Who was Alexei Navalny, the latest dissident in a long list of Putin’s dead enemies

The death of Alexei Navalny, murdered or crushed by the harsh treatment and inhospitable conditions of the Arctic prison colony where he was locked up, kills Russian President Vladimir Putin’s last dissident he had a certain aura about him I could overshadow it and that he was a figure known to the average Russian.

Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny was born on June 4, 1976 in Moscow. His parents (his father was born near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant) met as students. The boy Alexei grew up in the last 14 years of the Soviet Union in the military town of Kalinets, outside Moscow, where his father was stationed. He spent long periods in Ukraine, where his father was originally from. In 1998 he finished his law studies in Moscow and in 2009 He studied at American Yale.

Fame It comes to you through a blog and then a website (Rospil) where report cases of corruption that the media hides. In 2010, you accused public oil giant Rosneft of illegally diverting more than $3 billion that was supposed to be used to build an oil pipeline in Siberia.

The economic newspaper ‘Vodomosti’ declared this in 2009 personality of the year. In 2011 he claimed that Russian Unity, Putin’s party, It is a party “of thieves and swindlers”. December 5, 2011 he is imprisoned for the first time after a demonstration against alleged electoral fraud and creates the Anti-Corruption Foundation.

In 2013 he lost the election for mayor of Moscow and thereafter the siege of the authorities tightens. It’s starting to happen seasons locked up under surveillance in his house. In 2016 he announced that he would run in the 2018 presidential elections. His chances of winning are slim, according to the independent Levada center, but the Election Commission forbids him from appearing. They continue to receive small sentences of weeks or months for acts such as calling for demonstrations. In October 2019 the Ministry of Justice declared its Foundation as a “foreign agent”.

August 20, 2020 He is urgently hospitalized in the Omsk region, in Siberia, after falling into a coma while flying from Tomsk to Moscow. It is believed he was poisoned but the authorities assure that all toxic tests came back negative.

Two days later, still in a coma, he arrives in Germany on a medical plane after a direct offer from Angela Merkel to Vladimir Putin, who hopes to get him off his back. German doctors find traces of poisoning with the nerve agent novitchok. The tests are confirmed by Swedish and French laboratories.

Navalny recovers and is in Berlin does not respect the obligation imposed by Russian justice not to leave Moscow. The Kafkaesque situation has consequences. On January 17, 2021 he flew from Berlin to Moscow and upon landing he was arrested and on February 2 sentenced to three and a half years in prison for violating the conditions of his parole by being in Germany and not Berlin.

On 17 February the European Court of Human Rights (an organization of which Russia is a member) calls for his immediate release. Moscow turns a deaf ear. On 20 October 2021, the European Parliament awarded him the Sakharov Prize for freedom of conscience, awarded, among others, to Nelson Mandela and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.

The convictions are happening. March 22, 2022 Nine years “for fraud” and in July last year at 19 years old for “extremism”. His days began to dwindle last December.

Your lawyers report his disappearance to appear three weeks later a penal colony in the Arctic with the reputation of being the harshest Russian prison. He is known as “the polar wolf”.

Since then there has been almost no news of him, apart from the tweets published by his team of lawyers. In the last known images, from this same Thursday, Nalvany He appeared very thin but smiling.

A long list of deaths

Navalny is just the latest in a long line of Putin opponents died in strange circumstances to say the least.

The first to fall, I’m shooting on the streets of Moscow they were deputies, like Vladimir Golovliov or Sergei Yushenko.

There are dozens of suspected cases, some very sensational. In 2006, journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead. and that same year the former secret agent was poisoned in London Alexander Litvinenko.

In March 2013, the body of oligarch Boris Berezovsky was found in his home in England and all eyes fell on the Kremlin.

In February 2015 former deputy prime minister shot dead become an adversary Boris Nemtsov.

In September 2022 he died “after falling out of a window” the president of the oil giant Lukoil in a Moscow hospital, Ravil Maganov.