Its not the first time the russians have used the chemical vs their enemies. 2 Russian Agents poisoned a man, and his daughter, and they didnt die either, though they were really fucked up.
Novichok is a series of nerve agent weapons developed as part of a secret Soviet program and continued once the Soviet Union collapsed. A Novichok nerve agent was used to poison the former Russian double agent Sergey Skripal in the English town of Salisbury in 2018, making the weapon a household name.
In the Salisbury poisoning, not only Skripal's daughter Yulia but also a responding police officer and a local couple who found the container carrying the poison were hospitalised. One of the couple, Dawn Sturgess, died.
In the case of the Skripals, British police said the nerve agent had been brought into the U.K. in a perfume bottle by two agents from Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, and had been sprayed on the door handle of Sergey Skripal's house in Salisbury. He and his daughter had likely then absorbed the poison through their skin. Mirzayanov though has said Novichok nerve agents can also take the form of powder and can be released through the air.
The Skripals spent weeks in the hospital and remain under British government protection. Navalny has been in an induced coma for almost three weeks and was connected to a ventilator in the intensive care unit, according to Berlin's the Charité hospital where he was evacuated from Russia at the demand of his family.