Russia is gearing up for a second weekend of unrest as the Kremlin suppresses protests in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an effort to prevent them from turning into a Belarusian-style uprising.
In a new letter, Navalny appeared to nod his head at the “stop the cockroach” demonstrations against Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, and thanked his supporters, saying, “They cannot put everyone in prison.”
Supporters were called to a demonstration on Sunday near the headquarters of the FSB, the intelligence agency accused of poisoning Navalny last August. “Alexei is facing a serious prison sentence for defying Putin, investigating his own poisoning and telling the whole of Russia about the president’s palace,” said an invitation.
What is at stake is whether opposition to Vladimir Putin will be able to maintain its momentum and threaten to paralyze parts of Moscow and other cities every weekend. This would create a considerable headache for the Kremlin, which looks set on Tuesday to put Navalny in prison for many years.
“Right now, whatever the government wants, it gets, even if it breaks the law,” said Navalny’s lawyer, Olga Mikhailova, after a failed appeal to secure his release on Thursday.
Profile
Who is Alexei Navalny?
Born in 1976 on the outskirts of Moscow, Alexei Navalny is a lawyer who has become an activist whose Anti-Corruption Foundation investigates the wealth of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
He started out as a Russian nationalist, but emerged as the main leader of Russia’s democratic opposition during the wave of protests that led to the 2012 presidential election and has since been a thorn in the side of the Kremlin.
Navalny was prevented from appearing on state television, but he used social media to his advantage. A 2017 documentary accusing Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of corruption received more than 30 million views on YouTube in two months.
He was repeatedly arrested and arrested. The European human rights court ruled that Russia violated Navalny’s rights by keeping him under house arrest in 2014. Election authorities banned him from running for president in 2018 due to an embezzlement conviction that he claims was politically motivated. Navalny told the commission that his decision would be a vote ‘not against me, but against 16,000 people who nominated me; against 200,000 volunteers who have worked for me ‘.
There was also a physical price to pay. In April 2017, he was attacked with a green dye that nearly blinded him in one eye, and in July 2019, he was taken from prison to the hospital with symptoms that one of his doctors said could indicate poisoning. In 2020, he was again hospitalized after a suspected poisoning and taken to Germany for treatment. The German government later said that the toxicology results showed that Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent.
Russian police handled the protests more skillfully than their Belarusian counterparts, and it is unclear whether popular anger at Lukashenko will repeat itself against Putin, who remains more popular than his neighbor.
More than a dozen investigations have been opened across Russia over alleged riots, hooliganism, traffic blocking and other offenses, while officials analyze hours of footage taken at last Saturday’s rallies, which were some of Russia’s biggest protests in the past decade .
On Friday, a Russian news agency released footage of its visit to the £ 1 billion palace on the Black Sea, allegedly built for Putin, which was analyzed in a Navalny investigation last week. The building was shown largely under construction, looking at odds with the luxurious renderings of the mansion’s interiors assembled by Navalny’s team.
“If the palace is not completed and is not ready for another five years, then what, with license, is state-owned Transneft paying 120 million rubles a month to rent?” said Maria Pevchikh, chief investigator at Navalny, in response to the footage.
The Kremlin had already tried to dispel anger over the investigation by causing Putin himself to deny that he owned the palace – a rare move for a leader who does not yet recognize Navalny by name in public. Navalny’s video has been watched more than 100 million times on YouTube.
The Kremlin’s efforts to break the protest movement were revealed in a court in the Moscow region this week, when Navalny was taken to a hearing to learn for the first time that many of his aides, along with his brother, had been arrested in raids. cops .
“But why did they arrest Oleg?” Navalny asked his brother, who has already served three and a half years in prison and could face two more years if he is accused of violating coronavirus restrictions in last week’s protests. Navalny shook his head and added, “It’s crazy.”
Navalny, who owes his success in part to his presence on the Internet and his clever use of social media, has been isolated in Matrosskaya Tishina prison in Moscow and could be sent to prison at a probation hearing next week. His brother and several aides are being held under house arrest, which means they will not be able to watch the protests increasingly without a leader on Sunday.
Few Navalny aides remain free. One of them, Leonid Volkov, was charged in a separate case for allegedly attracting children to last week’s rallies in a video promoting the protests.
“I’m in hell,” he wrote when he was contacted on Thursday. In more expansive comments, he wrote: “Everyone knows that there was no ‘attraction to minors’ [to the rallies]. Why did the investigative committee open a case so deliberately absurd? So that everyone can worry and talk about it. “
Investigators said on Friday they would seek to arrest Volkov, who is abroad.