The strategy of the Navalny team is to increase its reach and visibility while undermining Mr Putin’s legitimacy through corruption investigations and election campaigns against the Kremlin. His allies say they will also call for more street protests.
“Our strategy is to be the best-organized political force when things start to change,” said Vladimir Ashurkov, one of Mr Navalny’s best allies, in a telephone interview from London. “We don’t know when that will happen.”
He said he had discussed plans with Mr Navalny to call for sanctions against Russian officials, figures in the state media and business magnates close to Mr Putin – which Mr Ashurkov did in a letter to President Biden last week. .
“We have a plan for how we are going to organize our work and how we will put constant pressure on the authorities for his release,” Ashurkov said of Mr Navalny.
Mr Navalny has repeatedly embarrassed Mr Putin and his allies with corruption investigative reports that have been viewed many millions of times on YouTube. Previously, authorities tried to restrain Navalny with several weeks in prison to prevent him from becoming a political martyr.
“We are entering a new period of instability and uncertainty,” said Ashurkov. “But nobody knows how close we are to the period for which we are preparing – when liberalization will begin.”
Long into the night after Mr. Navalny’s sentencing, the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg echoed with sirens, protesters’ chants and screams. On social media and in independent news channels, Russians expressed outrage at harrowing scenes of overnight police brutality.
Police officers were filmed waving batons at pro-Navalny protesters holding their hands up, a journalist going out twice on the head and people drag from passing cars.
Authorities have made more than 10,000 arrests in recent weeks, according to OVD-Info, an activist group that tracks detentions during protests.
The harsh tactic against protesters by the heavy use of riot police, and the uncompromising stance of top Russian officials and the state media by portraying Mr. Navalny and his supporters as criminals, indicated that the Kremlin had moved to a tougher line on domestic disagreements. .
But there was no sign that the Kremlin would change course.
“No unauthorized protest activity should take place,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov told reporters on Wednesday. “Unauthorized protests are cause for concern and confirm that the police are justified in their harsh, legal actions.”
Ivan Zhdanov, the director of the Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, wrote in an Instagram post to opposition supporters, “Don’t panic or lose heart.”
Others in the movement recognized that a long battle is ahead.
Mr Ashurkov, Navalny’s best ally, said his team had long understood that Russia’s pro-democracy groups were too weak to force political changes on their own timetable. But he said they were confident that change would come, with discontent from the general public and among the elite.
The authorities have made it clear that they will respond with vigor. According to OVD-Info, at least 1,408 protesters were arrested on Tuesday, including about 1,145 in Moscow.
In what appeared to be a carefully choreographed operation, hundreds of riot police fanned out across Moscow’s posh city center, even before Navalny’s conviction was announced and the opposition leader’s team called for protests. Police prevented crowds from forming and trapped protesters in courtyards and alleyways before marching to buses to take them away.
Tatiana Stanovaya, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center, in a commentary described the crackdown as the sign of a new phase in the Kremlin’s handling of the opposition to Putin.
In recent years, the Kremlin’s goal has been to delegitimize the opposition in the eyes of the public and keep it out of official politics. Now, she said, it is being criminalized and cast as a threat to national security.
At the same time, Mr Putin’s critics unite for the first time around a single figure: Mr Navalny.
“A time of great confrontation has come,” wrote Ms. Stanovaya.
Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.