Just weeks before leaving Germany, he told CNN: "I understand that Putin hates me, I understand that people in the Kremlin are ready to kill."As he recovered in Berlin from the August 2020 assassination attempt, Navalny and his crack research team -- acting on some creative sleuthing by investigative outfit Bellingcat and CNN -- figured out who his would-be killers were and discovered they'd been tailing him on Putin's orders for over three years.So detailed was Navalny's knowledge that, posing as an official with Russia's National Security Council, he was able to call one of the would-be killers, who promptly confessed to lacing Navalny's underwear with the banned nerve agent Novichok.He told Navalny he'd survived only because the plane carrying him diverted for medical help when he became sick, and suggested that the assassination attempt might have succeeded on a longer flight.Navalny's almost immediate incarceration after landing from Germany and his subsequent detention in one of Russia's most dangerous jails prisons -- he was moved in June to a maximum-security prison facility in Melekhovo, in the Vladimir region -- is no surprise."