MOSCOW – Months after suffering a near-fatal attack by a nervous agent, Alexei Navalny now faces new legal problems in Russia that have obscured the future of his opposition movement here and increased his plans to return from Germany, where he is recovering.
Navalny and his supporters denied Russian authorities’ accusations this week that the Kremlin’s best-known critic violated parole orders and defrauded supporters by millions of dollars in donations. They say the charges are aimed at preventing him from returning to Russia, where he promised to reinvigorate his network of activists.
Navalny fell unconscious in August on a flight to Moscow after meeting with grassroots supporters in Siberia, and was later evacuated to Berlin, but he promised to return and challenge President Vladimir Putin’s allied candidates in next year’s parliamentary election due in September. In recent weeks, he has struggled to publicly identify his attackers.
“They are trying to throw me in prison because I didn’t die on that plane and I looked for the killers personally,” he said in an Instagram post.
The Kremlin rejected the European authorities’ conclusions that Navalny was poisoned with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok and maintained the diagnosis offered by Russian doctors who initially treated him: that he lost consciousness due to a metabolic imbalance similar to a severe fall in blood sugar.
The new allegations, however, show the extent to which Mr. Navalny has attracted the authorities’ attention. They also present him with a dilemma in which he must choose between becoming another dissident in exile, which would effectively remove him from Russia’s political scene, or return and face the threat of imprisonment.
The Investigative Committee of Russia, the country’s top crime investigation agency, said on Tuesday that Navalny, who built his political career by exposing corruption and the excesses of people inside the Kremlin, used, among other things, US $ 4.78 million raised by his supporters to buy property, pay for travel abroad and cover his personal expenses. He started a criminal investigation.
Earlier this week, the state agency responsible for overseeing prison sentences said Navalny violated the conditions of a 2014 suspended sentence that he received on charges of embezzlement. In 2018, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the case was politically motivated.
Navalny said the charges against him were an attempt at revenge not only for surviving the poisoning on August 20, but also for working with open source researcher Bellingcat and using leaked phone data to publicly track and expose those he says are responsible for the attack.
A video shows the team of the Kremlin critic, Alexei Navalny, searching a hotel room where he stayed before he was poisoned by Novichok. Supporters say they have found traces of the nerve agent as pressure on Moscow increases to investigate. Thomas Grove reports from WSJ. Photo: Shamil Zhumatov / Reuters (originally published on September 18, 2020)
According to a transcript he released to his millions of social media followers last week, Navalny pretended to be an officer of the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, on the phone to extract details of the poisoning of one of the agents he says it is part of the ensuing cover-up. In the transcript, the individual said he applied the nervous agent to Navalny’s underwear.
The Wall Street Journal did not independently verify the phone conversation.
Putin and the Kremlin in recent months have tried to paint Navalny as irrelevant and to avoid using his name, referring to him as “the Berlin patient”.
Navalny’s organization, the Anti-Corruption Fund, for its part, has been the subject of searches and prosecutions for years. Last week, Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer and one of Navalny’s closest allies, was charged with trespassing after entering the home of the FSB agent with whom Navalny allegedly spoke by phone.
Other supporters say the authorities have withdrawn money from their bank accounts and others have been detained or sent to distant military bases to perform compulsory military service.
Previous opposition figures such as Vladimir Kara-Murza, who has been poisoned twice, and Garry Kasparov, who has been detained several times in Russia, have become largely irrelevant in domestic politics since he decided to leave the country, and Navalny may face a fate similar if he does not return after his recovery.
Allies like Sergei Guriev, who served as a reformist adviser during the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev and who has since left the country, predicted that 44-year-old Navalny would return despite the risks.
“He can’t say now that he won’t be back – it would destroy his reputation,” he said. “He understands that he can be arrested as soon as he crosses the border. He also understands that he can be killed. “
Others, like 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 arrest Navalny would galvanize his followers.
But he acknowledged that without Navalny’s online audience of millions, some of the momentum of his movement could be lost.
“All of this was a message to him: stop what you’re doing and don’t come back,” said Fateyev.
Write to Thomas Grove at [email protected]
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