MOSCOW – Months after Alexei Navalny had an almost fatal attack on the nerve agent, he now faces new legal problems in Russia that have clouded the future of his opposition movement and sparked interest in his plans to return from Germany, where he was recovering.
Mr. Navalny and his supporters denied this week the Russian government’s allegations that the Kremlin’s best-known critic had violated trial orders and defrauded supporters of millions of dollars in donations. They say the allegations were intended to deter him from returning to Russia, where he promised to spice up his network of activists.
Mr. Navalny became unconscious in August aboard a flight to Moscow after meeting with grassroots supporters in Siberia and then evacuated to Berlin, but promised to return and candidates linked to President Vladimir Putin in the next to challenge year’s parliamentary elections. payable by September. In recent weeks, he has made efforts to publicly identify his attackers.
“They are trying to throw me in jail because I did not die in the plane and searched for the killers myself,” he said in an Instagram post.
The Kremlin has rejected the European authorities’ conclusions that Navalny was poisoned by Soviet-era nervous agent Novichok and stood by the diagnosis offered by Russian doctors who initially treated him: that he had regained consciousness. lost due to a metabolic imbalance such as a severe drop in blood sugar.
However, the new allegations show the extent to which Mr. Navalny caught the attention of the authorities. They also offer him a dilemma in which he has to choose between becoming another dissident in exile, which will effectively remove him from Russia’s political landscape, or return and face the threat of imprisonment.
The Russian commission of inquiry, the country’s most important crime investigation agency, said on Tuesday that Navalny, who had built his political career on exposing the corruption and extravagance of intruders in the Kremlin, raised $ 4.78 million from his supporters. , used to buy properties. , pays for foreign travel and covers his personal expenses. It started with a criminal investigation.
Earlier this week, the state agency responsible for overseeing jail time said Navalny violated the terms of a 2014 suspended sentence he received on a charge of embezzlement. In 2018, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the case was politically motivated.
Mr. Navalny said the charges against him were an attempt to take revenge not only for surviving the poisoning on August 20, but also for collaborating with open source researcher Bellingcat and using leaked phone data to identify those he according to him to publicly detect and expose. responsible for the attack.
A video shows the team of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny searching for a hotel room where he stayed before being poisoned by Novichok. Supporters say they have found traces of the nerve agent as pressure on Moscow increases to investigate. WSJ’s Thomas Grove reports. Photo: Shamil Zhumatov / Reuters (Originally published on September 18, 2020)
According to a transcript he unveiled to his millions of fans on social media last week, Mr. Navalny posed as an officer of the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, over the phone to extract details of the poisoning from one of the agents who he said was part of the ensuing cover-up. In the transcript, the individual said that he had the nerve agent on mr. Navalny’s underwear applied.
The Wall Street Journal did not independently verify the phone call.
Mr. Putin and the Kremlin have been trying to oust Mr. To paint Navalny as an irrelevance and not to use his name, and rather refers to him as ‘the Berlin patient’.
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 the closest allies of Mr. Navalny, charged with trespassing after entering the home of the FSB agent, Mr. Navalny, allegedly entered by telephone.
Other supporters believe that authorities took money from their bank accounts and others were detained or sent to remote army bases to perform compulsory military service.
Former 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 he decided to leave the country. Navalny could face a similar fate if he does not return to his recovery.
Allies such as Sergei Guriev, who served as reform adviser during Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency and who has since left the country, predicted that the 44-year-old Navalny would return, despite the risks.
“He can not say now he will not come back – it will destroy his reputation,” he said. “He understands that he can sit in jail as soon as he crosses the border. He also understands that he could 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 kill Mr. To allow Navalny to jail, his followers would galvanize.
But he acknowledged that without Mr. Navalny’s online audience of millions, the momentum of his movement may be lost.
“All this was a message to him: Stop what you are doing, and do not come back,” he said. Fateyev said.
Write to Thomas Grove by [email protected]
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