Alexei Navalny: The one man Putin refused to mention by name – who never gave up fight against Russia’s corrupt regime
Alexei Navalny lived and died fighting against Vladimir Putin’s regime and the corruption at its heart.
Barred in 2018 from running in elections, he remained Mr Putin’s most powerful political opponent.
He was the one man capable of bringing tens of thousands on to the streets calling for a Russia without Mr Putin – and the one man Russia’s president famously refused to mention by name.
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He was stubborn, sarcastic and exceptionally charismatic – a born populist with a sense of humour which appealed especially to the young.
His YouTube investigations into Mr Putin’s cronies, and finally the president himself, garnered millions of views and exposed graft of the highest order. He acquired ever more powerful enemies.
For a decade, Mr Navalny was tolerated by the Kremlin. He endured a seemingly endless succession of arrests, court appearances and periods in detention but he survived.
In August 2020, that changed.
Poisoned while on a fact-finding mission
Alexei Navalny talks with his lawyers Olga Mikhailova, left, and Vadim Kobzev during a hearing in 2021. Pic: AP
The economic situation was deteriorating and discontent aggravated by the pandemic was growing.
Coupled with that, the Kremlin had an eye on parliamentary elections the following year, which Mr Navalny had vowed to disrupt through an alternative voting system.
In a hotel room in the Siberian city of Tomsk, on a fact-finding mission for one of his investigations, Mr Navalny was poisoned.
The groans recorded by a fellow passenger on the flight back to Moscow were the first indication that something terrible was wrong.
Moments later he fell into a coma.
He later said his life was saved by the pilot, who executed an emergency landing despite warnings of a bomb threat at the airport, and by paramedics who immediately administered the antidote atropine on the airport tarmac.
For three days Mr Navalny’s wife Yulia fought to have him airlifted to Berlin, finally making an appeal directly to Mr Putin, while doctors in Omsk where he was in hospital dithered over the diagnosis.
Alexei Navalny embraces his wife Yulia, as he was released in a courtroom in 2013. Pic: AP
Alexei Navalny, with his wife Yulia, right, daughter Daria, and son Zakhar in 2019. Pic: AP
Once in Berlin, a German military laboratory identified the poison in question. It was novichok, the weapons grade nerve agent used two years earlier against Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury.
Once again – a banned chemical weapon – and an attack which bore all the hallmarks of the Russian state.
Investigating from his hospital bed
The West imposed sanctions and demanded a full investigation. But the Kremlin refused, even going so far as to suggest Mr Navalny may have poisoned himself.
Mr Putin shrugged off the accusations and returned to a familiar theme, that Mr Navalny was an agent of the West.
“Who needs him anyway?”, the Russian president said at his annual news conference.
“If [they] had wanted to, they would have probably finished it.”
In the care of doctors at Berlin’s Charite hospital, Mr Navalny made a long but miraculous recovery.
From his hospital bed, he laid the groundwork for his most damning investigation yet – into what he called “Putin’s palace”, a billion dollar residence on Russia’s Black Sea coast.
Thanks too to the investigative work of Bellingcat and its Russian partners, he was able to determine the identities of the six intelligence officers who had poisoned him – even managing to get one of them to admit that the poison had been placed in his underpants.
After his recuperation, Mr Navalny stunned the world by saying he would return to Russia.
“Russia is my country, Moscow is my city, I miss them,” he posted on Instagram.
He knew what was in store. He was arrested at passport control for supposedly breaking parole and placed in pre-trial detention.
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Poisoned, jailed and mysterious falls from windows: What happened to Putin’s most vocal critics
Alexei Navalny looks at a camera while speaking from a prison via a video link in 2022. Pic: AP
Two days later his Putin’s Palace investigation went viral. Within weeks it had been viewed more than 100 million times.
A lawyer himself, Mr Navalny never faced due process against a raft of politically motivated prosecutions – but he never gave up the fight. And he asked the people not to give up either.
