Alexei Navalny

Alexei Anatolievich Navalny is a Russian opposition leader, politician, lawyer, and anti-corruption activist. He is the leader of the Russia of the Future party and the founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. In August 2020, Navalny was hospitalized in serious condition after he was poisoned with a nerve agent. In December 2016, he tried to run for President of Russia during the 2018 election but was barred by Russia’s Central Electoral Commission and later the Supreme Court of Russia due to a criminal conviction.

About Alexei Navalny in brief

Summary Alexei NavalnyAlexei Anatolievich Navalny is a Russian opposition leader, politician, lawyer, and anti-corruption activist. He is the leader of the Russia of the Future party and the founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. He came to international prominence by organizing demonstrations and running for office to advocate reforms against corruption in Russia. In August 2020, Navalny was hospitalized in serious condition after he was poisoned with a nerve agent. He was medically evacuated to Berlin and discharged a month later. On 17 January 2021, he returned to Russia, where he was immediately detained on accusations of violating parole conditions. On 2 February, his suspended sentence was replaced with a prison sentence, meaning he would spend two and half years in a penal colony. Navalny accused Putin of being responsible for his poisoning and an investigation implicated agents from the Federal Security Service in his poisoning. The EU and UK responded by imposing sanctions on Russian officials. The United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, France, the European Union, Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, Latvia and Estonia condemned the actions of the Russian government and demanded the immediate release of Alexei Navalny. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that the cases violated Navalny’s right to a fair trial, but they were never overturned. In December 2016, he tried to run for President of Russia during the 2018 election but was barred by Russia’s Central Electoral Commission and later the Supreme Court of Russia due to a criminal conviction.

He received two suspended sentences for embezzlement in two cases, one in July 2013 and another one in December 2014. Both cases are widely considered to be politically motivated and intended to bar him from running in future elections. In 2008, he invested 300,000 rubles in stocks of 5 oil and gas companies: Rosneft, Gazprom, Lukoil, Surgutftegas, and Surgurftega. As such, he began to aim at making the financial assets of these companies transparent. This is required by law, but there are allegations that high-level managers are involved in dealing with wrong-doings by Russian police, as well as resisting transparency. In 2010, he announced the launch of the RosPilPil project, which seeks to bring to light the corrupt practices in the procurement process in the Eastern Siberia–Pacific pipeline project. In March 2017, they released the documentary He Is Not Dimon to You, accusing Dmitry Medvedev, the then prime minister and former president of Russia, of corruption, leading to mass protests across the country. In a 2011 radio interview, he described Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, as a \”party of crooks and thieves\”, which became a popular epithet. In 2013, he ran in the Moscow mayoral election and came in second, with 27% of the vote, losing to incumbent mayor Sergey Sobyanin, a Putin appointee. Navalny received a scholarship to the Yale World Fellows program at Yale University in 2010.