Why Alexei Navalny was Putin’s number one enemy in Russia

Updated February 17, 2024 — 2.11pm

Alexei Navalny was Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, an anti-corruption investigator whose exposés 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 blamed on the Kremlin, sparked the biggest unauthorised protests Putin has ever faced.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny heads to attend a meeting in Russia’s Central Election commission in Moscow, Russia in December 2017.Credit: AP

In March 2022, he was convicted in a new case that would have brought his total time in prison to about 12 years. The US and European Union demanded the release of Navalny, who died in prison at age 47.

What happened to Navalny?

Navalny fell sick during a walk at the remote maximum-security prison camp in the Arctic where he was last held, and medical staff were unable to revive him, the prison authorities said on February 16. In December, friends and lawyers for Navalny, who’d been previously held in a prison outside Moscow, raised alarm on social media that they had lost contact with him. He later emerged in the Arctic camp, ending nearly three weeks in which his whereabouts were unknown. Western leaders decried Navalny’s death, with many placing responsibility squarely on the Kremlin.

Why was Navalny seen as a threat?

Navalny 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 labelled his campaign network as “extremist.” The authorities were growing increasingly intolerant of dissent, even before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which led to widespread international protests and sanctions. Since the start of the war, the repression has grown even more severe.

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 said it found no proof Navalny was poisoned. In late 2020, the Organisation 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.

Who was blamed for the attack?

The US directly blamed the Federal Security Service (FSB) for the attack, and the EU and UK said it could have been done only with the spy agency’s involvement. Investigative website Bellingcat said in December 2020 that it had identified members of a clandestine FSB unit specialising 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, the EU blacklisted six people in Russia allied to Putin over the poisoning.

Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny sends a heart message to his wife Yulia while in a Russian court in early 2021.Credit: Moscow City Court

How did he make himself heard?

Navalny had 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 belonged to Putin. The Kremlin said that wasn’t 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.

How had the Kremlin tried to neutralise him?

Navalny had been in and out of jail since 2011, often on charges of organising unsanctioned protests. 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 per cent of the vote. But he never served more than a month at a time until his latest incarceration.

Alexei Navalny, pictured with his wife Yulia, in Berlin’s Charite hospital in 2020 recovering from poisoning.Credit: AP via Instagram

Did the Kremlin’s tactics work?

Navalny was arrested and jailed after 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 kept protesters off the street.

What was he convicted of?

Russian police detained Navalny on charges of violating the terms of a suspended sentence after 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.

Alexei Navalny, pictured here at the centre of a 2018 rally in Moscow. Credit: AP

What action was 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 UK 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 US and its allies that followed.

Have there been other poisonings?

Yes. There were high-profile poisonings of former intelligence officers living in exile in the UK: 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 organisation, 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.

Does the opposition have other leaders?

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