#‘Poisoned’ Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is Putin’s fiercest critic

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Alexei Navalny; Navalny captured in an Instagram story drinking tea which may have been poisioned.
AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin, File; Pavel Lebedev/@djpavlin

Before he found himself fighting for his life after a suspected poisoning, Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was traveling through Siberia urging Russians to vote against Vladimir Putin’s cronies in upcoming local elections.

Navalny, 44, openly denounced Putin as “the tsar of corruption” and referred to the Russian leader’s party as a group of “crooks and thieves.”

The lawyer and anti-corruption crusader, who has been described as Putin’s fiercest enemy, has been so outspoken in recent weeks that most people he met wondered just how he had managed to stay alive for so long.

On Saturday, Navalny, who is hugely popular in Russia with 2.2 million Twitter followers, was airlifted to a Berlin hospital to be treated for the suspected poisoning.

He fell ill on Thursday after drinking tea at a Russian airport, and then collapsing during a flight over Siberia. Russian doctors who treated him in the Siberian capital of Omsk dismissed the poisoning hypothesis and said he was suffering from “a metabolic disorder.”

What followed was a tense 24 hours of wrangling between the Russian and German governments to allow his evacuation to Berlin, paid for by a German non-profit.

His critics worried that the delay was a ploy to stall his treatment until the poison had left his system. The Kremlin denied the claim, and granted permission for his transfer to the German hospital on Friday. Doctors at the Charite Hospital placed Navalny in a medically induced coma in order to stop his convulsions, according to reports.

“He is one of the most effective, prominent and, frankly, dangerous political opponents of the Putin regime,” said Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian journalist and opposition activist, in an interview with the Sunday Times of London.

Like many other opposition leaders, Kara-Murza, who has lobbied for economic sanctions against Russian officials, said he was a victim of poisoning by Russian officials. He said he survived two attempts in 2015 and 2017. The first time he suffered kidney failure and the second time he was placed in a medically induced coma.

Opposition members say that Navalny’s popularity, especially with young people, is the biggest threat to Putin, who is facing a wave of protests in Siberia and Belarus on the country’s western border. If anyone could lead a mass uprising against Putin it would be Navalny, Kara-Murza said.

Navalny’s anti-corruption videos on YouTube, in which he flies drones over the sumptuous homes of the Russian elite to expose their lavish lifestyles, have become internet hits in Russia. When Navalny was arrested in 2012, thousands of people took to the streets demanding his release. They are expected to act with even greater anger if he dies as a martyr for the opposition cause, Kremlin critics say.

Asked if he worried that Putin would launch direct attacks against him, Navalny said he didn’t think the Russian leader would be so obvious.

“I don’t think that Putin would say to someone directly, ‘Please meet Navalny in front of his office and toss toxic liquid in his face,’” he recently told the Sunday Times of London. “They would have had a meeting and said, ‘We should pressure him, make him uncomfortable.’ People know how to read the hints.”

In Russia, authorities were giving out those “hints” even before Navalny boarded his flight to Germany. On Friday, Russian police cracked down on other opposition to Putin in the country.

A member of the feminist protest group Pussy Riot tweeted that authorities tried to arrest them in Norilsk, an industrial city above the Arctic Circle.

“This is very disturbing. They’re clearly trying to intimidate us all,” said the tweet from the militant group.