Alexei Navalny: Who is the jailed Putin critic some Russians hope could overthrow him?

Published

2 years ago

August 4, 2023

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President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic has been handed a fresh prison term, which could keep him behind bars for another two decades.

Russian politician Alexei Navalny was sentenced by a court to 19 years in jail on Friday after being found guilty of extremism charges relating to the activities of his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK).

He is already serving a nine-year term for a number of charges that he claims are politically motivated.

Since rising to prominence as an opposition figure in the early 2000s, Navalny has previously been convicted of defying government officials, embezzlement, fraud, parole violations and contempt of court.

The foundation he set up in 2011 has sought to discredit Putin and his associates through well-produced online investigative documentaries that claim to expose their opulent lifestyles.

His persistent online campaigning has gained him a network of loyal followers both in and outside Russia.

It has also seen him repeatedly jailed, barred from running for political office and most famously poisoned by a Soviet-era nerve agent in 2020.

Here we look at how the biggest thorn in the Kremlin’s side got to where he is now.

Ukrainian heritage

Alexei Navalny was born to factory owners in a village west of Moscow called Butyn in 1976, but grew up in the town of Obninsk, around 60 miles southwest of the Russian capital.

He is Ukrainian on his paternal side and spent summers with his Ukrainian grandmother in the town near Chernobyl where his family are from.

Navalny, now 47, cites the mistreatment of locals after the 1986 nuclear disaster as one of the reasons he first sought to take on the Moscow regime.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Navalny graduated with a law degree from Moscow’s Peoples’ Friendship University in 1998 before gaining a second in economics in 2001.

It was around this time that Vladimir Putin rose to power supported by a circle of oligarchs that bought up state-owned companies and sponsored his United Russia party.

Anti-corruption foundation

To begin with, Navalny expressed nationalist and anti-immigrant views. His focus on government corruption has largely clouded earlier comments about Muslims in Russia, but in 2021 Amnesty International retracted his ‘prisoner of conscious’ status after he failed to distance himself from them.

He joined the liberal Yabloko opposition party in 2000 but was expelled for “nationalist activities” in 2007.

While working as a lawyer in the early 2000s, Navalny started blogging, with the initial aim of protesting against rampant overdevelopment in Moscow.

As the years went by and Putin’s grip on power tightened, his campaigns honed in on corruption of state-run organisations such as gas and oil giants Gazprom and Rosneft.

He bought small shares in the companies along with some state-owned banks so he could ask awkward questions about their funding at AGMs.

In 2010 he founded RosPil, an anti-corruption project run by lawyers that monitored the spending of state-run organisations and enabled them to bring several cases of suspected violations to court.

A year later in 2011 he established his main Anti-Corruption Foundation, which now has millions of followers worldwide through its various social media channels.

In December that year following widespread reports Russia’s parliamentary elections had been rigged, thousands gathered in Moscow to contest the result.

Navalny was the first of around 300 people to be arrested. He was jailed for 15 days for “defying a government official”.

With Putin re-elected and Navalny gaining notoriety, charges against the opposition leader began to stack up. One of the first in 2012 was for embezzlement of the state-owned timber company Kirovles.

Mayor of Moscow bid

In 2013 he ran to be mayor of Moscow, coming second with 27% of the vote and receiving around 97.3 million rubles (£2.3m) in campaign funding.

In a separate case involving the Russian subsidiary of French cosmetics company Yves Rocher, Navalny was placed under house arrest and banned from using the internet in 2014. His team continued to update his blog for him.

Eventually he was handed a three-and-a-half year prison suspended prison sentence – but his brother Oleg was jailed.

In late-2015 FBK’s first long-form investigation was released. The YouTube documentary ‘Chaika’ accused then-Russian prosecutor General Yury Chaika of corruption and ties to a notorious criminal group – and received 26 million views.

A year later Navalny announced his intention to run in the 2018 presidential elections, but he was eventually barred from standing over the outcome of the Kirovles embezzlement case, bringing condemnation from the EU and wider international community.

Another YouTube documentary, this time on former prime minister Dmitry Medvedev and his alleged empire of palaces, was released by Navalny and his team in March 2017, racking up seven million views in its first week.

It triggered rallies throughout Russia, subsequent arrests, and Navalny being jailed for organising unauthorised demonstrations.

At one protest, he was attacked with disinfectant by a group of unknown assailants, which damaged his right eye.

Novichok poisoning

It was only three years ago that Navalny’s fight against Putin hit headlines beyond Russia.

