Is Russia’s President Putin Afraid of Alexei Navalny?

Foreign Policy Brief #112 | By: Yelena Korshunov | January 8, 2024

Featured Photo taken from: www.prospectmagazine.co.uk – Illustration by Chris Tilbury; images © Michał Siergiejevicz

__________________________________

Alexei Navalny is one of the leaders of the Russian opposition and a leading opponent of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. Navalny gained initial fame for his investigations into corruption in Russia. The biggest exploration published by Navalny in 2021 was a lavish Black Sea property he claimed is owned by Putin. The investigation with an accompanying two-hour YouTube video claimed the property cost $1.35 billion and was paid for “with the largest bribe in history.” The report alleges that the property, located along Russia’s southern Black Sea coast, is 39 times the size of Monaco and features a casino inside an 11-mile mansion, along with an ice rink and vineyards.

Alexei Navalny is of Russian and Ukrainian descent. He grew up in a city named Obninsk, located about 62 miles southwest of Moscow. When the USSR has collapsed, his parents became the basket-weaving factory owners. Being a child Alexei spent summertime with his grandmother in Ukraine. Navalny developed his career as a lawyer, businessmen, and politician. He graduated from the People’s Frienship University of Russia with a degree in law and then studied finance at the Financial University of the Goverement of Russian Federation. Later Navalny received a scholarship for the 6-month Yale World Fellows program at Yale.

After an attempted poisoning by a chemical warfare agent from the Novichok group and subsequent treatment in Germany, Navalny returned to Russia on January 17, 2021. Novichok is a family of nerve agents some of which are binary chemical weapons. The agents were developed at the state chemical research institute by the former Soviet Union and Russia between 1971 and 1993. Navalny accused Putin of being responsible for his poisoning.

Right after landidng at the Moscow’s airport, Navalny was immediately arrested on a number of charges, including creating an “extremist community.” The same month he was thrown into correctional colony #2 in the city of Pokrov.

However, on the eve of the presidential elections in Russia in March, 2024, since December 6, 2023, Navalny had not been connected via video link at court hearings, and his lawyers and associates had not been informed where he was. The oppositionist last appeared at a court hearing via video link on November 28. After that, at all meetings, the correctional facility didn’t connect the politician to video conferencing. According to his representatives, the colony officials explained this by saying that there had been an “accident” and there was no electricity.

Navalny’s disappearance was preceded by the arrest of three lawyers who at different times represented his interests: Igor Sergunin, Vadim Kobzev and Alexei Liptser. In October, they were taken into custody on charges of participation in an “extremist community.”

In Navalny’s last publication on his website https://navalny.com, dated December 7, he calls Russians to vote against Vladimir Putin: “Presidential elections will take place on March 17, 2024. On this day, we encourage everyone to come to the polling stations and vote against Vladimir Putin. This can be done by checking the boxes for any other candidate.”

“Use the 100 days before the vote to campaign against Putin and his power’, Navalny encourages. “Without a doubt, we are in for a parody of the electoral procedure. And the final results will, as usual, be falsified. But any election, even the most fraudulent one, is a time of doubt. People think about who is in power and why he is there. The main task of the Russian opposition, the task of all honest citizens, is to answer these doubts with all their might. Putin will harm Russia. He must go. Putin views these elections as a referendum on approval of his actions. Referendum on approval of the war.”

On December 25, it finally became known where Alexei Navalny is located. He was transferred to correctional colony IK- 3 “Polar Wolf” in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region above the Arctic Circle. The colony to which Navalny was moved has a very bad reputation. Until that moment, there had been no contact with the opposition politician for 19 days. “We found Alexei Navalny,” the politician’s press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, wrote on her X (formerly Twitter) account. “He is located in IK-3 in the village of Kharp, Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region. The lawyer saw him today. Alexey is fine.”

On December 26, Navalny’s associates published his first letter after being transferred, “I am your new Ded Moroz [Grandpa Frost, Russia’s analog to Santa Claus]. So what? I have a sheepskin coat, a hat with earflaps, soon they will give me felt boots, and within 20 days of the transfer I have grown a beard. True, there are no deer, but there are huge, fluffy, very beautiful shepherd dogs… The 20 days of the transfer were quite tiring, but I was still in a great mood, as befits Ded Moroz.”  With these words Aleksei Navalny tries to cheer up his supporters and desperate family, but the real conditions of the colony he is in are awful. The next brief will give the reader a tour into its walls.

1. Aleksei Navalny and his family. Photo from navalny.com 
2. Aleksei Navalny under arrest. Photo from dzen.ru

Get the latest updates from our reporters by subscribing to the U.S. Resist Democracy Weekly Newsletter, and please consider contributing to Keeping Democracy Alive by donating today! We depend on support from readers like you.