Death of Alexeï Navalny: who are the last opponents of Vladimir Putin?

Alexeï Navalny, the most famous opponent of Vladimir Putin, died suddenly at the age of 47, Friday January 16, in a penal colony in the Arctic where he was serving sentences totaling more than thirty years of imprisonment. He was convicted by the Russian judicial steamroller for fraud (2021) and for “extremism”. Convictions that he considered “political”.

In August 2020, Alexeï Navalny was urgently hospitalized in Omsk, Russia, before being exfiltrated to Germany for treatment. The government claimed to have found traces of Novichok, a poison used by Russian services. In January 2021, the opponent of Vladimir Putin flew to Russia, where he was arrested.

For twenty-four years that he has ruled Russia with an iron fist, Vladimir Putin has reduced dissenting voices to nothing. The last media opponents are almost all in prison or exiled. Who are they ?

Found guilty in April 2023 of “high treason,” disseminating “false information” about the Russian army and illegally working for an “undesirable” organization in Russia, Vladimir Kara-Mourza, 42, is currently serving a 25-year sentence. years in prison in a penal colony in Siberia. He recently wrote that he had been placed in solitary confinement for at least four months. This father of three was arrested in the spring of 2022, after returning to Russia.

Vladimir Kara-Mourza claims to have been the victim of two poisoning attempts, in 2015 and 2017, which he attributes to Russian power. He would suffer from polyneuropathy and neuromuscular pathology. In 2022, the former journalist won the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize.

Vladimir Kara-Mourza also has British citizenship. Before being imprisoned, this close friend of former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, assassinated in 2015, was the vice-president of the NGO Open Russia, founded in 2001 by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oligarch in exile and critic of Kremlin. He was also vice-president of the liberal opposition party Parnas.

For criticizing the Russian offensive in Ukraine live on YouTube, Ilia Yashin was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison in December 2022 – a sentence unchanged during the appeal trial in April 2023. Live on YouTube, Yashin had denounced “the murder of civilians” in the Ukrainian town of Boutcha, where the Russian army was accused of abuses. Facts denied by the Kremlin.

The political opponent, aged 40, was prosecuted on the basis of the “fake news law”, which punishes with a penalty of up to 15 years of imprisonment anyone who “discredits” or publishes “false information” about the army.

Considered by Russia as a “foreign agent”, Oleg Orlov, 70, has been on trial since Friday February 16 for having repeatedly denounced the assault on Ukraine. He faces up to five years in prison.

The co-founder of the Russian NGO Memorial, pillar of the defense of the fight against repression in contemporary Russia and guardian of the memory of the victims of the Gulag, winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize and dissolved by Russian justice in 2021, refused to testify during his trial. Two hearings have been scheduled for February 21 and 26.

In October 2023, Oleg Orlov was found guilty of having “discredited” the army. He was sentenced to a small fine.

This 60-year-old ex-billionaire, once the richest man in the country, who made his fortune in oil, was arrested in October 2003 in his private jet, then stranded on the tarmac of Novosibirsk airport. , in Siberia. He was charged with large-scale fraud, tax evasion and even misappropriation of property.... He will be sentenced to fourteen years in prison, a sentence which will be reduced on appeal. By decision of Vladimir Putin, he will be released after ten years and will take refuge in the West. He now lives in London.

In 2015, Russian justice issued an international arrest warrant against him for “organizing the murder and attempted murder of two or more people” – facts dating back to 1998.

In 2001, he founded Open Russia, a humanitarian foundation, which finances the construction of a high school for war orphans, as well as the development of the Internet in schools.

Evgueni Roïzman, 61, is a free man. But he narrowly escaped prison. In March 2023, the emblematic ex-mayor (2013-2018) of Yekaterinburg, in the Urals, was sentenced to 14 days in prison for sharing on social networks a video bearing the logo of the Anti-Corruption Foundation of the opponent Alexeï Navalny, an organization deemed “extremist”.

In May of the same year, he was tried for having “discredited” the Russian army in a video published on his YouTube channel where he criticized the offensive in Ukraine. Verdict: a fine of 260,000 rubles - around 3,000 euros at the exchange rate at the time.

“You can’t negotiate with cancer. Like a cancer, Putin and his elites must be cut out,” declared opponent Garry Kasparov during a hearing in the US Senate in 2015, five days after the assassination of opponent Boris Nemtsov in Moscow.

The six-time world chess champion is now 60 years old and lives in exile. He is president of the Human Rights Foundation (HRF).