Blogger, anti-corruption lawyer and political activist who organized the biggest protests in Moscow since the fall of the Soviet Union, Alexei Navalny, number 1 enemy of Russian President Vladimir Putin, died this Friday (16) in a remote prison in the Arctic.
“Vladimir, the poisoner”, was what Navalny called the head of the Kremlin in February 2021, during the first of the trials in which he was a defendant and which were criticized by the Russian opposition and the West.
Navalny was the beacon of the first free generation in Russian history. The Kremlin was so aware of this that, in the midst of the war in Ukraine, the Russian justice system imposed the last of its sentences, which totaled almost 30 years in prison.
The arrest did not stop Navalny from openly condemning what he called the “criminal war” in Ukraine, whose sole objective, according to the opposition leader, is to allow Putin to “maintain power”.
He also criticized the partial mobilization decreed by the head of the Kremlin, whose objective would be to “involve as many people as possible” in the war and “stain hundreds of thousands of people with blood”.
Furthermore, he stated that “Putin is losing” the conflict and predicted “a large number of deaths (…) in the war grinder”.
Navalny took advantage of the unpopularity of the conflict to revive his political movement, banned as “extremist”, with the slogan “no war, no mobilization, freedom for Navalny”.
After Novichok poisoning, Navalny was arrested
The Kremlin's patience with Navalny ran out in August 2020. At the time, according to the extra-parliamentary opposition, the Russian authorities had decided to eliminate the Russian politician.
“Putin ordered my murder,” said Navalny after recovering in Germany from poisoning with a toxic agent from the Novichok family.
The secret special services operation went wrong, and Navalny managed to return to Russia in mid-January 2021 to challenge Putin.
But the Kremlin was waiting for him. Authorities took advantage of his refusal to appear before authorities in an old criminal case and sent him to prison.
In this way, Putin found himself free from another enemy, as happened with the then richest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, imprisoned in Siberia (2003), or with opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, murdered in front of the Kremlin in 2015.
Navalny was the opposition figure with the greatest electoral weight, but after being the victim of an assassination attempt by the Federal Security Service (FSB), he became a celebrity abroad.
Adept at social media, Navalny was already preparing his revenge, which came in the form of three compromising videos for the Kremlin.
With the help of Bellingcat and several Western media outlets, he managed to collect data that proved, according to the politician, the FSB's involvement in his assassination attempt.
And it didn't stop there, including a telephone conversation with one of the alleged participants in the secret operation who admitted that his accomplices had sprayed Novichok on the opponent's underwear.
Navalny's latest controversial revelation about the Kremlin was a video titled “Putin's Palace”, about a mansion in the Black Sea region that the president allegedly received as a gift and to which one of his best friends, businessman Arkadi Rotenberg, admitted more late to be an owner.
All of this not only exposed the FSB and Putin, but was also watched by more than 150 million people, a number that contrasts with the 7 million who followed the president's annual press conference at the same time.
A war cry: “Russia without Putin”
It all started in the liberal Yabloko party, from which Navalny was expelled for his nationalist views. But his ostracism was short-lived, as in the 2011 parliamentary elections, he managed to organize the biggest protests against the government since the fall of the USSR, with the battle cry “Russia without Putin”.
The following year, he made the big leap into politics by running in the Moscow mayoral elections, where he won almost a third of the votes, an unprecedented milestone for the extra-parliamentary opposition.
Putin's animosity, who never called him by name, stems from the countless occasions on which the opposition leader exposed the shame of the Kremlin's allies, denouncing them on social media, far from the reach of censorship.
There were no taboos when it came to reporting corruption in public administration. Whether for the Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, the president of Parliament or the president of a state bank, for the prosecutor general or the wife of the presidential spokesperson, the leader of the opposition was no longer just a nuisance, but a threat.
He was sentenced to prison for alleged economic crimes, and was therefore disqualified from running for president. He was physically attacked on several occasions. Even behind bars, he managed to influence the elections with his “Smart Vote” program, which consists of choosing between the candidates with the greatest chance of defeating the candidate of the party in power.
Shortly after asking for votes for any candidate other than Putin in the March presidential elections, Navalny was clandestinely transferred to the Arctic prison, where he died this Friday.
#chronicle #announced #death #Navalny #Putin39s #number #enemy