MY FRIEND ALEXEI TRAGICALLY UNDERESTIMATED PUTIN’S MALICE AND SHEER BRUTALITY
THREE years ago I said Vladimir Putin was carrying out a slow-motion assassination of Russia’s leading dissident Alexei Navalny. Yesterday, my worst fears were realised.
Navalny was principled and fearless but in the end he tragically underestimated the malice and brutality of Putin and his cronies.
Like everyone who has worked with Alexei over the years to expose the appalling corruption of Russia’s ruling class, I am devastated by the news of his death. The only positive we can take from it is that Alexei’s legacy will live on in the campaigning of his many supporters around the world. And I will be one of them. We met at the turn of the millennium – when I was a fund manager in Moscow and campaigning for shareholder rights at a time when corruption was rife in the Russian corporate world. After I was kicked out of the country in 2005, we continued to work together to expose the naked greed of the men at the top.
I redoubled my efforts in 2009 after the murder of my lawyer and friend Sergei Magnitsky, a man with the courage of a lion, who died in a Moscow prison after being hideously tortured.
Navalny was motivated by a deep sense of patriotism and furious outrage over the way Putin’s mafia state was stealing from the Russian people. And despite being arrested repeatedly for speaking out, he carried on fighting.
By August 2020, the authorities had had enough and agents of the FSB – the successor to the KGB – tried to kill him using a nerve agent. He survived thanks only to the fact his supporters managed to fly him to Germany for cuttingedge medical treatment.
Despite the obvious dangers he faced in his homeland, after spending a month in hospital, he returned to Russia against the advice of friends because he believed he couldn’t be an effective politician unless he was on the ground. Alexei was arrested the moment he touched down in Moscow.
But he was never a man to back down and within two days he had authorised his team to release a highly embarrassing video investigation into the gaudy €1.15billion palace that Putin had built for himself on the Black Sea.
At the last count, it had attracted more than 100 million views on YouTube.
More recently, in an almost suicidally courageous move, he had them compile a dossier on the governor of the very prison in which he was incarcerated. The resulting investigation not only named Colonel Dmitry Nozhkin’s mistress but revealed he and his wife’s penchant for threesomes.
His punishment was a transfer to an even more inhospitable penal colony deep in the Arctic Circle, where the temperature can fall to as low as minus 30C at this time of year.
I’m currently at the Munich Security Conference where I am campaigning for the release of Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian dissident who was sentenced to 25 years for ‘treason’ a year ago after denouncing the invasion of Ukraine.
We can only hope the global outcry over the death of my friend Alexei will offer Vladimir and so many other heroic activists a degree of protection against the murderous death cult in the Kremlin.