MOSCOW – Months after a near-fatal attack on a nerve agent, Alexei Navalny is now facing new legal troubles in Russia that have clouded the future of his opposition movement here and the commitment to his plans to return from Germany, where he is recovering. .
Navalny and his supporters this week denied allegations made by Russian authorities that the Kremlin’s best-known critic violated probation orders and cheated supporters with millions of dollars in donations. They say the charges are intended to deter him from returning to Russia, where he has pledged to revive his network of activists.
Navalny fell unconscious aboard a flight to Moscow in August after meeting with constituencies in Siberia, and was subsequently evacuated to Berlin, but has promised to return and challenge candidates allied with President Vladimir Putin in the parliamentary elections. next year. no later than September. In recent weeks, he has made efforts to publicly identify his attackers.
“They’re trying to throw me in jail for not dying on that plane and looking for the killers myself,” he said in an Instagram post.
The Kremlin has rejected the European authorities’ conclusions that Mr Navalny had been poisoned with the Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent and kept behind the diagnosis of the Russian doctors who initially treated him: that he lost consciousness due to a metabolic imbalance similar to a severe drop in blood sugar.
However, the new allegations show to what extent Mr Navalny has caught the attention of the authorities. They also present him with a dilemma in which he must choose between becoming another dissident in exile, effectively removing him from Russia’s political landscape, or returning and facing the threat of imprisonment.
The Russian Commission of Inquiry, the country’s main crime investigation agency, said on Tuesday that Mr Navalny, who built his political career by exposing the corruption and excesses of insiders in the Kremlin, had used, among other things, $ 4.78 million raised by his supporters were gathered to buy properties. , pay for travel abroad and cover personal expenses. It has started a criminal investigation.
Earlier this week, the state agency responsible for overseeing the jail sentences said Navalny had violated the terms of a 2014 suspended prison sentence he was given for 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 to retaliate not only for surviving the August 20 poisoning, but also for working with open-source researcher Bellingcat and using leaked phone data to protect those he believes. were to be traced and made public. responsible for the attack.
A video shows Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s team 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 builds on Moscow to investigate. Thomas Grove of WSJ reports. Photo: Shamil Zhumatov / Reuters (Originally published September 18, 2020)
According to a transcript he released to his millions of followers on social media last week, Mr. Navalny pretends to be an officer of the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, on the phone to retrieve details of the poisoning from one of the agents he says was. part of the ensuing cover-up. In the transcript, the person said he applied the nerve agent to Mr. Navalny’s underwear.
The Wall Street Journal has not independently verified the phone call.
Mr Putin and the Kremlin have been trying in recent months to portray Mr Navalny as an irrelevance and to avoid his name, referring to him instead as ‘the Berlin patient’.
Mr. Navalny’s organization, the Anti-Corruption Fund, has been the target of raids and lawsuits for years now. Last week, Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer and one of Navalny’s closest allies, was charged with breaking into the home of the FSB agent Mr. Navalny had supposedly spoken by phone.
Other supporters say authorities have withdrawn money from their bank accounts and others have been detained or sent to distant military bases to perform mandatory military service.
Previous opposition members such as Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was poisoned twice, and Garry Kasparov, who was repeatedly detained in Russia, have become largely irrelevant in domestic politics since they decided to leave the country, and Mr Navalny could face a similar fate. if he does not return after his recovery.
Allies like Sergei Guriev, who served as a reformist adviser during Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency and has since left the country, predicted that 44-year-old Navalny would return despite the risks.
“He can’t say he won’t be coming back now – it would destroy his reputation,” he said. “He understands that he can be put in prison as soon as he crosses the border. He also understands he could be murdered. “
Others, like Andrei Fateev, 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 imprison Navalny would boost his followers.
But he recognized that without Navalny’s online audience of millions, some of the momentum of his movement could be lost.
“All this was a message to him: stop what you are doing and don’t come back,” said Mr. Fateyev.
Write to Thomas Grove at [email protected]
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