On 20 August 2020, he was travelling back to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk, where he had been working with local activists, when he fell gravely ill on the plane.

The pilot made an emergency landing in nearby Omsk and Navalny received emergency hospital treatment.

His team immediately accused the Kremlin of poisoning him, which it vehemently denied, and he was flown, still in a coma, to Berlin.

After wide-ranging tests, numerous German medics confirmed he had been poisoned with novichok – the same Soviet-era nerve agent used to poison former KGB agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in 2018.

His recovery took five months, with his wife Yulia, daughter Dasha and son Zakhar, by his bedside.

Despite the risk of arrest, Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021 where he was immediately detained for allegedly violating the terms of his suspended sentence from the Yves Rocher case.

Fresh wave of anti-Putin protests

News of his arrest triggered some of the biggest protests in Russia since Putin’s rise to power and resulted in thousands of demonstrators being arrested themselves.

Navalny was sentenced to two-and-a-half years for the parole violation, but as before, his team provided updates on him through his Twitter and other social media accounts.

Among them was news of a three-week hunger strike, which Navalny said was due to sleep deprivation and being refused medical treatment.

In June 2021 a Moscow court outlawed his foundation and conducted a series of raids aimed at shutting down its network. Some team members were forced to flee Russia.

Following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Navalny used his social media posts and court appearances to protest against the war. At one hearing he described it as “stupid” and “built on lies”.

A month later at short notice he was brought back to court and handed another nine years for embezzlement and contempt of court before being transferred to a maximum-security prison in Vladimir, western Russia.

This hasn’t stopped him and his team relaunching the anti-corruption movement and filing lawsuits over his treatment in prison, which he claims has seen him forced to listen to one of Putin speeches on repeat for 100 days in a row.

Despite his team’s concerns about his health and that he may be being slowly poisoned behind bars, Navalny remains defiant, claiming his death would only further fuel the protest movement.

And in spite of his latest sentence, many in Russia view him as a Nelson Mandela-style figure, who they hope will be released from prison to take over as president when Putin falls.

A documentary about him, which reveals him tricking a chemical weapons expert into seemingly confessing to poisoning his underwear with Novichok, won an Oscar earlier this year.

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Russian spy ship on edge of UK waters, warns defence secretary

Published

1 day ago

November 19, 2025

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Russian spy ship on edge of UK waters, warns defence secretary

A Russian spy ship is currently on the edge of UK waters, the defence secretary has announced.

John Healey said it was the second time that the ship, the Yantar, had been deployed to UK waters.

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Giving a news conference in Downing Street, he said: “A Russian spy ship, the Yantar, is on the edge of UK waters north of Scotland, having entered the UK’s wider waters over the last few weeks.

“This is a vessel designed for gathering intelligence and mapping our undersea cables.

“We deployed a Royal Navy frigate and RAF planes to monitor and track this vessel’s every move, during which the Yantar directed lasers at our pilots.

“That Russian action is deeply dangerous, and this is the second time this year that this ship, the Yantar, has deployed to UK waters.”

Mr Healey added: “So my message to Russia and to Putin is this: we see you, we know what you’re doing, and if the Yantar travels south this week, we are ready.”

His warning comes following a report from MPs that the UK lacks a plan to defend itself from a military attack, despite the government promising to boost readiness with new arms factories.

At least 13 sites across the UK have been identified for new factories to make munitions and military explosives, with Mr Healey expecting the arms industry to break ground at the first plant next year.

The report, by the Commons Defence Committee, said the UK “lacks a plan for defending the homeland and overseas territories” as it urged the government to launch a “co-ordinated effort to communicate with the public on the level of threat we face”.

Mr Healey acknowledged the dangers facing the UK, saying the country was in a “new era of threat” that “demands a new era for defence”.

Giving more details on the vessel, he said it was “part of a Russian fleet designed to put and hold our undersea infrastructure and those of our allies at risk”.

He said the Yantar wasn’t just part of a naval operation but part of a Russian programme driven by Moscow’s Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, or GUGI, which is “designed to have capabilities which can undertake surveillance in peacetime and sabotage in conflict”.

“That is why we’ve been determined, whenever the Yantar comes into British wider waters, we track it, we deter it and we say to Putin we are ready, and we do that alongside allies,” he added.

Asked by Sky News’ political correspondent Rob Powell whether this was the first time that lasers had been used by a Russian vessel against pilots, Mr Healey replied: “This is the first time we’ve had this action from Yantar directed against the British RAF.