“I am fighting as best I can,” he said in one court appearance. “And I will continue to do so, despite the fact that I’m now under the control of people who love to smear everything with chemical weapons.
“My life isn’t worth two cents, but I will do everything I can so that the law prevails. And I salute all the honest people across the country who aren’t afraid and who take to the streets.”
Tens of thousands did in cities across the country – the largest unsanctioned protests in Putin’s Russia.
More than 10,000 people were detained. But those would be the last large-scale protests Russia would witness.
Constant rotation through solitary confinement
When Mr Putin invaded Ukraine, Mr Navalny called on the people from his jail cell to take a stand, but only a small minority were brave enough to try. Anti-war protests were quickly crushed.
Despite his best efforts to give a voice to the people, his message failed to resonate with a majority of Russians, cowed by two decades’ of Mr Putin’s rule.
The Kremlin piled fresh charges against him of extremism and terrorism – one count, absurdly, being the rehabilitation of Nazism.
In August 2023, he was sentenced to a further 19 years in jail in a special penal regime, for the very worst offenders.
It was effectively a death sentence. On constant rotation through solitary confinement, Mr Navalny’s health deteriorated.
His death in prison at just 47 is another appalling stain on the conscience of the Russian state.
World
Trump vowed to end Ukraine war in first 24 hours of his presidency – nearly 200 days in, could he be close?
Seven hours is a long time in US politics.
At 10am, Donald Trump accused Russia of posing a threat to America’s national security.
By 5pm, Mr Trump said there was a “good prospect” of him meeting Vladimir Putin “soon”.
There had, he claimed, been “great progress” in talks between his special envoy Steve Witkoff and the Russian president.
It’s difficult to gauge the chances of a meeting between the two leaders without knowing what “great progress” means.
Is Russia “inclined” towards agreeing a ceasefire, as Ukraine’s president now claims?
Is Mr Putin prepared to meet with his Ukrainian foe, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, too?
The very fact that we’re asking those questions suggests something shifted on a day when there was no expectation of a breakthrough.
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Zoo kills 12 healthy baboons to ease overcrowding
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
Mr Trump repeatedly vowed to end the war within 24 hours of becoming president.
On day 198 of his presidency, he might, just might, be one step closer to achieving that.
Staff at a zoo in Germany which culled 12 baboons and fed some of their carcasses to the lions say they have received death threats.
Tiergarten Nuremberg euthanised the healthy Guinea baboons at the end of July due to overcrowding in their enclosure.
Some remains were used for research while the rest were fed to the zoo’s carnivores.
Plans to kill the baboons were first announced last year after the population exceeded 40, and protestors gathered outside the zoo to show their outrage.
When the site closed last Tuesday to carry out the cull, several activists were arrested after climbing the fence.
The director of the zoo defended the decision, saying efforts to sterilise and rehome some baboons had failed.
“We love these animals. We want to save a species. But for the sake of the species, we have to kill individuals otherwise we are not able to keep up a population in a restricted area,” Dr Dag Encke told Sky News.
These are not the specific animals involved. File pics: Reuters
‘The staff are suffering’
He said police are investigating after he and the staff were sent death threats.
“The staff are really suffering, sorting out all these bad words, insults and threats,” Dr Encke said.
“The normal threat is ‘we will kill you, and we’ll feed you to the lions’.
“But what is really disgusting is when they say that’s worse than Dr Mengele from the National Socialists, who was one of the most cruel people in human history.
“That is really insulting all the victims of the Second World War and the Nazi regime.”
Josef Mengele was a Nazi officer who performed deadly experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War.
Dr Dag Encke
Zoo animals ‘treated as commodities’
Culling animals and feeding them to predators isn’t unheard of in zoos.
In 2014, Copenhagen Zoo caused controversy by euthanizing an 18-month-old male giraffe called Marius and feeding his body to the lions.
At the time, the zoo said it was due to a duty to avoid inbreeding.
Dr Mark Jones, a vet and head of policy at Born Free Foundation, a charity which campaigns for animals to be kept in the wild, denounced the practice and said thousands of healthy animals are being destroyed by zoos each year.
