Ever since the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was arrested and imprisoned on trumped-up charges in January 2021, Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) has fought tirelessly to keep its leader in the public eye – and to continue his work exposing the corruption of the regime. Just under 130 million people viewed the FBK’s YouTube video ‘Putin’s Palace’, which detailed the outrageous luxury of a seaside palace built for Russia’s leader and the complex web of offshore schemes that financed it. The documentary Navalny – which details the opposition leader’s investigation into his own near-fatal poisoning by a team of FSB assassins in Tomsk in August 2020 – won the best documentary award at this year’s Oscars. ‘My husband is in prison for telling the truth,’ Navalny’s wife Yulia told the Academy Awards audience. ‘I dream of the day that he and Russia will be free.’
Was it a mistake for Navalny to return to Moscow to face an imprisonment which has proved monstrously cruel?
Was it a mistake for Navalny to return to Moscow from Berlin – where he was being treated for novichok poisoning – to face an imprisonment which has proved monstrously cruel? ‘You can [only] talk about mistakes if there had been any other options,’ says Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief of staff who, until his recent resignation, also served as FBK’s chairman.
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