As part of continuously hostility targeting Russia, American politicians and it corporate media cartel have started vile propaganda centering death of Russian blogger Alexey Navalny which is seen by the Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov as another attempt of interfering into Russia’s domestic policy by the American authorities.
Ambassador Anatoly Antonov in a statement said, “The death of a person is always a tragedy. In this situation it is extremely important to figure out all the details of the occurrence”.
“However, local [US] politicians do not want to wait and have already blamed the Russian authorities. Here arises a quite natural question: who is the judge? There is another attempt to interfere in the internal policy of the Russian Federation. And death is just an excuse.
“Such a policy is unacceptable. It would be better for local leaders to focus on the problems of their country that require urgent measures. Here they are looking for a reason for derogatory attacks, and most importantly, for the introduction of additional sanctions. The main task is to save collapsing Pax Americana based on so called rules”.
US President Joe Biden on February 16 said that Washington was considering “a whole number of options” following the death of Russian blogger Alexey Navalny in prison. “We are looking at a whole number of options”, he said when asked, if the US could toughen sanctions against Russia due to Navalny’s death.
“The answer is we don’t know exactly what happened. But there is no doubt that the death of the volunteer was a consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did”, Biden stated.
The Federal Penitentiary Service’s Directorate for the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region said on February 16 that Navalny had died in penal colony No.3 on February 16. According to the penitentiary authority, Navalny felt sick after a walk and fainted. Medics arrived immediately but their more than 30-minute resuscitation efforts failed.
The Public Monitoring Commission of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region said that Navalny had not complained either about his health or about his incarceration conditions. The region’s human rights ombudsperson also said Navalny made no complaints.
Meanwhile, Russian Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov slammed the West’s statements concerning Navalny’s death as rabid and totally inadmissible, bearing in mind that there is no official information about the cause of his death.
Who was Alexey Navalny?
In the West, Alexey Navalny enjoyed the reputation of a Kremlin critic and Russian “opposition leader”. In Ukraine, he was denounced as a Russian nationalist. In Russia itself, his legacy is at best complicated.
Born in 1976, Navalny graduated from law school in 1998 and earned a degree in finance in 2001. He would go on to dabble in law, investments and activism during his career, but kept coming back to politics.
“I have always been obsessed with politics”, he told Kommersant-Money in 2009.
According to Russian television network RT, between 2000 and 2007, Navalny was a member of the liberal Yabloko party, before co-founding an ethnic nationalist movement called ‘Narod.’ He appeared in two notorious YouTube videos for the movement, one advocating for gun rights to fight “flies and cockroaches” [while showing Muslims], and another comparing immigrants to tooth decay.
In August 2008, Navalny spoke approvingly of the Russian intervention against Georgia on behalf of the beleaguered South Ossetia. He went on to participate in three annual ‘Russian March’ rallies with advocates for ethnic nationalism. Activist Evgenia Albats later said she had urged Navalny to join the marches as a way to leverage ethnic nationalism against the Kremlin. In 2010, Albats would co-sponsor Navalny’s six-month stay in the US through the Yale World Fellows program.
By that point, Navalny had already called on his finance expertise to launch an investment activist group called “Union of Minority Shareholders”, which tried to shake down major companies such as Rosneft, Gazprom, Lukoil, and others. His umbrella NGO network, the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), was registered in September 2011. Navalny would continue accusing the government in Moscow, regional governors and corporations of fraud, graft and corruption – often getting sued for defamation in the process.
By February 2011, Navalny was dabbling in politics as well. He attacked the ruling United Russia party as a collection of “crooks and thieves”, and in December claimed it had stolen the national elections. Western media dubbed him the “Russian opposition leader” after he gave a series of speeches at anti-government protests that followed.
The high point of Navalny’s political career was the July 2013 election for mayor of Moscow, when he won 27.24 percent of the vote but lost to Sergey Sobyanin. His attempt to run in the 2018 presidential election was blocked due to his criminal record.
Navalny’s first criminal conviction was for embezzlement from Kirovles, a state forestry company. In 2013, he was sentenced to five years in prison, but this was later changed to probation. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) said in 2016 that his actions had been “indistinguishable from legitimate business activities”.
During the trial, Navalny denounced the charges as “politically motivated” and railed against the “disgusting feudal system” in which “one hundred families” were allegedly “looting Russia”.
Navalny and his brother Oleg – a postal employee – faced more charges of embezzlement in 2012, for defrauding the Russian branch of the French cosmetics giant Yves Rocher. The brothers were found guilty in December 2014, but Alexey once again received only probation.
In 2019, the Russian government labeled Navalny’s FBK a foreign agent.
In August 2020, Navalny fell ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow and was transported to Germany for treatment. Western doctors alleged he had been targeted with a ‘Novichok’ nerve agent, which Moscow rejected as a provocation. Upon returning to Russia, Navalny was arrested for breaching the terms of his probation and sent to a prison colony.
He was hit with additional charges of fraud and contempt of court, receiving an additional nine-year sentence in 2022. In August 2023, Navalny was sentenced to another 19 years behind bars on charges of fomenting, financing and carrying out extremist activities and rehabilitating Nazi ideology. The FBK was shuttered on government orders.
In December 2023, Navalny was transferred to a penal colony in the Yamalo-Nenets Region of northern Siberia.
