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.
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Here we look at how the biggest thorn in the Kremlin’s side got to where he is now.
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Navalny appears in court
Ukrainian heritage
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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.
Image: Vladimr Putin
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.
Image: In court in Moscow. Pic: AP
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.
Image: Appearing in one of his YouTube videos
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.
Image: Holding a blank piece of paper against the glass wall of the dock in court
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.
Image: Putin’s Black Sea Palace from one of Navalny’s documentaries. Pic: YouTube/Alexei Navalny
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.
Image: In hospital in Germany with wife Yulia and his two children
Image: The hospital in Omsk, Siberia where he received treatment in 2020
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.
Image: Police detain a protester in Moscow with a ‘Freedom for Alexei Navalny’ placard
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.
Image: Appearing from prison via videolink. Pic: AP
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.
Image: Graffiti of him in St Petersburg
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.
Donald Trump has criticised Vladimir Putin and suggested a shift in his stance towards the Russian president after a meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy before the Pope’s funeral.
The Ukrainian president said the one-on-one talks could prove to be “historic” after pictures showed him sitting opposite Mr Trump, around two feet apart, in the large marble hall inside St Peter’s Basilica.
The US president said he doubted his Russian counterpart’s willingness to end the war after leaving Rome after the funeral of Pope Francis at the Vatican.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, he said “there was no reason” for the Russian president “to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days”.
Image: The two leaders held talks before attending the Pope’s funeral
He added: “It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently, through ‘Banking’ or ‘Secondary Sanctions?’ Too many people are dying!!!”
The meeting between the US and Ukrainian leaders was their first face-to-face encounter since a very public row in the Oval Office in February.
Mr Zelenskyy said he had a good meeting with Mr Trump in which they talked about the defence of the Ukrainian people, a full and unconditional ceasefire, and a durable and lasting peace that would prevent the war restarting.
Other images released by the Ukrainian president’s office show Sir Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron were present for part of the talks, which were described as “positive” by the French presidency.
Mr Zelenskyy‘s spokesman said the meeting lasted for around 15 minutes and he and Mr Trump had agreed to hold further discussions later on Saturday.
Image: The world leaders shared a moment before the service
Image: Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy meet in the Basilica
But the US president left Rome for Washington on Air Force One soon after the funeral without any other talks having taken place.
The Ukrainian president’s office said there was no second meeting in Rome because of the tight schedule of both leaders, although he had separate discussions with Mr Starmer and Mr Macron.
The French president said in a post on X “Ukraine is ready for an unconditional ceasefire” and that a so-called coalition of the willing, led by the UK and France, would continue working to achieve a lasting peace.
There was applause from some of the other world leaders in attendance at the Vatican when Mr Zelenskyy walked out of St Peter’s Basilica after stopping in front of the pontiff’s coffin to pay his respects.
Image: Donald Trump and the Ukrainian president met for the first time since their Oval Office row. Pic: Reuters
Sir Tony Brenton, the former British ambassador to Russia, said the event presents diplomatic opportunities, including the “biggest possible meeting” between Mr Trump and the Ukrainian leader.
He told Sky News it could mark “an important step” in starting the peace process between Russia and Ukraine.
Professor Father Francesco Giordano told Sky News the meeting is being called “Pope Francis’s miracle” by members of the clergy, adding: “There’s so many things that happened today – it was just overwhelming.”
The bilateral meeting comes after Mr Trump’s peace negotiator Steve Witkoff held talks with Mr Putin at the Kremlin.
They discussed “the possibility of resuming direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine”, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said.
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On an extraordinary day, remarkable pictures on the margins that capture what may be a turning point for the world.
In a corner of St Peter’s Basilica before the funeral of Pope Francis, the leaders of America and Ukraine sit facing each other in two solitary chairs.
They look like confessor and sinner except we cannot tell which one is which.
In another, the Ukrainian president seems to be remonstrating with the US president. This is their first encounter since their infamous bust-up in the Oval Office.
Image: The two leaders held talks before attending the Pope’s funeral
Other pictures show the moment their French and British counterparts introduced the two men. There is a palpable sense of nervousness in the way the leaders engage.
We do not know what the two presidents said in their brief meeting.
But in the mind of the Ukrainian leader will be the knowledge President Trump has this week said America will reward Russia for its unprovoked brutal invasion of his country, under any peace deal.
Mr Trump has presented Ukraine and Russia with a proposal and ultimatum so one-sided it could have been written in the Kremlin.
Kyiv must surrender the land Russia has taken by force, Crimea forever, the rest at least for now. And it must submit to an act of extortion, a proposed deal that would hand over half its mineral wealth effectively to America.
Image: The world leaders shared a moment before the service
Afterwards, Zelenskyy said it had been a good meeting that could turn out to be historic “if we reach results together”.
They had talked, he said, about the defence of Ukraine, a full and unconditional ceasefire and a durable and lasting peace that will prevent a war restarting.
The Trump peace proposal includes only unspecified security guarantees for Ukraine from countries that do not include the US. It rules out any membership of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s allies are watching closely to see if Mr Trump will apply any pressure on Vladimir Putin, let alone punish him for recent bloody attacks on Ukraine.
Or will he simply walk away if the proposal fails, blaming Ukrainian intransigence, however outrageously, before moving onto a rapprochement with Moscow.
If he does, America’s role as guarantor of international security will be seen effectively as over.
This could be the week we see the world order as we have known it since the end of the Second World War buried, as well as a pope.