MOSCOW – Months after suffering a near-fatal nervous breakdown, Alexei Navalny now faces new legal issues in Russia that have clouded the future of his opposition movement here and increased bets on his plans to return ‘Germany, where he has recovered. .
Navalny and his supporters have denied allegations by Russian authorities this week that the Kremlin’s best-known critic violated parole orders and defrauded donors of millions of dollars in donations. They say the allegations want to deter him from returning to Russia, where he has promised to reinvigorate his network of activists.
Navalny fell unconscious in August aboard a flight to Moscow after meeting with supporters of the base in Siberia, and was later evacuated to Berlin, but has vowed to return and challenge allied candidates with President Vladimir Putin in next year’s parliamentary elections, due in September. In recent weeks he has made efforts to publicly identify his attackers.
“They’re 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 has dismissed European authorities’ findings that Mr. Navalny was poisoned with Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok and has stayed on the side of the diagnosis offered by Russian doctors who initially treated him: Who lost consciousness due to a metabolic imbalance similar to a 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 to him 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 would return and face the threat of imprisonment.
Russia’s investigative committee, the country’s leading crime investigation agency, said on Tuesday that Mr Navalny, who built his political career from exposure to corruption and the excesses of the privileged Kremlin , had used, among other things, $ 4.78 million raised 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 suspended sentence he received in 2014 for embezzlement charges. In 2018, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the case had a political motivation.
Navalny said the charges against him were an attempt at revenge not only for surviving the poisoning on Aug. 20, but also for working with open source investigator Bellingcat and using filtered phone data to publicly track and expose those which he says were responsible for the attack.
A video shows the team of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny looking for a hotel room where he stayed before being poisoned by Novichok. Supporters say they found traces of the nerve agent as pressure on Moscow increases to investigate. Thomas Grove reports from the WSJ. Photo: Shamil Zhumatov / Reuters (originally published on September 18, 2020)
According to a transcript he handed over to his millions of social media followers last week, Mr Navalny pretended to be on the phone as an officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to extract details of the poisoning of one of the agents who says he was part of the next coverage. In the transcript, the individual said he applied the nerve agent to Mr. Navalny’s underwear.
The Wall Street Journal has not independently verified the telephone conversation.
Putin and the Kremlin in recent months have tried to paint 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 subject of raids and lawsuits for years. Last week, Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer and one of Mr Navalny’s closest allies, was accused of entering after entering the home of the FSB agent with whom he allegedly spoke by telephone.
Other supporters say authorities have taken money from their bank accounts and others have been detained or sent to distant army bases for compulsory military service.
Earlier opposition figures, such as Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was twice poisoned, and Garry Kasparov, who was repeatedly detained in Russia, have become largely irrelevant in domestic politics since they decided to leave the country. and Mr. Navalny might have a similar fate if he does not return after convalescence.
Allies such as Sergei Guriev, who served as a reform adviser during Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency and have since left the country, predicted that 44-year-old Navalny would return, despite the risks.
“He can’t say now that he won’t come back, that 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 he was poisoned, predicted that any attempt to imprison Mr Navalny would galvanize his followers.
But he acknowledged that without the online audience of millions of Mr. Navalny, one could lose some of the momentum of his movement.
“All of that was a message to him: stop doing what you do and don’t come back,” Fateyev said.
Write to Thomas Grove to [email protected]
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