Who was opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the critic who accused Putin of “sucking the blood of Russia” – 2024-02-20 06:37:33

Alexei Navalny was Russia’s most prominent opposition leader for the past decade.

His death, announced this Friday by the authorities of the prison where he had been held since the end of last year, within the Arctic Circle, means the end of both a political and personal struggle once morest the president. Vladimir Putin.

A struggle that took him from having millions of followers both on social networks and on the Russian streets to various sentences in prisons in the country, in addition to several attempts on his life.

Navalny accused Putin of “sucking blood from Russia” through a “feudal state” that concentrates power in the Kremlin.

The president’s party, United Russia, was for the opposition a den of “criminals and thieves.”

both men They never faced each other at the polls.

The opposition leader tried in 2018, but his candidacy was vetoed following a Russian court convicted him of embezzlement.

Navalny always denied these accusations, and claimed that his legal disputes were retaliation by the Kremlin for his criticism.

He was born on June 4, 1976 in Butyn, in the Moscow region, where he graduated in Law from the Russian People’s Friendship University in 1998.

He leaves a wife and two children.

Poisoning and other attacks

Navalny’s battle once morest Putin became intensely personal when the opponent accused the president of having ordered state agents to poison him, an attack that almost cost him his life in August 2020.

Navalny collapsed during a flight over Siberia and was rushed to a hospital in Omsk, in the center of the country.

He then fell into a coma, and a Germany-based humanitarian organization persuaded Russian officials to allow him to be transferred to Berlin for treatment.

Days later, on September 2, the German government revealed that the tests carried out showed “unequivocal signs” of Novichok nerve agent poisoning.

This is the same chemical that the former Russian spy was almost killed by Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in England in March 2018.

The Kremlin denied any role in the attack suffered by Navalny, whom Putin always avoided naming in public.

But the president did admit that the State has kept the opponent under surveillance, alleging links to American spies.

Despite official denials, the journalistic investigative group Bellingcat published that the Federal Security Service (FSB) has indeed persecuted Navalny.

In fact, Bellingcat named the agents it suspected of poisoning the Russian politician.

Navalny suffered arrests and convictions, which he attributed to political persecution.

On one occasion, Navalny posed as a senior Russian security official over the phone and recorded the confession of one of those agents.

The European Union imposed sanctions on six senior Russian officials and a Russian chemical weapons research center, accusing them of direct involvement in Navalny’s poisoning.

That attack was not the only one suffered by the opponent.

In 2019, he was diagnosed with “contact dermatitis” while in prison, and his doctor indicated he may have been exposed to “some toxic agent.”

He has also been attacked twice with an antiseptic green dye known as “zelyonka” and suffered chemical burns to one eye.

Navalny had been an obstacle for the Kremlin for several years, but at that time He also accumulated criticism from other opposition groups who accused him of being a nationalist.

In 2014, when asked on a radio station regarding Ukraine’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula, he said that although Crimea had been “seized” in violation of international law, “the reality is that Crimea is now part of Russia. Crimea is ours.”

Opposition blogger

His rise as a force in Russian politics began in 2008, when he exposed malpractices and corruption in some of Russia’s large state-controlled corporations on his blog.

One of his tactics was to become a minority shareholder in major oil companies, banks and ministries, and ask uncomfortable questions regarding irregularities in state finances.

On social networks, his followers They were predominantly young and he addressed them with sharp and forceful language, mocking the establishment loyal to President Putin.

Before the 2011 parliamentary elections, in which he did not stand as a candidate, he urged readers of his blog to vote for any party except Putin’s United Russia, which he dubbed the “party of criminals and thieves.” , a phrase that became popular.

United Russia won the election, but with a razor-thin majority, and its victory was marred by widespread accusations of vote rigging that sparked protests in Moscow and other major cities.

Navalny organized marches once morest Putin with other opposition leaders (pictured here with chess player and politician Gary Kasparov in 2012), but also faced criticism within the Russian opposition.

Navalny was arrested and jailed for 15 days following the first protest, on December 5, 2011, but emerged in time to speak at the largest of the post-election demonstrations in Moscow, on December 24 of that year.

It is estimated that around 120,000 people attended.

Putin, however, was easily re-elected. And Russia’s powerful Investigative Committee launched criminal investigations into Navalny’s previous activities, even questioning his legal credentials.

When he was briefly jailed in July 2013 for embezzlement, the five-year sentence was widely seen as a political decision.

And, once morest all odds, he was allowed to leave prison to participate in the Moscow mayoral elections, in which he came second with 27% of the votes, behind Putin’s ally, Sergei Sobyanin.

The result, however, was considered a great success, since Navalny did not have access to state television: he depended only on the internet and word of mouth.

His first conviction was later overturned by Russia’s Supreme Court, following the European Court of Human Rights determined that he had not received a fair hearing in his first trial.

Subsequently, in a new judicial process in 2017, he was convicted a second time and received a five-year suspended sentence.

Navalny once more described the trial as a farce and assured that they were only trying to exclude him from the 2018 elections.

Putin avoided naming Navalny in public.

Navalny once told the BBC that the best Western states might do for Russian justice was to crack down on “dirty money.”

“I want people involved in corruption and persecution of activists to be banned from entering these countries and visas denied,” he said.

When Navalny was jailed in 2013, he told the judge that he would fight with his comrades “to destroy the feudal state that is being built in Russia, to destroy the system of government where 83% of the national wealth is owned by 0.5% of the population”.

Navalny has participated in ultranationalist events, which has caused concern among the Russian liberal sector. Russian nationalists were also wary of her ties to the United States following spending a semester at Yale in 2010.

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