Who was opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the critic who accused Putin of “sucking the blood of Russia”

Alexey Navalny He was Russia’s most prominent opposition leader over the past decade.

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

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A fight that took him from having millions of followers both on social media and on the streets of Russia to several sentences in the country’s prisons, 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 was tried in 2018, but his candidacy was vetoed after a Russian court convicted him of embezzlement.

Navalny has always denied these accusations and stated that his legal disputes were the Kremlin’s retaliation for his criticism.

He was born on June 4, 1976 in Butyn, 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 against Putin became intensely personal when the opponent accused the president of ordering 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 convinced Russian authorities 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 ex-Russian spy was almost killed by Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in England in March 2018.

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

But the president admitted that the State kept his opponent under surveillance, claiming links to American spies.

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

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

Navalny suffered arrests and convictions, which he attributed to political persecution. (GET IMAGES).

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

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

This 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 that he may have been exposed to “some toxic agent.”

He was also attacked twice with a green antiseptic dye known as “zelyonka” and suffered chemical burns to one of his eyes.

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

In 2014, when asked on a radio station about 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 illegal practices and corruption in some of Russia’s large state-controlled companies on his blog.

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

On social media, your followers They were predominantly young and he addressed them with sharp and blunt language, mocking the establishment loyal to President Putin.

Before the 2011 parliamentary elections, in which he did not run, he urged his blog readers to vote for any party except Putin’s United Russia, which he dubbed the “party of criminals and thieves.” .

United Russia won the elections, but with a slim majority, and its victory was marred by widespread accusations of electoral fraud that sparked protests in Moscow and other major cities.

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

Navalny was arrested and jailed for 15 days after 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 thousand people attended.

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

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

And, against all odds, he was allowed out of prison to participate in Moscow’s local elections, in which he came second with 27% of the vote, behind Putin’s ally Sergei Sobyanin.

The result, however, was considered a great success, as 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, after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that he had not received a fair trial at his first trial.

Subsequently, in a new court case in 2017, he was convicted for the second time and received a five-year suspended sentence.

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

Putin avoided naming Navalny in public. (GET IMAGES).

Navalny once told the BBC that the best Western states could do for Russia’s justice system was to crack down on “dirty money.”

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

When Navalny was arrested 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 national wealth belongs to 0.5% of the population”.

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

Source: Elcomercio