Russian government goons forcibly and brutally led away Navalny supporters at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport; security guys arrested Navalny when he landed.

The doc appears to reliably identify three thugs involved with the poisoning incident, names and all, in apparent cahoots with a Russian security cabal of some kind. The thugs infected Navalny by dosing his underwear. In a bizarre, breathtaking sequence, Navalny even impersonates one of the would-be assassin’s collaborators during a phone call (actually a series of calls) and extracts incriminating information.

Navalny is currently looking at a couple of decades in prison. The conspiracy is proven, it’s all out in the open, Russia is a sham democracy, Putin is a killer and none of it matters — Putin runs the country like a mafia boss, and Navalny is in a political concentration camp. So it goes.