Russia has placed jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny on a list of “terrorists and extremists” that includes outfits like the Taliban and the Islamic State.
In April 2021, the state had placed Navalny’s headquarters organisation on a list of terrorist and extremist groups. For a year now, Navalny has been in jail over embezzlement and parole violation charges.
The list, maintained by the Federal Financial Monitoring Service, includes individuals Russian authorities believe are involved in activities supporting “terrorist or extreme” organisations.
The entry comes days after Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Agency published photos of a palace Putin was alleged to live in. Located on the coast of the Black Sea, it has a vast marble swimming pool decorated with busts of Greek gods, a hookah lounge with a pole for dancing, a wine cellar, theatre, and other gaudily decorated amenities. A year earlier, the group had released drone footage of the palace, which it said cost $1.4 billion.
Navalny rose to fame in late 2011 after his blog posts went viral, where he called Putin’s courtiers “Crooks and thieves” and said he would “chew through the throats of those animals? He was known for his incendiary language at the time, which was not only reserved for Putin.
In 2007, he was associated with far-right forces in Russia and was seen in a video calling for the deportation of migrants and comparing Islamist militants to cockroaches. As a result of his speeches, he was expelled from the Yabloko party.
Since then, he has positioned himself as Putin’s foremost opposition, campaigning against him across the country. Though barred from running in nationwide elections in 2016, his campaign spread across Russia in local elections. In 2020, while travelling from Siberia, Navalny fell violently ill and had to be airlifted to Germany for treatment. German doctors confirmed that he had been poisoned by a nerve agent often used by Russia’s FSB, Novichok.
After recovering, Navalny returned to Russia and upon his arrival, was arrested. A court later found him guilty of disobeying the terms of his probation over a 2014 money laundering case.
