A year after his arrest on his return to Russia, the opponent Alexeï Navalny assured not “to regret a second” to have returned.
Despite difficult prison conditions, a hunger strike and attacks on his organization, Alexeï Navalny has no regrets. The Russian opponent spoke on Monday, in a post on social networks to mark the first anniversary of his arrest on his return from Russia, after several months of convalescence in Germany following the attempted poisoning of which he was the target, and for which he blames the Kremlin. “I did not manage to take a single step in my country as a free man, I was arrested even before the border control”, he wrote in this message, accompanied by a photo showing him with his wife Yulia. Even if he knew he was risking a lot by returning to Russia, Alexeï Navalny assumes: “I did it, I don’t regret it for a second and I will continue to do it”, he insisted. “After a year in prison, I tell you what I shouted in court: do not be afraid”, is it written in the text transmitted from the prison of Vladimir, where he is imprisoned. “I recently read that Home Office workers are being fired for liking one of my posts. So in Russia in 2022, even a like can be a show of courage.”
Alexeï Navalny will spend this first anniversary of arrest in court, or almost. He appears before the Petushki court, by videoconference, where two complaints he filed against the prison administration were to be heard – one has already been rejected, explains the “Moscow Times”. The opponent is currently serving a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence for violating judicial review for a 2014 conviction, believing that his medical repatriation to Germany went against the conditions of his suspended sentence. He is now facing prosecution for “terrorism”, which could earn him heavy prison sentences.
Increased repression of the opposition in the country
The European Parliament awarded him the Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought last month. A reward that her eldest daughter, Daria Navalnaya, came to accept on her behalf, who then reconsidered her father’s arrest: “There was no discussion about a return or not to Russia. We knew he would be imprisoned, but not necessarily from the airport. It was the most shocking moment, so shameful that they decide to arrest him at the airport, not let him come home, talk to his parents, to our family.”
His chief of staff Leonid Volkov, who was recently added to the list of “terrorists and extremists”, lives in exile but does not consider himself protected, he explained to us: “We have a madman in the Kremlin with a team of poisoners. You can’t really protect yourself 100% without living in a bunker forever. Novichok could be here or there”, he said, grabbing his glass and his pen, citing the product used to poison Alexei Navalny in Siberia but also the former double agent Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom. “Once you have decided to continue living, to accept the risk, you should not think about it too much. It’s a certain intellectual discipline, I have the impression of getting out of it… as long as I don’t get asked too many questions, everything is fine. This date of January 17 will “go down in history as the beginning of the end of Putinism”, he wrote on social networks on Monday.
Imprisoned Alexei Navalny, his party was also targeted: his organization was banned for extremism last June, as part of a severe crackdown on NGOs and opponents in the country. Evidenced by the dissolution of the organization Memorial, created in 1989 to investigate crimes committed under the Soviet regime, ordered twice in two days by justice last month. In both cases, the organization was accused of having violated the law on “foreign agents” – which qualifies as such any structure receiving foreign funds, and which recalls that of “enemy of the people” of the Soviet era- and for advocating “terrorism” and “extremism” by publishing a list of prisoners containing the names of members of religious or political groups banned in the country such as Jehovah’s witnesses.
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