Following the announcement of the death of opponent Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison on Friday, a look back at the repression that critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin have faced since he came to power in 2000.
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Death in prison
Alexei Navalny AFP
Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin's biggest killer for more than a decade, was harassed, poisoned and imprisoned. According to authorities, he eventually died at the age of 47 in an Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence for “extremism.”
The anti-corruption activist, a former Moscow lawyer, was the victim of a serious poisoning in Siberia in 2020, which he attributed to the Kremlin, which the Kremlin always denied.
Upon his return to Russia in January 2021 after recovering in Germany, he was immediately arrested and his anti-corruption organization FBK was closed for “extremism.”
Murdered
AFP
Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister once seen as President Boris Yeltsin's successor in the fight against Vladimir Putin, became a major critic of the Russian president in the 2000s.
Less than a year after speaking out against the annexation of Crimea, Nemtsov was assassinated with four bullets in the back in February 2015 on a bridge a few meters from the Kremlin. He was 55 years old.
AFP
His supporters accused Chechen satrap Ramzan Kadyrov of giving the order, which he denies. Nevertheless, five Chechens were convicted of this murder, without the perpetrator ever being officially identified.
Ten years earlier, in October 2006, Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in the lobby of her building in Moscow. The journalist for Novaya Gazeta, the country's most important independent media company, had documented and denounced the Russian army's crimes in Chechnya for years.
Locked
Oleg Orlov AFP
Other critics were already in prison or at risk of being imprisoned, such as Oleg Orlov, a human rights advocate and the iconic NGO Memorial, whose new trial opened in Moscow on Friday. He faces up to five years in prison for repeatedly denouncing the military offensive in Ukraine.
A long-time opponent, Vladimir Kara-Mourza, 42, says he has survived two poisonings in the past. In April 2023, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison in a closed-door trial for spreading “false information” about the Russian military. He is serving his sentence in Siberia.
Also in April, 39-year-old Ilia Yashin was sentenced on appeal to eight and a half years in prison for denouncing “the murder of civilians” in the Ukrainian town of Boutcha, near Kiev, where the Russian army has been accused of abuses Moscow denies.
Ksenia Fadeïeva, 31, a former lawmaker allied with Alexei Navalny, was accused of “founding an extremist organization.” At the end of 2023 she was also sentenced to nine years in prison.
Back in June 2023, Lilia Tchanycheva, Mr. Navalny's first collaborator to be put on trial for setting up an “extremist organization,” was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.
Exiles
Garry Kasparov AFP
Most of the main opponents remaining in Russia are imprisoned. The others fled or went into exile, like the former world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon, spent 10 years in prison after speaking out against Mr. Putin in the early 2000s. Since his release in 2013, the ex-oligarch has sought refuge in London, from where he funds opposition platforms.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky AFP
Many supporters of Mr. Khodorkovsky, but also of Alexei Navalny, have left Russia since 2021, a year that marked a sharp acceleration of repression that has intensified since the offensive in Ukraine.
Moscow is also increasing pressure on dissidents in exile. In February, an investigation was launched in Russia against the writer Boris Akunin, who has been in exile in London since 2014, for “spreading false information” about the army and “calling for terror.”
“Foreign Agents”
The opponents face a further punishment: being classified as “foreign agents”.
This label has been given to hundreds of people, human rights activists, opponents and journalists. This was the case in February with Oleg Orlov and before that with exiled former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and Novaya Gazeta editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov.
A pillar of the defense of human rights in Russia, the NGO Memorial, co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, was dissolved by Russian courts at the end of 2021 for violating the “foreign agents” law, which imposes strict administrative constraints.
The Russian judiciary has also repeatedly ordered the dissolution of critical associations on the grounds that they had organized events in Russia outside their geographical “area of activity”. This was the case in August with the Sakharov Center Association and previously with the Moscow Helsinki Group and the Sova Center.