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 Putin, Poison and the Importance of Alexey Navalny

Navalny’s return to Russia -- and immediate detention -- risks creating a new irritant in Russia’s relationship with the West.

 Putin, Poison and the Importance of Alexey Navalny
Alexey Navalny, Russian opposition leader, walks with demonstrators during a rally in Moscow, Russia. (Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg)

Alexey Navalny is Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, an anti-corruption investigator whose exposés have targeted President Vladimir Putin and his inner circle. His detention and subsequent imprisonment in 2021 upon his voluntary return from Germany, where he was recuperating from a nerve-agent attack he blames on the Kremlin, sparked the biggest unauthorized protests Putin has ever faced. In March 2022, he was convicted in a new case that will bring his total time in prison to about 12 years. The U.S. and EU have demanded Navalny’s release without success. 

1. Why has Navalny been seen as a threat?

Navalny, 45, resisted the kind of pressure -- repeated jail sentences, house arrest, physical assault -- that led many other Putin critics to flee the country. Until his poisoning though, the Kremlin’s seeming special treatment of him inspired speculation that he was a known quantity and therefore an acceptable threat. But that calculus changed. Navalny received a sentence of about 2-1/2 years in 2021 and most of his allies went into exile abroad to avoid prison after prosecutors labeled his campaign network as “extremist.” The authorities were growing increasingly intolerant of dissent, even before the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine which led to widespread international protests and sanctions. Since the start of the war, the repression has grown even more severe.

2. What brought him to the world’s attention?

Navalny fell ill in August 2020 on a flight to Moscow after meeting with local activists in the Siberian city of Tomsk. His shouts of pain could be heard in a video taken on the plane, which was diverted to Omsk in a move that likely saved his life. Local doctors kept Navalny in a clinic there for two days before, under international pressure, he was transferred to Berlin’s Charite hospital. The Kremlin says it found no proof Navalny was poisoned. In October 2020, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an international watchdog, confirmed that a nerve agent from the banned Novichok group had been used in the poisoning.

3. Who would want to harm Navalny?

The U.S. directly blamed the Federal Security Service (FSB) for the attack, and the EU and U.K. said it could only have been done with the spy agency’s involvement. Investigative website Bellingcat said in December 2020 that it had identified members of a clandestine FSB unit specializing in poisons who had followed Navalny since January 2017. Putin later admitted Navalny was under surveillance but denied the government was behind the poisoning. French President Emmanuel Macron described it as an “assassination attempt,” Germany’s then-Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Navalny in the hospital and in October 2020, the European Union blacklisted six people in Russia allied to Putin over the poisoning.

4. How did he make himself heard?

Navalny has a huge social media following, which made him a target as it allowed him to deliver his message despite an effective blackout by Russia’s tightly controlled television networks. After his arrest, he published an investigation into a giant Black Sea palace he said belongs to Putin. The Kremlin says that’s not true, but within days it became his most-popular video ever, racking up more than 120 million views, while a billionaire friend of Putin’s claimed ownership of the property. 

 Putin, Poison and the Importance of Alexey Navalny

5. How did the Kremlin try to neutralize him before?

Navalny has been in and out of jail since 2011, often on charges of organizing unsanctioned protests, but never served more than a month at a time until his latest incarceration. He was barred from running in the 2018 presidential election after the Kremlin learned its lesson when Navalny was allowed to run for Moscow mayor against incumbent Sergei Sobyanin, a Putin loyalist, back in 2013 and received 27% of the vote.  

6. Have the Kremlin’s tactics worked?

Navalny was arrested and jailed when he flew back to Moscow from Berlin in January 2021, sparking large-scale protests. Over 10,000 people were detained at the rallies, as demonstrators braved riot police, freezing temperatures and threats they could face charges for participation. The demographics of the protests showed why the Kremlin was worried: according to one pollster, the average age was younger than past protests and nearly half of the attendees were out for the first time. The subsequent crackdown that banned Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation and targeted opponents of all stripes has kept protesters off the street.

7. What has he been convicted of?

Russian police detained Navalny on charges of violating the terms of a suspended sentence when he failed to check in during his recovery in Germany. A Moscow court ordered him jailed for violating parole for a 2014 fraud conviction, in a case the European Court of Human Rights called politically motivated. The 2-1/2 year term was just a start, and in March 2022 he received an additional 9-year sentence in a high-security prison for fraud and contempt of court.

8. What action has been taken?

The Biden administration announced its first sanctions against Russia in March 2021. The penalties -- like those adopted by the European Union -- targeted senior Russian law enforcement officials, as well as broadly matching sanctions the EU and the U.K. imposed earlier on other Russians allied with Putin in response to the attempted murder of Navalny. But actions over the Navalny case have been overtaken by the international condemnation sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the far-reaching sanctions by the U.S. and its allies that followed. 

9. Have things like this happened before?

Yes. There were high-profile poisonings of former intelligence officers living in exile in the U.K.: Alexander Litvinenko was given a fatal dose of polonium 210 in his tea in a London restaurant in 2006, while Sergei Skripal survived an assassination attempt with Novichok in 2018. The chief coordinator for Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia organization, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was tailed by the same FSB team linked to Navalny’s poisoning before he twice suffered near-fatal attacks, according to a Bellingcat report in February 2021.  

10. Does the opposition have other leaders?

Navalny, who combines charisma with a sophisticated understanding of how to use social media to bypass the Kremlin’s blackout, is by far the most visible leader among Russia’s fractured anti-Putin bloc. The crackdown on dissent since the invasion of Ukraine has further marginalized the opposition, with Putin adopting the language of former Soviet leader Josef Stalin to condemn those against the war as “traitors.”

The Reference Shelf

  • Navalny was named to the Bloomberg 50 in 2021, a look at the year’s most influential people.
  • Navalny’s YouTube video alleging Putin built a $1.3 billion seaside palace.
  • A Bloomberg article on Navalny’s sentencing.
  • Bellingcat implicates an FSB chemical weapons team in Navalny’s poisoning.
  • Navalny’s “smart voting” initiative encourages voters to coalesce around politicians most likely to beat Putin’s favored candidate.
  • A QuickTake on the history of international sanctions against Russia.

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

With assistance from Bloomberg