Piotr Verzilov looks tanned and full of energy as he orders a pot of green tea at a cafe in central Moscow.

“The irony is that I feel a lot better now than before the poisoning,” says the Pussy Riot activist and editor of the online investigation site Mediazona.

Verzilov was rushed to a Moscow hospital on September 11, 2018, after suddenly losing his sight, hearing and mobility. After three days, he was flown to Germany.

The doctors of Charite Hospital in Berlin said he was suffering from anticholinergic syndrome, local and foreign media reported. The condition blocks the passage of certain neurotransmitters. They added that the sudden onset of Verzilov’s disease was strongly indicative of poisoning.

“I felt like I was in a black hole,” Verzilov said of his physical and mental condition after the incident.

Back in Russia after five months of what he calls “the rehabilitation exile” in Israel, Verzilov says he is more determined than ever to try to transform the country into a free and just society.

“If you want to wage a political fight in Russia, you have to be prepared for all types of scenarios, including death. ”

Russian prosecutors have yet to open an investigation into the incident. Verzilov is convinced that the poisoning was carried out by the security services who, he joked, “have a bit of a habit of doing it.”

Activists and security services have been on high alert since former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal was poisoned in Britain last year in an attack blamed by London on Moscow.

Verzilov says the day he fell ill he was to receive a report he commissioned on the deaths of three Russian documentary filmmakers in the Central African Republic in July 2018.

Orkhan Dzhemal, Aleksandr Rastorguev and Kirill Radchenko have died under mysterious circumstances in which Russia and the Central African Republic insist it was a roadside robbery gone wrong.

They were in the country to investigate Russian private military company Wagner, which local and international media reported reported operates in the Central African Republic.

A report on the deaths of the journalists published in January by Dossier, an investigative medium funded by the magnate-turned-opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky, interrogates the ambush theory.

Rastorguyev was Verzilov’s close friend and collaborator, and Verzilov says he almost joined the ill-fated trip to investigate reports of Russian mercenary activity in the country.

At the last minute, he decided to stay in Russia for to participate in a protest pitch invasion during the FIFA World Cup final that landed him in jail for 15 days.

Verzilov says his own investigations have linked Evgeny Prigozhin to events in the Central African Republic.

Prigozhin is a businessman and caterer, nicknamed “Putin’s boss” by Russian media because of his close ties to the Russian president.

Verzilov is convinced that his involvement in the investigations in the Central African Republic and the invasion of the World Cup pitch led to his apparent poisoning.

“It could have been a combination of the two, and things just piled up,” he says.

However, the investigation is not the only thing on his mind when he returns to Moscow.

Verzilov defines himself as “a political artist above all”.

He was a co-founder of the outrageous Pussy Riot and married to Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who spent two years in a penal colony for her role in the group’s anti-Putin Punk Prayer protest in Moscow’s main cathedral.

He also founded another collective, Voina, famous for organizing a live sex show in a Moscow museum to protest the 2008 election of Dmitry Medvedev to the Russian presidency.

Verzilov says that political art as protest works very differently from conventional street gatherings, but that “both forms of expression are needed to change society.”

He firmly believes that ordinary Russians see value in the actions of collectives like Pussy Riot and Voina, and support them.

“When I was locked up for the World Cup stunt, my prison guards en masse asked me to sign autographs for their friends and relatives,” he says. “These cops, who earn 40,000 rubles ($ 622) a month, understood our motivations to run in this field.”

Verzilov says he will continue to play his role in making Russian political art one of the country’s most famous brands abroad.

“When you go to a random city in the United States, people often know two Russian names, Poutine and Pussy Riot. “