In a rustic the place nearly all dissent has been stamped out, Alexei Navalny shined an unrelenting highlight on corruption, making him one of many greatest threats to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Corruption is a matter that resonates deeply in Russia, and Navalny’s unvarnished reviews alleging eye-popping ranges of graft by the nation’s rulers regularly struck a chord. Greater than anything, Navalny’s opposition to Putin was grounded in monetary evaluation and particulars about wealth.
“He targeted not simply on the corruption — Russian individuals are by no means stunned by how corrupt their leaders are — however on the offensiveness of all of it,” mentioned Sam Greene, a professor of Russian politics at King’s School in London and the director for democratic resilience on the Middle for European Coverage Evaluation.
Regardless of years of threats, arrests and different efforts to silence him, together with poisoning, Navalny — by savvy use of know-how in addition to old style shoe-leather reporting — stored the concentrate on how lavishly Putin and his allies appeared to stay.
That made him a hazard to the regime.
“The Kremlin noticed Navalny as a menace,” Greene mentioned. “The concern was that the emotion his reviews stirred might grow to be contagious and that folks would possibly start to imagine the injustice of it had grow to be so egregious as to have grow to be insupportable.”
With Navalny’s demise Friday in a Russian penal colony, the place he had been serving a 19-year sentence on fees of extremism that had been broadly seen as politically pushed, it stays to be seen if his group, the Anti-Corruption Basis, can sustain the stress on Putin.
Listed below are a few of the allegations of corruption Navalny made towards Putin and different Russian leaders.
Putin’s palace
In 2021, Navalny launched a virtually two-hour-long investigative movie detailing an extravagant Italianate mansion overlooking the Black Sea that purportedly belonged to Putin. The video was seen tens of thousands and thousands of instances on-line.
The report included aerial drone footage of what gave the impression to be a hockey rink, a full-scale Orthodox church, two helipads and a winery on the 17,000-acre piece of land.
Navalny mentioned data confirmed that the property sat inside a closed territory beneath the jurisdiction of Russia’s Federal Safety Service and that it had price practically $1.4 billion to construct.
The Kremlin denied that the home belonged to Putin. Russian billionaire Arkady Rothenburg, a childhood good friend and shut confidante of Putin’s, later mentioned the home was his.
Dmitry Medvedev’s fortune
Russian President Vladimir Putin with Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and prime minster of Russia who Navalny claimed had additionally amassed large wealth by corrupt dealings.
RIA NOVOSTI/AFP by way of Getty Photos
In 2017, Navalny launched an investigative report that claimed to point out how Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s then-prime minister and former president, had amassed a fortune price properly over $1 billion by a secret property empire.
The report alleged that Medvedev had used a sequence of charities he ran to extort funds from Russia’s richest oligarchs, then used these funds to construct up a community of properties throughout Russia and even in Italy.
Navalny mentioned not one of the properties had been listed in Medvedev’s identify however quite within the names of the charities he ran or of shut associates of his. The report alleged that Medvedev had embezzled $1.2 billion, and that the property empire made Medvedev considered one of Russia’s wealthiest folks.
The Kremlin dismissed the report as propaganda. On the time, Navalny was working for president towards Putin. Throughout the marketing campaign, Navalny was injured by attackers who threw a caustic substance in his eyes, and he was jailed a number of instances. He was ultimately charged with and convicted of corruption and thrown off the poll.
Putin’s superyacht
The superyacht Scheherazade, which has been linked to Putin, moored at Marina di Carrara in Italy on March 23, 2022.
Getty Photos
Even from behind bars, Navalny continued to show an irritant for the Kremlin. In 2023, two years after he had been despatched to jail, his basis launched a report saying it had decided {that a} 459-foot-long superyacht anchored in Italy belonged to Putin.
The report mentioned the Scheherazade was one of many world’s 20 largest yachts and was price $700 million. In-built Germany in 2020, the vessel allegedly featured a movie show, a helipad, a swimming pool and a safety system able to taking pictures down drones.
The ship was impounded by Italian authorities in 2022 as a part of European sanctions towards Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. It’s also the main focus of a U.S. federal court docket case introduced by the Treasury Division, which is in search of to grab the vessel. Eduard Khudainatov, the previous head of Russian state-owned oil large Rosneft, has claimed to personal the ship. The U.S. has argued in court docket that he’s a straw proprietor.
Patriots residing overseas
A repeated theme in Navalny’s reviews was exhibiting what he claimed was proof that a few of Russia’s most vocally patriotic politicians and tv personalities maintained quite a few homes within the West.
One such goal was tv talk-show host Vladimir Soloviev, who Navalny and his group mentioned had not one however 5 homes in Italy alone, together with one down the street from a house owned by actor George Clooney in Lake Como.