MOSCOW – The return of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny to his homeland on Sunday was, from the beginning, a symbolic act of defiance.
He was arrested on arrival and is now sitting in Moscow’s most notorious detention center, awaiting a trial that could put him in prison for years, in the custody of the same regime he says he tried to kill him with an era nervous agent. Soviet.
When Navalny announced that he would finally return to Russia, after recovering from Novichok poisoning at a German hospital, he raised the question: why? The Kremlin made it clear for months that it did not want President Vladimir Putin’s most outspoken opponent to return and was willing to play dirty to discourage him
In the days since Navalny’s return, it looks like he has returned to what could be his final fight.
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“They are scared,” he said in a video recorded in an improvised court outside Moscow on Monday, where he was sentenced to 30 days of pre-trial imprisonment.
“They are afraid of you,” he said. “They are afraid of those people who manage to stop being silent and realize their own strength … I ask them to stop being silent, resist and go to the street. We are so many. “
When Navalny left Russia in August in a German air ambulance, he clung to life in an induced coma. Scientists in several countries have determined that he was poisoned and nearly killed with Novichok, a variant of Soviet-made nerve agents – the same type of chemical weapon used against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the UK in 2018.
For Navalny’s supporters, it was immediately obvious who tried to kill him: the Russian Federal Security Service. After all, they argued, who else could get their hands on such a weapon? When Navalny, under the care of German experts, woke up from a coma weeks later, he was unequivocal in placing the blame directly on Putin. The Russian government has denied any involvement.
Navalny’s national campaign is organizing protests on Saturday across the country in support of the imprisoned opposition icon. On February 2, he will appear in court, where a judge will consider the state’s request to turn a suspended sentence into a sentence of execution. If that happens, he faces a prison sentence of up to three and a half years on current charges. Protests, say his allies, are his only hope.
This was already a risky situation by the standards of Russia’s stifled and tightly controlled domestic policy. But Navalny dramatically increased the stakes on Tuesday night. In a move that can only be interpreted as him going all-in in an epic final confrontation with Putin: his team launched one of the biggest investigations into Putin’s wealth.
In the introduction to the two-hour video detailing his team’s investigation of the funding behind the “Putin palace”, Navalny tells viewers that his team decided to continue the investigation while he was still in the ICU and immediately agreed that he would release when he returned home to Moscow, “because we don’t want the main character in this film to think that we are afraid of him.”
The report details Putin’s rise to wealth and power and the construction of the massive $ 1.4 billion palace on the Black Sea coast. NBC News has not independently confirmed the report’s findings.
Although Navalny says he decided to pursue this investigation after waking up from a coma, the scope of the effort and the nature of the material presented suggest that this is the culmination of years of work, after a decade of smaller-scale investigations into the figures surrounding Putin. Until now, Navalny has never fired such a direct shot at the leader.
“The great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy once described the power structure in Russia very clearly: ‘The villains who stole the people got together, recruited soldiers and judges to protect their orgy and are partying,” he said, “We will just live normally. when we stop tolerating employees who steal and reelect them ”.
In 48 hours since joining YouTube, it has been viewed 38 million times and was the most popular video in Russia. However, the question remains: is it enough to inspire a large-scale demonstration of support on February 2, when he goes to trial?
Otherwise, and even with the prospect of possible international sanctions on the matter, the Kremlin may consider the cost of arresting Navalny to be entirely affordable.