The world is closely following what happened with Alexei Navalny. The man who appeared as Vladimir Putin’s main opponent He died mysteriously while spending his days in the Arctic prison to which he had been transferred last December.
As happened with other deathsthis puts the magnifying glass on the Kremlin and its actions against opposing voices.
Who was Navalny
The man was 47 years old and was an anti-corruption lawyer, blogger and had organized the main anti-government demonstrations since the fall of the Soviet Union. Besides, He reported in 2021 that he had been poisoned during a flightin which he almost lost his life and had to be treated urgently in Germany.
He Russian lawyer, blogger and opposition figure Alexey Navalny died today in a remote prison colony in the Russian Arctic, where he arrived after years of complaints against the Kremlin for corruption and repression and after suffering a poisoning that the West attributes to the Russian intelligence services.
The convictions of Navalny, the Russian opponent
Navalny, in prison since January 2021 For failing to attend his parole checks while he was in Germany recovering from poisoning with the nerve agent Novichok, he was sentenced again in August 2023 to 19 years in prison for extremism.
Navalny received different sentences through processes that were questioned by Western countries and the Russian opposition. Among the different penalties, he accumulated almost 30 years in prisonso he was deprived of his freedom since 2021. Anyway, He continued to express himself behind bars on various topicssuch as his rejection of the war with Ukraine.
Precisely, regarding the war conflict against kyiv, he pointed out that It is “a criminal war” whose objective is for Vladimir Putin to “retain power”. In addition to his prediction about “an enormous number of deaths in the crusher of war,” he took advantage of the passage of time to reactivate the political movement he led and which had been banned as “extremist”.
The poisoning and his prison sentence
In August 2020, the Russian opposition denounced that An attempt was made to eliminate Alexei Navalny with poisoning. After recovering from ingesting a toxic agent from the Novichok family, The opposition leader said that “Putin ordered my assassination”.
After refusing to appear before the authorities in a summons for an old case, The Kremlin decided to send him to prison in order to eliminate him from its path. Something similar had happened with Mikhail Khodorkovskywho was the richest man in Russia and was imprisoned in Siberia during 2023.
The assassination attempt on Navalny
Navalny was the opponent with the most electoral appeal, but after being the victim of an assassination attempt at the hands of the Federal Security Service (FSB) became a celebrity abroad. Until then, that honor, poisoning with toxic agents, had been reserved almost exclusively for former FSB spies who had gone over to the enemy.
Very active on social networks, published different documents and files that showed the Kremlin’s responsibility in his poisoning, which included telephone conversations and videos of properties that the president of Russia had. Its popularity meant that these publications reached close to 150 million people.
The dream of a “Russia without Putin”
The opposition began to organize in the 2011 parliamentary elections, where led the largest protests since the fall of the USSRunder the motto of “Russia without Putin“. Even in 2012 he ran in the elections as a candidate for mayor of Moscow, where he obtained a third of the votes, a shocking figure for the opposition.
As the years went by, his figure grew and represented a problem for the Kremlin, so He obtained different convictions for various crimes, most of them economic, and even received physical attacks. Even behind bars, he manages to influence the elections with his Smart Vote program, which consists of choosing among the candidates with the best chance of unseating the Kremlin party candidate.
Shortly after calling to vote for any candidate except Putin in the presidential elections next March, Navalny was clandestinely transferred to the Arctic prison where he died in still suspicious conditions.
Source: Ambito
