Had he remained outside Russia, Navalny may have been able to coordinate a powerful anti-war movement. Instead, he is silenced for ever
For years, Alexei Navalny remained clear on a key message: he was a Russian opposition politician and he was determined to stay in Russia. Exile, he believed, would lead to political irrelevance, and calling on Russians to oppose Vladimir Putin from the safety of the west would mark him as a hypocrite.
Navalny, who died last week aged 47, while serving a lengthy prison term in an Arctic penal colony, stuck to this belief as the political climate in Russia deteriorated and the space for dissent narrowed ever further, and even after he was poisoned with novichok in 2020, leading to his ill-fated decision to return early the next year.
Russian authorities had tried various methods to shut Navalny up for more than a decade. Initially, some
