MOSCOW – A few months after suffering a near-fatal nervous breakdown, Alexei Navalny now faces new legal problems in Russia, which have darkened the future of his opposition movement and raised the stakes of his plans to return from Germany. where he recovered.
Mr Navalny and his supporters have denied allegations by Russian authorities this week that the Kremlin’s best-known critic violated probation orders and defrauded supporters of millions of dollars in donations. They say the allegations are meant to discourage him from returning to Russia, where he has promised to revive his network of activists.
Navalny fell unconscious in August on a flight to Moscow after meeting with popular supporters in Siberia and was later evacuated to Berlin, but vowed to return and challenge allied candidates with President Vladimir Putin in next year’s parliamentary elections. future, due by September. In recent weeks, he has made efforts to publicly identify his attackers.
“He’s trying to throw me in jail because I didn’t die on that plane and I looked for the killers myself,” he said in an Instagram post.
The Kremlin rejected European authorities’ findings that Mr Navalny had been poisoned by Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok and was left with a diagnosis by Russian doctors who initially treated him: that he had lost consciousness due to a metabolic imbalance similar to severe drop in blood sugar.
However, the new allegations show the extent to which Mr Navalny has attracted the attention of the authorities. They also present a dilemma in which he must choose between becoming another dissident in exile, which would effectively remove him from Russia’s political landscape, or he will return and face the threat of imprisonment.
Russia’s main investigative committee said on Tuesday that Mr Navalny, who had built his political career on discovering corruption and excesses inside the Kremlin, had used, among other things, $ 4.78 million. by his supporters to buy property, pay for travel abroad and cover his personal expenses. A criminal investigation has begun.
Earlier this week, the state agency responsible for overseeing prison sentences said Mr Navalny had violated the terms of a 2014 suspended sentence he had received for embezzlement charges. In 2018, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the case is politically motivated.
Mr Navalny said the allegations against him were an attempt to retaliate not only for surviving the August 20 poisoning, but also for collaborating with open-source researcher Bellingcat and using leaked phone data to track down and expose the public. those he says were responsible for the attack.
A video shows the Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s team searching for a hotel room where he stayed before being poisoned by Novichok. Proponents say they found traces of the nerve agent as pressure increased on Moscow to investigate. Thomas Grove reports from the WSJ. Photo: Shamil Zhumatov / Reuters (originally published on September 18, 2020)
According to a transcript he released last week to his millions of social media followers, Mr Navalny posed as an officer with Russia’s Federal Security Service or FSB on the phone to extract details of the poisoning from one of the agencies on which says it is part of the following coverage. In the transcript, the individual said he applied the nerve agent to Mr. Navalny’s underwear.
The Wall Street Journal did not independently verify the telephone conversation.
Mr Putin and the Kremlin in recent months have tried to see Mr Navalny as irrelevant and avoid using his name, referring to him as a “Berlin patient”.
Meanwhile, Mr Navalny’s organization, the Anti-Corruption Fund, has been the target of raids and lawsuits for years. Last week, Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer and one of Mr Navalny’s closest allies, was charged with the crime after entering the home of the FSB agent he was allegedly talking to on the phone.
Other supporters say the authorities took money from their bank accounts, and others were detained or sent to distant armed bases to serve compulsory military service.
Previous opposition figures, such as Vladimir Kara-Murza, who has been poisoned twice, and Garry Kasparov, who has been repeatedly detained in Russia, have become largely irrelevant in domestic politics since they decided to leave. the country, and Mr. Navalny could face a similar fate if he did not return after his convalescence.
Allies such as Sergei Guriev, who served as a reformed adviser during Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency and left the country, have predicted that Navalny, 44, will return, despite the risks.
“He can’t say now that he’s not coming back – it would destroy his reputation,” he said. “He understands that he can be imprisoned when he crosses the border. He also understands that he can be killed. “
Others, such as Andrey Fateyev, a Navalny supporter who spent days with the opposition politician in the Siberian city of Tomsk before being poisoned, predicted that any attempt to imprison Mr. Navalny would galvanize his followers.
But he acknowledged that without Mr Navalny’s online million-dollar audience, some of the momentum of his movement could be lost.
“All this was a message for him: Stop what you are doing and don’t come back,” said Fateyev.
Write to Thomas Grove at [email protected]
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