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| Russian police carry out mass raids against opposition activists | |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| Russian law enforcement authorities have carried out mass raids on the homes and offices of the Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s supporters. | |
| Searches took place in 39 towns and cities on Thursday, four days after the ruling United Russia party, which supports President Vladimir Putin, lost a third of its seats in the Moscow city assembly while easily retaining its dominant position nationwide. | |
| Navalny had urged his supporters to vote tactically in last weekend’s local and regional elections to try to reduce the chances of Kremlin-backed candidates, a strategy that appears to have had some success in the capital. | |
| “Putin is very angry,” Navalny wrote on social media after the raids. “This is a case where the actions of the police are no different from those of burglars.” | |
| Authorities told activists that the searches were related to a money-laundering investigation into Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, an organisation that has published embarrassing investigations into what it says is the wrongdoing of corrupt officials. | |
| Born in 1976 just outside Moscow, Alexei Navalny is a lawyer-turned-campaigner whose Anti-Corruption Foundation carries out investigations into the wealth of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. | |
| He started out as a Russian nationalist, but emerged as the main leader of Russia's democratic opposition during the wave of protests that led up to the 2012 presidential election, and has since been a constant thorn in the Kremlin’s side. | |
| Navalny is barred from appearing on state television, but has used social media to his advantage. A 2017 documentary accusing the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, of corruption received more than 30m views on YouTube within two months of release. | |
| He has been repeatedly arrested and jailed by the authorities. The European court of human rights ruled that Russia violated Navalny's rights by holding him under house arrest in 2014. Election officials formally barred him from running for president in 2018 due to an embezzlement conviction that he claims was politically motivated. Navalny told the commission its decision would be a vote “not against me, but against 16,000 people who have nominated me, against 200,000 volunteers who have been canvassing for me”. | |
| There has also been a physical price to pay. In April 2017, he was hospitalised after being attacked with green dye that nearly blinded him in one eye, and in July 2019 was taken from jail to hospital with symptoms that one of his doctors said could indicate poisoning. | |
| His main strength in opposition has been in bringing large numbers of protesters out on to Russia's streets. At times, Navalny has seemed to find short spells in jail an energising rather than demoralising experience. “There were some others in the jail, and for all of them it was their first protest in their lives," he once said. "When they saw me walking past, they were calling out, ‘When’s the next protest?’ They weren’t asking if there would be one, they wanted to know when.” | |
| State investigators last month opened a criminal investigation into the alleged laundering of 1bn roubles (£12.2bn) by the foundation itself. It also froze a slew of bank accounts linked to the foundation, a move Navalny’s allies said was a trumped-up attempt to cripple his political movement. | |
| Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s spokeswoman, said on Thursday that the scale and nature of the latest raids was unprecedented. | |
| Leonid Volkov, another senior Navalny ally, published a list of towns and cities where activists had been targeted. | |
| “The overall number of searches is over 150 and no less than 1,000 Russian law enforcement employees are involved [in the raids],” Volkov wrote on social media. He linked the searches to Navalny’s tactical voting strategy and said the homes of activists, their relatives and the regional headquarters of Navalny’s movement were being targeted. | |
| Activists were being taken in for questioning, he added, saying technical hardware was being confiscated. | |
| “The state has two tasks – to frighten and steal,” wrote Volkov. “It’s obvious that the aim of this operation is to destroy our headquarters structure and to obstruct the work of our [regional] headquarters.” | |
| Golos, a non-governmental organisation that monitors Russian elections, said on Thursday that the homes of its activists were also being raided by the authorities. | |
| Navalny and his supporters organised a wave of protests after popular opposition politicians were barred from standing in the Moscow parliament election, prompting a police crackdown. | |
| The 43-year-old opposition leader missed several of the rallies while serving a 30-day jail term for organising previous unauthorised protests. | |
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| Alexei Navalny | Alexei Navalny |
| Vladimir Putin | |
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