“We take it extremely seriously. I’ve changed the Navy’s rules of engagement so that we can follow more closely, monitor more closely, the activities of the Yantar when it’s in our wider waters. We have military options ready.”

Mr Healey added that the last time the Yantar was in UK waters, the British military surfaced a nuclear-powered attack submarine close to the ship “that they did not know was there”.

The Russian embassy has been contacted for comment.

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South Korea: All 267 passengers and crew rescued from ferry that ran aground, says coastguard

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1 day ago

November 19, 2025

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South Korea: All 267 passengers and crew rescued from ferry that ran aground, says coastguard

More than 250 passengers on board a ferry that ran aground off the South Korean coast have been rescued, according to the coastguard.

It said the Queen Jenuvia 2, travelling from the southern island of Jeju to the southwestern port city of Mokpo, hit rocks near Jindo, off the country’s southwest coast, late on Wednesday.

A total of 267 people were on board, including 246 passengers and 21 crew. Three people had minor injuries.

Footage showed passengers wearing life vests waiting to be picked up by rescue boats, which were approaching the 26,000-tonne South Korean ferry.

Its bow seemed to have become stuck on the edge of a small island, but it appeared to be upright and the passengers seemed calm.

Weather conditions at the scene were reported to be fair with light winds.

South Korea’s Prime Minister Kim Min-seok ordered all available boats and equipment to be used to rescue those on board, his office said.

The coastguard received a report of the incident late on Wednesday, and immediately deployed 20 vessels and a plane to join the rescue effort.

It was not immediately clear what caused the vessel to run aground.

The vessel can carry up to 1,010 passengers and has multiple lower decks for large vehicles and passenger vehicles, according to its operator Seaworld Ferry.

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In 2014, more than 300 people, mostly schoolchildren heading to Jeju on a school trip, died when the Sewol ferry sank.

It was one of the country’s worst disasters.

The ship went down 11 years ago near the site of Wednesday’s incident, though further off Jindo.

After taking a turn too fast, the overloaded and illegally-modified ferry began listing.

It then lay on its side as passengers waited for rescue, which was slow to come, before sinking as the country watched on live television.

Many of the victims were found in their cabins, where they had been told to wait by the crew while the captain and some crew members were taken aboard the first coastguard vessels to arrive at the scene.

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A Bond-villain ship prowling our waters: Why the Yantar alarms the West

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1 day ago

November 19, 2025

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A Bond-villain ship prowling our waters: Why the Yantar alarms the West

The Yantar may look scruffy and unthreatening but below the surface it’s the kind of ship a Bond villain would be proud of.

In hangars below decks lurk submersibles straight out of the Bond film Thunderball. Two Consul Class mini manned subs are on board and a number of remotely operated ones.

It can “undertake surveillance in peacetime and sabotage in conflict”, in the words of Britain’s Defence Secretary John Healey.

Cable-cutting equipment combined with surveillance and intelligence gathering capabilities make this a vessel to be reckoned with.

Most worryingly though, in its most recent tangle with RAF planes sent to stalk it, the Yantar deployed a laser to distract and dazzle the British pilot.

Matthew Savill, from the Royal United Services Institute, told Sky News this was potentially a worrying hostile act.

He said: “If this had been used to dazzle the pilot and that aircraft had subsequently crashed, then maybe the case could be made that not only was it hostile but it was fundamentally an armed attack because it had the same impact as if they’d used a weapon.”

The Yantar is off our waters and here to threaten the West’s Achilles heel, says our government. Undersea infrastructure is essential to our hyper-connected world.

Undersea cables are the vital nervous system of Western civilisation. Through them courses the data that powers our 21st century economies and communications systems.

Pipelines are equally important in supplying fuel and gas that are vital to our prosperity. But they stretch for mile after mile along the seabed, exposed and all but undefended.

Their vulnerability is enough to keep Western economists and security officials awake at night, and Russia is well aware of that strategic weakness.

That is why some of the most sophisticated kit the Russian military possesses is geared towards mapping and potentially threatening them.

The Yantar’s concealed capabilities are currently being used to map that underwater network of cables and pipelines, it’s thought, but they could in the future be used to sabotage them. Russia has been blamed for mysterious underwater attacks in the recent past.

A more kinetic conflict striking at the West’s soft underwater underbelly could have a disastrous impact. Enough damage to internet cables could play havoc with Western economies.

It is a scenario security experts believe the West is not well enough prepared for.

Putting the Yantar and its Russian overseers on watch is one thing; preventing them from readying for such a doomsday outcome in time of war is quite another.