MOSCOW – The return of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny to his homeland on Sunday has been a symbolic challenge from the start.
He was arrested on arrival and is now sitting in Moscow’s most notorious detention facility awaiting trial, which could put him in jail for years, under the supervision of the same regime he says he tried to assassinate with a Soviet nerve agent. era.
When Navalny announced that he would eventually return to Russia after recovering from Novichok poisoning in a German hospital, it asked the question: why? The Kremlin has shown for months that it does not want Vladimir Putin’s most outspoken opponent to return, and was prepared to play dirty to discourage it.
In the days since Navalny’s return, he appears to have returned for what may be his last battle.
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“They are scared,” he said on Monday in a video taken from a temporary courtroom outside Moscow, where he was sentenced to 30 days in prison.
“They’re scared of you,” he said. ‘They are afraid of the people who can stop to be quiet and realize their own strength … I urge you to stop being silent, resist and go to the street. There are so many of us. ”
When Navalny left Russia in August with a German air ambulance, he was kept alive in a medically induced coma. Scientists in several countries have determined that he was poisoned and nearly killed, with Novichok, a variant of the Soviet-made nerve agent – the same type of chemical weapon used in 2018 against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the UK.
For Navalny’s supporters, it was immediately clear who was trying to kill him: the Russian Federal Security Service. After all, they reason, who else can get their hands on such a weapon? When Navalny, under the care of German specialists, woke up weeks later from his coma, he was unequivocally blaming Putin directly. The Russian government has denied any involvement.
Navalny’s national campaign is holding rallies across the country on Saturday in support of the jail opposition icon. On February 2, he will appear in court, where a judge will consider the state’s request to commute a suspended sentence in difficult times. If that happens, he will face up to three and a half years in prison under current charges. Protest, his allies say, is his only hope.
This was already an extremely important situation by the standards of Russia’s weakened, heavily controlled domestic policy. But Navalny dramatically increased the game Tuesday night. In a move that can only be interpreted as going to an epic, final confrontation with Putin: his team has released one of the biggest investigations into Putin’s wealth.
In the introduction to the two-hour video outlining his team’s investigation into the financing behind ‘Putin’s Palace’, Navalny tells viewers that his team decided to continue the investigation while still in intensive care, and immediately agreed that they would release it when he returned home to Moscow, “because we do not want the main character of this film to think that we are afraid of him.”
The report describes Putin’s increase in wealth and power and the construction of the $ 1.4 billion massive palace on the Black Coast. NBC News did not independently confirm the report’s findings.
Although Navalny says he decided to continue this investigation after waking up from his coma, the scale of the effort and the nature of the material suggest that it is the culmination of years of work, after a decade of smaller-scale investigations into the figures surrounding Putin. Until now, Navalny had never taken such direct shots at the leader.
“The great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy once described the structure of power in Russia very clearly: ‘The villains who robbed the people gathered, recruited soldiers and judges to guard their orgy, and they had a feast,’ ‘ he said, ‘we will only live normally if we stop tolerating officials who steal and re-elect them. ”
In 48 hours since he went on YouTube, it has been viewed 38 million times and was the biggest video in Russia. Yet the question remains: is it enough to inspire a large-scale support of 2 February when he is tried?
If not, and even with the prospect of possible international sanctions on the issue, the Kremlin may view the cost of Navalny’s imprisonment as entirely affordable.