 Few people are harder to silence than Aleksei Navalny, the Russian opposition icon who is the only person able to drum up large-scale anti-Putin protests on home soil. If anyone else were in his current position, it would be hard to imagine ever hearing from them again. Only three years after surviving Novichok poisoning, the 47-year-old, by far Putin's most popular critic in Russia, is currently on trial for 'extremism' charges in a high-security prison where he's already serving a nine-year term. Russian state prosecutors want him jailed for another 20 years in a 'special regime colony' home to the country's most fearsome and violent inmates – where his family and friends would be unable to help in case of any more sudden mysterious 'illnesses'. Navalny himself said he expects a 'Stalinist' sentence of 18 years, and has been told to brace for another trial on terrorism charges. Yet the former lawyer has shown a knack for getting his voice heard and undermining the Kremlin in even the most challenging situations. The son of a Soviet army officer and an economist, Navalny spent most of his childhood around military bases in the Moscow area. Navalny has continued to crack sardonic jokes aimed at his captors from behind bars (Picture: AFP) Spending summers with his grandmother, who lived near Chernobyl, Ukraine, would eventually instill a healthy suspicion of authority in him at a young age. A nine-year-old Navalny witnessed part of the Soviet attempted cover-up of the 1986 nuclear disaster, when officials ordered locals to plant potatoes in irradiated soil to supposedly show there was no danger from exposure. He joined a liberal political party while a student in the early days of Putin's reign, when there were a range of groups in Russian parliament who seemed to be having a meaningful contest for people's votes. But the Russian president managed to unify most conservat){kind=link}
NEWS… BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT
Few people are harder to silence than Aleksei Navalny, the Russian opposition icon who is the only person able to drum up large-scale anti-Putin protests on home soil.
If anyone else were in his current position, it would be hard to imagine ever hearing from them again.
Only three years after surviving Novichok poisoning, the 47-year-old, by far Putin’s most popular critic in Russia, is currently on trial for ‘extremism’ charges in a high-security prison where he’s already serving a nine-year term.
Russian state prosecutors want him jailed for another 20 years in a ‘special regime colony’ home to the country’s most fearsome and violent inmates – where his family and friends would be unable to help in case of any more sudden mysterious ‘illnesses’.