Who was Alexei Navalny, Russian opposition leader and Putin critic?
Navalny has long challenged Putin
Navalny was Russia’s best-known opposition leader — and has publicly criticized the Russian president and his government and called for political change.
Navalny had a large political network and led massive street protests in Russia. He had also been able to harness social media to keep pressure on Putin and his allies, exposing alleged corruption in widely viewed YouTube videos. Putin still largely refuses to say his name, in a show of disdain.
Navalny won various international human rights awards, and for many years faced court trials and house arrest, while Russian authorities seized his bank accounts. He was been barred from running against Putin in presidential elections, but continually found creative ways to resist Putin’s increasingly authoritarian rule.
Navalny studied law and finance in Russian universities and entered politics in 1999, just as Putin first took up national leadership. He joined the liberal opposition party Yabloko before being expelled in 2007. He later formed a group known as the Anti-Corruption Foundation to open investigations that increasingly struck at the heart of the Kremlin elite.
In 2013, Navalny surprised many analysts when he won 27 percent of the vote against a key Kremlin ally in the Moscow mayoral election. He became an international figurehead of dissent against Putin when he was poisoned by the nerve agent Novichok while on a flight from Siberia, making global headlines in 2020.
Navalny faced threats on his life
Amid the poisoning incident in 2020, the airplane pilot made an emergency landing in the city of Omsk, where Navalny was rushed to a hospital and placed on a ventilator. He was evacuated to Germany to recover. He later blamed Russian security forces for the poisoning, as did the State Department and European authorities. Russian officials denied any role.
Last year, lawyers and associates of Navalny said he feared that Russian authorities may be slowly poisoning him in prison after he suffered acute stomach pains and seizures and lost significant weight.
Navalny had been behind bars for nearly three years
Navalny had been jailed since he returned to Russia in January 2021. He and international rights groups denounced the charges against him as trumped up for political retribution.
In late December, Navalny surfaced in a penal colony in Russia’s far north following weeks where his whereabouts were not known. His spokesperson said he was “doing well” at the time.
Since Navalny’s imprisonment, Russia has taken a sharp authoritarian turn, arresting and jailing thousands of activists and antiwar figures, and launching a war in neighboring Ukraine.
Navalny faced up to 35 years in prison in total
That’s according to his spokesperson Kira Yarmysh, who said in late December that Navalny was a defendant in 14 criminal cases.
In 2021, he was sentenced to more than 2½ years in prison, in part for breaching probation rules, a decision his supporters called entirely political. While in prison, Navalny went on a hunger strike that captured international attention to protest the conditions of his imprisonment. He ended it after 24 days, after his doctors expressed alarm that he was close to death.
In August, a Russian court handed him a 19-year sentence on charges of “extremism” for organizing a political movement opposing the Kremlin and ordered for him to be transferred to a “special regime” colony. Such facilities are notorious for their severe conditions and harsh treatment of prisoners. Navalny was also convicted of fraud, embezzlement and contempt, among other charges he long argued were fabricated due to his political opposition to the Kremlin.
Adam Taylor, Ruby Mellen, Siobhán O’Grady, Miriam Berger and Maite Fernández Simon contributed to this report.
