Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said he believed Russia’s intelligence services had poisoned him with a Novichok nerve agent because authorities saw him as a threat ahead of next year’s parliamentary elections. “They understood that there were big, big problems threatening them ahead of elections for the State Duma,” Navalny said in a YouTube interview with a Russian blogger, his first video appearance since being discharged from a Berlin hospital. The outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin emerged from a coma in early September after collapsing on a domestic flight in Siberia on Aug. 20.
