Why was Alexei Navalny arrested?

Alexei Navalny, found dead in prison this Friday, is a former Russian nationalist politician he ended up in prison in the furthest place possible from the Kremlin, near the Arctic Circle, for pose a danger to Vladimir Putin’s regime.

Navalny helped fuel the 2011 and 2012 protests in Russia by campaigning against election fraud and government corruption, investigating Putin’s inner circle and share the results in clever videos that have garnered hundreds of millions of views.

The peak of his political career came in 2013, when he won 27% of the vote in a race for mayor of Moscow that few believed was free or fair.

For years he remained a thorn in the Kremlin’s sideidentifying a palace built on the Black Sea for Putin’s personal use, villas and yachts used by former president Dmitry Medvedev, and a prostitute who linked a top foreign policy official to a well-known oligarch.

Novichok poisoning

In 2020, Navalny fell into a coma after the alleged Novichok poisoning by the Russian security service FSB and was evacuated to Germany for treatment, where his life was saved.

He recovered and returned to Russia in January 2021, where he was arrested on charges of violating parole and sentenced to the first of numerous prison terms totaling more than 30 years Behind the bars. One of the main accusations against Navalny It’s for fraudsomething that he classified as a “political” position.

His arrest marked the starting point of a wave of repression against the oppositionthe press and civil society have been critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin recently launched a presidential campaign for his fifth term. He is already the longest-serving Russian leader by Joseph Stalin and he could surpass it if he runs for re-election in 2030, a possibility since he had the constitutional rules on term limits rewritten in 2020.