Alexei Navalny's big gamble

Alexei Navalny seems to undergoing a metamorphosis. Yesterday, we saw him attending another trial by video, looking gaunt after 24 days of hunger strike. But if anything, the more attenuated his frame, the more his moral certainty shone through it.

An appeals hearing for a separate charge of insulting a Second World War veteran gave him a rare opportunity to speak to the outside world. Characteristically, he made a joke of his condition to his wife, Yulia, saying he now looked like ‘a creepy skeleton.’

However, this was a moment’s light-hearted intimacy in a bravura performance primarily directed towards both the Kremlin and the wider Russian population. Just as Vladimir Putin appears unable to refer to Navalny by name – instead using such formulations as ‘the blogger’ or ‘the man in question’ – so, too, the opposition leader chose not to refer to the president directly. Instead, he delivered a blistering critique of ‘the king without clothes,’ whose ‘twenty years of mediocre rule’ has left Russia backward and degraded.

Although Navalny’s team vow to continue their struggle, the national organisation that could mobilise protests and campaign in forthcoming parliamentary elections is no more

He continued that ‘your thieving, naked king wants to continue to rule, to the very end.