Since rising to prominence in the early 2000s, Alexei Navalny has been convicted of defying government officials, embezzlement, fraud, parole violations and contempt of court. He has now been sentenced to another 19 years in prison.
President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic has been handed a fresh prison term, which could keep him behind bars for another two decades.
Russian politician Alexei Navalny was sentenced by a court to 19 years in jail on Friday after being found guilty of extremism charges relating to the activities of his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK).
He is already serving a nine-year term for a number of charges that he claims are politically motivated.
Since rising to prominence as an opposition figure in the early 2000s, Navalny has previously been convicted of defying government officials, embezzlement, fraud, parole violations and contempt of court.
The foundation he set up in 2011 has sought to discredit Putin and his associates through well-produced online investigative documentaries that claim to expose their opulent lifestyles.
His persistent online campaigning has gained him a network of loyal followers both in and outside Russia.
It has also seen him repeatedly jailed, barred from running for political office and most famously poisoned by a Soviet-era nerve agent in 2020.
Here we look at how the biggest thorn in the Kremlin’s side got to where he is now.
Ukrainian heritage
Alexei Navalny was born to factory owners in a village west of Moscow called Butyn in 1976, but grew up in the town of Obninsk, around 60 miles southwest of the Russian capital.
He is Ukrainian on his paternal side and spent summers with his Ukrainian grandmother in the town near Chernobyl where his family are from.
Navalny, now 47, cites the mistreatment of locals after the 1986 nuclear disaster as one of the reasons he first sought to take on the Moscow regime.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Navalny graduated with a law degree from Moscow’s Peoples’ Friendship University in 1998 before gaining a second in economics in 2001.
It was around this time that Vladimir Putin rose to power supported by a circle of oligarchs that bought up state-owned companies and sponsored his United Russia party.
To begin with, Navalny expressed nationalist and anti-immigrant views. His focus on government corruption has largely clouded earlier comments about Muslims in Russia, but in 2021 Amnesty International retracted his ‘prisoner of conscious’ status after he failed to distance himself from them.
He joined the liberal Yabloko opposition party in 2000 but was expelled for “nationalist activities” in 2007.
While working as a lawyer in the early 2000s, Navalny started blogging, with the initial aim of protesting against rampant overdevelopment in Moscow.
As the years went by and Putin’s grip on power tightened, his campaigns honed in on corruption of state-run organisations such as gas and oil giants Gazprom and Rosneft.
He bought small shares in the companies along with some state-owned banks so he could ask awkward questions about their funding at AGMs.
In 2010 he founded RosPil, an anti-corruption project run by lawyers that monitored the spending of state-run organisations and enabled them to bring several cases of suspected violations to court.
A year later in 2011 he established his main Anti-Corruption Foundation, which now has millions of followers worldwide through its various social media channels.
In December that year following widespread reports Russia’s parliamentary elections had been rigged, thousands gathered in Moscow to contest the result.
Navalny was the first of around 300 people to be arrested. He was jailed for 15 days for “defying a government official”.
With Putin re-elected and Navalny gaining notoriety, charges against the opposition leader began to stack up. One of the first in 2012 was for embezzlement of the state-owned timber company Kirovles.