Alexei Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in prison. (document)
Paris France:
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the latest critic to clash with President Vladimir Putin, died on Friday while serving a 19-year sentence in an Arctic prison.
Others were killed, escaped death, or were exiled. Here’s a look at Putin’s most prominent critics and where they stand now:
died in prison
Navalny, 47, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, was jailed in early 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany, where he was undergoing a near-fatal poisoning attack with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok.
He was sentenced to 19 years in prison on charges widely condemned by independent rights groups.
In late 2023, he was transferred to a remote Arctic prison colony in Russia’s Yamal-Nenets region in northern Siberia, where he died on Friday after falling unconscious while walking there.
killed
In 2015, Kremlin critic and former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov was shot dead while crossing the Moscow Bridge near the Kremlin to get home.
Five Chechen men were convicted of Nemtsov’s murder, but the mastermind of the murder was never found.
Nemtsov’s allies have pointed the finger at the Kremlin and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who has denied the accusation.
Nemtsov is a charismatic speaker who criticized Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and often participated in opposition protests. He was only 55 years old when he died.
Nearly a decade ago in 2006, journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered outside her home in Moscow, shocking the world.
Politkovskaya, a reporter for Russia’s top independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, has strongly criticized the Kremlin’s tactics in Chechnya.
jail
Opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, 42, was sentenced to 25 years in prison in April 2023 for comments critical of the Kremlin and the Ukraine offensive, the longest sentence to date. A harsh sentence.
He was imprisoned for treason, spreading “false” information about the Russian military and belonging to a “bad organization.”
He suffered from serious health problems, which his lawyers said were caused by two poisonings in 2015 and 2017.
In December 2022, opposition politician Ilya Yashin was jailed for eight-and-a-half years for spreading “false” information about Russian troops, under legislation that would criminalize criticism of the Ukraine offensive .
In July 2023, Lilia Chanysheva, Navalny’s ally in the central republic of Bashkortostan, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.
In December, a Russian court sentenced Ksenia Fadeyeva, the leader of Navalny’s group in the Siberian city of Tomsk, to nine years in prison on “extremism” charges. Imprisoned, the organization has now been banned.
exile
Some of Putin’s high-profile critics have been in exile for years.
Among them is former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent ten years in prison after challenging Russian leaders early in their rule.
Khodorkovsky lives in London and funds media projects critical of the Kremlin.
Many of Navalny’s key allies fled Russia after his group was banned for “extremism.”
But the decision to send troops to Ukraine in February 2022 triggered unprecedented domestic repression, which proved to be the final nail in the coffin for the Russian opposition movement.
Russians who oppose Moscow’s attack on Ukraine are now scattered around the world. Many fled to Europe and Israel.
“foreign agent”
The nickname “foreign agent” has Stalinist overtones and has been used by authorities to exert administrative pressure on critics.
Many journalists and Russia’s leading independent media have been labeled “foreign agents,” making their operations more difficult.
Those who have received this title include exiled former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, Novaya Gazeta editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov and 70-year-old co-chairman of the Nobel Laureate Memorial Group Oleg Orlov.
Russia opened a new trial on Friday against Orlov, who faces up to five years in prison for condemning Ukraine’s offensive.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
