Since coming to power, Vladimir Putin has shown he’s got no qualms about assassinating critics.
His most prominent foe is Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has exposed the corruption of Putin and his inner circle for more than a decade.
Navalny and his party have been banned from running in elections, had their bank accounts frozen and were hit with crippling fines and arrests. But the final reckoning came when Navalny was poisoned in Russia in August 2020.
Read the main story: Putin a killer? Let us count the ways
He was flown for treatment to Germany when he was in a coma. German doctors, as well as several independent labs in Europe, said that he had been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent – a chemical weapon produced by the Russian government.
In December the Insider, Bellingcat, CNN and Der Spiegel published an investigation according to which Navalny had been poisoned by agents of Russia’s Federal Security Service and identified their names.
To prove their assertions, they obtained data on the alleged murderers’ travel and mobile phone data. A special chemical substances unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) had been following Navalny for years, including during his trip to Siberia when the assassination attempt took place.
Navalny impersonated a Russian state official to speak to one of the members of the alleged poisoning team, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, in December. Kudryavtsev admitted that he had taken part in the poisoning operation and said that the poison had been put in Navalny’s underwear.
Putin has admitted that the FSB squad had been conducting surveillance on Navalny but denied that they were supposed to kill him.
Navalny’s poisoning evokes parallels with another murder attempt involving Novichok.
In 2018 former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a Novichok agent in Salisbury, U.K., but survived. Dawn Sturgess, a British citizen, accidentally came into contact with the poison and died as a result.
British authorities identified Russian military intelligence agents Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Bashirov as suspects in the unprecedented use of chemical warfare on British soil.
The same FSB squad that allegedly tried to kill Navalny had also trailed three other people before they were found dead with signs of poisoning, including syringe pricks, in 2014 to 2019, according to a January investigation by Bellingcat, the Insider and Der Spiegel.
They are Timur Kuashev, a journalist and human rights activist from the Caucasus; Ruslan Magomedragimov, a Lezgin nationalist activist from the Russian republic of Dagestan, and Nikita Isayev, the leader of a minor party called New Russia and an aide to pro-Kremlin politician Sergei Mironov.
The FSB poisoning team also followed liberal politician Vladimir Kara-Murza when he was poisoned in 2015 and then again in 2017, although he survived, Bellingcat, the Insider and Der Spiegel reported in February.
In the run-up to his first poisoning, Kara-Murza had been lobbying for U.S. sanctions against Putin’s regime jointly with liberal politician Boris Nemtsov.
Nemtsov himself was shot dead next to the Kremlin on Feb. 27, 2015. He was killed hours after promoting a march against Russia’s war in Ukraine.
In 2017 a fighter at the Sever battalion of Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, a loyalist of Putin, was convicted for Nemtsov’s murder.
Two other critics of Putin – columnist Yulia Latynina and activist Pyotr Verzilov – survived poisoning attempts in 2017-2018.
Investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya who wrote about Russia’s war in Chechnya and criticized Putin, also survived a poisoning attempt in 2004, when she was flying from Moscow to Rostov-on-Don. She was later murdered in her building’s elevator in 2006.
Putin’s regime also used more exotic ways to eliminate opponents. In 2006, former KGB and FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who accused Putin of orchestrating the murders of hundreds of people, was poisoned with polonium-210, a radioactive material. A British court concluded in 2016 that Putin ordered the assassination.
When opponents of Putin can’t be killed, they are jailed. Navalny is currently political prisoner No. 1.
In January Navalny returned to Russia after treatment in Germany and was immediately arrested by Russian authorities.
“He committed two crimes (in Putin’s eyes) – didn’t die when they tried to kill him and found his murderers, showing that they are ridiculous and pathetic,” columnist Latynina said on her radio show on March 27.
After Navalny was detained, his team released his investigation about Putin’s hidden $1 billion palace in the resort of Gelendzhik on Russia’s Black Sea coast. The video has gotten 115 million views, becoming the most popular political video in Russia’s history and triggering large-scale protests.
In February a Russian court replaced a 10-year probation term against Navalny in the so-called “Yves Rocher case” with a 2.5 year jail sentence.
In 2012 Russian investigators opened the Yves Rocher case based on a complaint by Bruno Leproux, head of French cosmetics firm Yves Rocher’s Russian branch. Navalny and his brother Oleg were accused of money laundering and fraud by allegedly providing transportation services at inflated prices to the company.
Leproux, who has been accused of acting as an agent of Putin’s regime in this case, never showed up in court to testify in the Yves Rocher case and subsequently resigned. Yves Rocher’s official representatives denied in court that the Navalnys had caused any damage to the company, and no other witnesses confirmed their alleged guilt.
In 2017 the European Court of Human Rights recognized the Yves Rocher verdict as unlawful and ordered the Russian government to pay 4 million rubles in damages to Navalny. The Russian authorities had to recognize the decision and paid the sum.
The formal reason for Navalny’s jailing in February was that Navalny failed to regularly attend Russian penitentiary facilities for checkups at the end of his probation term. Effectively he was jailed by the Kremlin for failing to be in Russia when he was recovering in Germany from the murder attempt allegedly orchestrated by the Kremlin.
The decision was also criticized as absurd because Navalny’s probation term had already expired before he was jailed – on Dec. 30, 2020.
While in prison, Navalny said the prison authorities were effectively torturing him by depriving him of sleep – i.e. waking him up eight times per night. He also started suffering from back pains and loss of sensation in his leg and said that the prison authorities were refusing to provide adequate treatment to him.
On March 31, Navalny went on hunger strike to protest against the torture.
“Given that FSB officers recently tried to kill me with a chemical weapon, and state doctors claimed it was just a problem with metabolism, I have certain doubts about the causes of the disease and my prospects of recovery,” Navalny wrote in a letter published by his team on Facebook.
Putin has also resorted to the Stalin-era practice of punishing family members for the political stance of their relatives.
In 2014 Navalny’s brother Oleg, who was not involved in politics, was jailed for 3.5 years in the Yves Rocher case. He was widely seen as a hostage of Putin’s regime whose only guilt consisted in being Alexei Navalny’s brother.
After he was released, Oleg Navalny was arrested again in January, with the excuse being a violation of COVID-19 regulations during protests against his brother’s imprisonment. He is still in custody.
In March Navalny’s exiled associate Ivan Zhdanov also said his father, who used to be a minor village official, had been arrested in an abuse of power case.
