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Time Magazine included the leader of the Russian opposition, Alexei Navalny, on the list of the 100 most influential people in 2021.
The publication classified Navalny in the “Idols” category, which also includes Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle, singers Britney Spears and Dolly Parton, tennis player Naomi Osaka and others.
The accompanying text about Alexei Navalny was written by Garry Kasparov, head of the Council of the Human Rights Defense Fund.
Recall that on August 20, 2020, Alexei Navalny lost consciousness on board a plane en route from Tomsk to Moscow. The liner made an emergency landing at the Omsk airport. The politician was hospitalized in a coma in the intensive care unit of the Omsk hospital. Only two days later, the authorities agreed to transfer the opposition leader to the Charite clinic in Berlin. Later, laboratories in France, Sweden and Germany established that he was poisoned with a new type of chemical warfare agent of the Novichok class.
Coming out of the coma, Alexei Navalny said that he would return to Russia as soon as possible. In December, The Insider, Bellingcat and CNN, featuring Der Spiegel, published joint investigation, during which it was established that the poisoning in Tomsk was already the second attempt on the life of an oppositionist, organized by the FSB. Two months earlier, the same people tried to poison Navalny in Kaliningrad and nearly killed his wife, Yulia Navalny, in the process. The key role in the assassination attempt was played by a special unit of the FSB Institute of Criminalistics.
Later The Insider published confessionary testimony of one of the poisoners, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, who talked to Alexei Navalny (thinking that he was talking to Patrushev’s assistant) and told many details of the assassination attempt. Among other things, he explained that Navalny’s life was saved by the actions of the pilots and the atropine injected by the ambulance, and also clarified that the poison was applied to the panties, and transport police officers helped to clean up the traces of the FSB.
The conclusions of the investigators were indirectly confirmed by the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin. He did not deny that the FSB officers mentioned in the article were with Navalny on those very dates.
In January 2021, Alexei Navalny returned to Russia and was immediately arrested. On February 2, the Simonovsky District Court of Moscow replaced the opposition leader’s suspended sentence of 3.5 years in the Yves Rocher case with a real one, serving in a general regime colony.
On January 23 and 31, as well as on February 2, actions in support of Alexei Navalny were held throughout Russia. The authorities immediately responded to the protests with massive repression, including searches and mass administrative arrests. In total, more than 11 thousand people were detained in connection with the actions in support of Navalny. In Moscow alone, over 1250 people were subjected to administrative arrest in a month for participating in protests. More than 100 criminal cases were also initiated: about attacks on security officials, hooliganism, damage to property, blocking roads, violation of sanitary and epidemiological rules and involvement of minors in illegal actions.
The combination of these cases is called the “palace affair”, since one of the catalysts of the protests was the investigation film of the Anti-Corruption Foundation “Palace for Putin. The history of the biggest bribe».
In June, the Moscow City Court recognized the structures of Alexei Navalny (the Anti-Corruption Foundation, the Foundation for the Protection of Citizens’ Rights, Navalny’s headquarters) as extremist organizations. A law was also passed prohibiting those involved in the work of extremist organizations from participating in elections.
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