Why Alexey Navalny matters

Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny famously returned to Moscow in January 2021, where he was promptly arrested at the airport for supposed parole violations. A month later, his suspended sentence was replaced with a 2.5-year prison sentence. Roughly a year later, in March 2022, a judge added another nine years to his prison term, convicting him in a kangaroo court of embezzlement and contempt of court. So, Navalny has at least another decade of imprisonment ahead of him, but it will likely be far more.

In a new trial with a verdict expected on Friday, August 4, public prosecutors have asked a judge to sentence Navalny to an additional 20 years in prison on charges of “creating an extremist organization,” “inciting extremism,” and creating a nonprofit organization that infringed on Russian citizens’ rights, financed extremism, and involved minors in dangerous activities. Oh, and they say he “rehabilitated Nazism.” In late April, the prosecution dumped a 196-volume case file on Navalny, and the court gave him a week to review the materials. Before this, Navalny had said he expects to be charged in a separate case, in a military court actually, for crimes related to “terrorism,” probably facing life imprisonment. 

Ahead of the verdict in this latest case against Russia’s best-known anti-Kremlin opposition leader, The Naked Pravda spoke to political scientist Mikhail Turchenko and Wilson Center senior adviser and Meduza Ideas editor Maxim Trudolyubov about Alexey Navalny, his movement, and about how he’s changed Russian politics even as he languishes behind bars.

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