“It reflects the fact animals in zoos are often treated as commodities that are disposable or replaceable,” he said.
Marius the giraffe was put down and publicly fed to lions at at Copenhagen Zoo in Denmark. Pic: Keld Navntoft/AFP/Getty
Zoo asks for unwanted pets
Earlier this week, a zoo in Denmark faced a backlash for asking for unwanted pets to be donated to be used as food for its predators.
In a Facebook post, Aalborg Zoo said it could take smaller live animals such as chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs, as well as horses under 147cm. It said the animals would be euthanised by specially trained staff before being fed to carnivores like the European lynx.
While some people supported the scheme, saying they had donated animals in the past, others are outraged.
“The very idea of a zoo offering to take unwanted pets in order to kill them and feed them to their predators will, I think, horrify most right-minded people,” said Dr Jones.
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Dr Mark Jones
Aalborg Zoo has now closed the post to comments and said in a statement: “For many years at Aalborg Zoo, we have fed our carnivores with smaller livestock.
“When keeping carnivores, it is necessary to provide them with meat, preferably with fur, bones, etc., to give them as natural a diet as possible.
“Therefore, it makes sense to allow animals that need to be euthanised for various reasons to be of use in this way.
“In Denmark, this practice is common, and many of our guests and partners appreciate the opportunity to contribute.”
World
Trump could meet Putin as early as next week to discuss Ukraine ceasefire – White House official
Donald Trump could meet Vladimir Putin in person as early as next week to discuss a ceasefire in Ukraine, a White House official has said.
They said the meeting would be conditional on the Russian president meeting his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Sky News’s US partner network NBC News reported.
It came days before the White House’s deadline for Russia to reach a peace deal with Ukraine or face severe economic penalties, which could also target countries buying its oil.
Asked during a news conference at the White House if the talks would take place, Mr Trump said: “There’s a very good prospect that they will.”
He said it had not been determined where the talks would take place, but added: “We had some very good talks with President Putin today.”
However, he said: “I’ve been disappointed before with this one.”
Asked if Mr Putin made any kind of concession to lead to the development, Mr Trump did not give much away, but added: “We’ve been working on this a long time. There are thousands of young people dying, mostly soldiers, but also, you know, missiles being hit into Kyiv and other places.”
More tariffs ‘could happen’
Mr Trump also said he could announce further tariffs on China similar to the 25% he announced on India over its purchases of Russian oil.
“Could happen,” he said, after saying he expected to announce more secondary sanctions intended to pressure Russia into ending its war with Ukraine.
Earlier, he imposed an additional 25% tariff on Indian goods, on top of a previous 25% tariff, over its continued purchases of Russian oil.
India’s foreign ministry spokesperson said the additional tariffs were “unfair, unjustified and unreasonable”.
Vladimir Putin welcomes Steve Witkoff during a meeting in Moscow. Pic: Sputnik/Reuters
It came after Mr Putin held talks with Mr Trump‘s special envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow, with the meeting lasting around three hours.
In a post on Truth Social, Mr Trump said Mr Witkoff “had a highly productive meeting” with Mr Putin in which “great progress was made”.
He said he had updated America’s European allies, and they will work towards an end to the Russia-Ukraine war “in the days and weeks to come”.
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Correspondents in Washington and Moscow break down a busy day of diplomacy
‘The war must end’
Mr Zelenskyy later said he and Mr Trump spoke on the phone after the meeting. He said “European leaders also participated in the conversation” and “we discussed what was said in Moscow”.
He added: “Our common position with our partners is absolutely clear: The war must end. We all need lasting and reliable peace. Russia must end the war that it started.”
Mr Zelenskyy later said: “It seems that Russia is now more inclined to agree to a ceasefire.”
He added that the pressure on Moscow “is working”, without elaborating, and stressed it was important to make sure Russia does not “deceive us or the United States” when it comes to “the details” of a potential agreement.
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