“Possibly the only strong opposition figure to emerge in Russia in the last five years.” This is how the BBC described the Russian opposition leader in 2011 Alexei Navalny, who with groans of pain and after losing consciousness, was rushed yesterday to a hospital in the city of Omsk, in Siberia. The 44-year-old lawyer was rushed to the intensive care unit, victim of possible poisoning. Navalny reportedly began to feel ill during a flight back to Moscow after having tea at the airport and later collapsed in the plane’s bathroom, forcing the pilots to make an emergency landing in the Siberian city.
Doctors managed to stabilize Navalny, who he was connected to a respirator. Later it was learned that an ambulance plane would travel from Germany to take Navalny to that country. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said the government wished the lawyer a speedy recovery, “As we would do with any citizen.”
The lawyer, who writes for independent media and for the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, graduated from the Russian University of Peoples’ Friendship in 1998. Between 1999 and 2001 he specialized in Finance and Credit at the Financial University, under the government of the Russian Federation, and in 2010 was awarded a scholarship to the World Fellows Program at Yale University.
Between 1999 and 2007, Navalny belonged to the liberal party Yabloko. In 2011, she created the. Anticorruption Foundation, investigating Russian officials, authorities and state-controlled companies.
After the legislative elections of December 4, 2011, the politician called for a protest from his Twitter account, denouncing irregularities in the elections. Two days later, about 5,000 people came to demonstrate outside the Kremlin. Navalny was arrested and sentenced to 15 days in prison.
In July 2013, Navalny was found guilty of embezzlement and sentenced to five years in prison. The conviction was denounced by the European Union and the United States, which considered it influenced by political interests.
Since the assassination of politician Boris Nemtsov in 2015, he is considered the main opponent of Vladimir Putin. He was nicknamed the “Russian Erin Brockovich” -in allusion to the famous American activist- and even named “Person of the year” in 2009 by the Russian newspaper Vedomosti.
This has earned him numerous attacks. Navalny was doused with a green liquid in the Siberian city of Barnaul in 2017 by an unknown assailant. A doctor told him that he had lost 80% of his sight in one eye after suffering a chemical burn from this fluid. In 2019, he was rushed to a hospital from jail where he was serving his sentence after possible poisoning. Doctors said he had had a allergic reaction and returned to prison the next day.
In 2019, the Ministry of Justice classified the Navalny Foundation as a “foreign agent”, a designation frequently used by the government to label its critics as traitors. Navalny has been harassed and imprisoned numerous times for short periods. Considered a charismatic speaker, he attracts younger Russians, particularly in large cities like Moscow, but has managed to network across the country.
Navalny had denounced the Putin’s recent reforms as a constitutional coup. The opponent even planned to run in the 2018 elections, but the authorities blocked his candidacy by accusing him of corruption.
Navalny, who has referred to Putin as the leader of “A party of scammers and thieves” he is the latest in a long line of opponents to the Kremlin who have suffered sudden medical emergencies, often with fatal consequences. Former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko and journalist Anna Politkovskaya were among the victims.
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