have the photos." According to the investigation, Navalny had been under surveillance by a group of eight operatives from the unit since 2017, and there may have been earlier attempts to poison him. The travel data of the alleged FSB officers were made publicly available. When asked about the investigation, Putin called it "the legalisation of the materials of American intelligence agencies" and confirmed that Russian security agents were tailing Navalny, claiming that Navalny was backed by U.S. intelligence and denying that he was poisoned. In January 2021, Bellingcat in a separate joint investigation with Der Spiegel linked the unit that tracked Navalny and allegedly poisoned him to the deaths of two other activists including Timur Kuashev in 2014 and Ruslan Magomedragimov in 2015, as well as potentially the politician Nikita Isayev in 2019, but it noted that Isayev was "absolutely loyal" to the Kremlin and there was no motive for him to have been killed by the FSB. According to Bellingcat, the same FSB unit had been involved in the assassination of Boris Nemtsov and the poisonings of Vladimir Kara-Murza and Dmitry Bykov. Telephone conversation with agent Following the investigation but before its publication, Navalny recorded his telephone conversation with Konstantin Borisovich Kudryavtsev, an alleged FSB operative allegedly involved in his poisoning. The recording was released on 21 December 2020. During the phone conversation, Navalny posed as an aide to the secretary of Russia's Security Council Nikolai Patrushev, pretending to debrief Kudryavtsev about the operation and asking for details of why the mission had failed. Investigators used caller ID spoofing software to make the call look like it was coming from an FSB work phone number. Kudryavtsev unwittingly confessed that the Novichok agent had been applied to Navalny's underwear while he was staying at the hotel in Tomsk; but while Navalny had worn them for the flight as planned, the poison had apparently been absorbed too slowly. He attributed Navalny's survival to the pilots rerouting the flight and doctors in Omsk administering an antidote "almost immediately". Following Navalny's medical evacuation to Germany, the man said he had been sent to recover Navalny's clothes so that they could be treated to remove traces of Novichok before they could be tested by independent experts. The FSB later dismissed the recording of Navalny's telephone call as a forgery, calling it a "provocation" that "would not have been possible without the organizational and