Putin, Poison and the Importance of Alexey Navalny: QuickTake

(Bloomberg) -- Alexey Navalny is Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, an anti-corruption investigator whose exposés have targeted President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. His plan to return to Russia after recuperating in Germany from a nerve-agent attack he blames on the Kremlin risks potentially landing him in jail and creating a new irritant in Russia’s relationship with the West. While the poisoning has already resulted in limited new sanctions against Russia, any attempt to arrest Navalny would be certain to inspire calls for a tougher response.

1. Why is Navalny seen as a threat?

Navalny, 44, has resisted the kind of pressure -- repeated jail sentences, house arrest, physical assault -- that led many other Putin critics to flee the country. Until his poisoning though, the Kremlin’s seeming special treatment of him inspired speculation that he was a known quantity and therefore an acceptable threat. He was even allowed to run for mayor of Moscow in 2013. But that calculus may have changed. Navalny’s “smart voting” initiative, which encourages voters to coalesce around politicians most likely to beat the Kremlin’s favored candidate, led to the defeat of ruling party candidates in 2019 and again had some success in local races in September 2020.

2. Who would want to harm Navalny?

Investigative website Bellingcat said in December that it identified members of a clandestine Federal Security Service (FSB) unit specializing in poisons who have followed Navalny since January 2017. Putin later admitted Navalny was under surveillance but denied the government was behind the poisoning, saying that “if we had wanted to, we would have finished the job.” French President Emmanuel Macron described the incident as an “assassination attempt,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Navalny in hospital and in October the European Union blacklisted six people in Russia allied to Putin as punishment for the poisoning.

3. How does he make himself heard?

He has a huge social media following, which could make him a target as it allows him to deliver his message despite an effective blackout by Russia’s tightly controlled television networks. Even from abroad, Navalny’s voice gets noticed. While recovering in Berlin, Navalny published what he said was a phone call with one of his would-be assassins in which he posed as an adviser to Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev. In a June survey by Levada Center, a non-governmental research organization, he was named the most inspiring public person in Russia other than Putin.

4. How has the Kremlin tried to neutralize him?

Navalny has been in and out of jail since 2011, often on charges of organizing unsanctioned protests, but never served more than a month at a time. He was barred from running in the 2018 presidential election due to what the European Court of Human Rights labeled politically motivated convictions. The Kremlin learned its lesson in 2013 when Navalny was allowed to run for Moscow mayor against incumbent Sergei Sobyanin, a Putin loyalist, and received 27% of the vote. He had been handed a five-year suspended sentence in an embezzlement case in July of that year. Navalny also received a suspended sentence in 2014 while his younger brother, Oleg, was imprisoned for 3 1/2 years in a separate fraud trial involving the Russian branch of French cosmetics company Yves Rocher. Both men denied wrongdoing.

5. What else has happened to Navalny?

An assailant linked to a radical pro-Putin group threw chemical dye in his face in 2017, nearly costing him his sight in one eye. When jailed for 30 days following Moscow city council elections in 2019, Navalny was briefly hospitalized after what his doctor called “a toxic reaction to an unknown chemical substance.” His official diagnosis was an allergic reaction. Earlier that year, the Russian authorities started an investigation into the alleged laundering of 1 billion rubles ($14 million) by his Anti-Corruption Foundation, charges that Navalny and his allies denied. He dissolved the fund after it was blacklisted in 2019 as a “foreign agent,” subjecting it to restrictive regulations. He said on Twitter at the time that the fund had never received foreign money.

6. What about more recently?

In October 2020 Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia had evidence Navalny was being given instructions by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency while in Germany. Now the Federal Penitentiary Service says it will detain Navalny upon his return to Russia because he faces charges of violating the terms of his probation when he failed to check in during his recovery in Germany. Investigators have also opened a new criminal case against him for alleged fraud.

7. How was he poisoned?

Navalny fell ill in August on a flight to Moscow after meeting with local activists in the Siberian city of Tomsk, who were organizing for regional elections. In October the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an international watchdog, confirmed that a nerve agent from the banned Novichok group had been used in the poisoning. His shouts of pain could be heard in a video taken on the plane, which was diverted to Omsk in a move that likely saved his life. Local doctors kept Navalny in a clinic there for two days before, under international pressure, allowing him to be transfered to Berlin’s Charite hospital. The Kremlin says it found no proof Navalny was poisoned.

8. Who has been poisoned in the past?

The highest profile poisonings were of former intelligence officers living in exile in the U.K.: Alexander Litvinenko was given a fatal dose of polonium 210 in his tea in a London restaurant in 2006, while Sergei Skripal survived an assassination attempt with Novichok in 2018. The chief coordinator for Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia organization, Vladimir Kara-Murza, suffered kidney failure in 2015, and activist Pyotr Verzilov, who led a pitch invasion during the 2018 soccer World Cup final game to protest Putin’s rule, was treated for what doctors said were symptoms of poisoning later that year. Other Kremlin critics who have been killed include former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, journalist Anna Politkovskaya -- who had earlier suffered a poison attack -- and human-rights activist Natalia Estemirova. A number of Chechens living in exile have also been killed, including in Germany in August 2019.

9. What does this mean for Putin?

While Navalny’s return to Moscow could exacerbate tensions between Putin and incoming U.S. President Joe Biden, Russia’s relationship with Washington is already at a post-Cold War nadir, meaning Biden’s leverage is limited. More relevant could be domestic and former Soviet politics. Last year saw protests in Russia’s Far East about the arrest of a populist governor there who polled better than Putin, while a mass movement in Belarus has rocked ally Alexander Lukashenko’s 26-year presidential rule. Putin himself has spent 20 years developing an image of someone who controls even the smallest details of the state apparatus. Analysts say a failure to come down hard on Navalny could be a sign of weakness.

10. Does the opposition have other leaders?

Navalny, who combines charisma with a sophisticated understanding of how to use social media to bypass the Kremlin’s blackout, is by far the most visible leader among Russia’s fractured anti-Putin bloc. He’s the only opposition politician who controls a nationwide network that could be mobilized for elections in 2021 to the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament. Currently, the 450-seat body doesn’t have a single opposition member.

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