Alexei Navalny’s supporters gathered on Plainpalais Square on the eve of the Russia-USA Summit in Geneva, on June 16th 2021. They laid out signs that summarize all the actions against Vladimir Putin's political oponent.

Novichok agents came to public attention after they were used to poison opponents of the Russian government, including the Skripals (Serguei the father and his daughter Ioulia, he was a former military intelligence officer), and two others in Amesbury in the United Kingdom in 2018 and Alexei Navalny in 2020, but civil poisonings with this substance have been known since at least 1995. In November 2019, the Organisation (OPCW), which is the executive body for the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), added the Novichok agents to "list of controlled substances" of the CWC "in one of the first major changes to the treaty since it was agreed in the 1990s" in response to the 2018 poisonings in the United Kingdom. A Novichok is a group of nerve agents, some of which are binary chemical weapons. Russian scientists who developed the nerve agents claim they are the deadliest ever made, with some variants possibly five to eight times more potent than VX, and others up to ten times more potent than soman. As well as Russia, Novichok agents have been known to be produced in Iran.