Vox: Why Putin wants Alexei Navalny dead

 In 2006, a lawyer named Alexei Navalny started a blog where he wrote about corruption in his home country of Russia. It’s the most prominent problem under the regime of Vladimir Putin, who has ruled Russia since 2000. Putin has systematically taken over the country’s independent media, oligarchy, elections, and laws to cement his own power and wield corruption to his advantage.

That’s what Navalny set out to expose. And in 2010, he published a groundbreaking investigation into a state-owned transportation company, Transneft, which was funneling state money into the hands of its executives. The post launched Navalny into politics.

By 2016, he had become the face of Russia’s opposition movement, run for mayor, and was running for president against Putin himself. Navalny was unifying Russia’s opposition like no politician had before. That’s why the Kremlin tried to kill him. Navalny survived the assassination attempt, launching a movement never before seen in Russia.

Politico: Putin’s party takes hit in Moscow election (9/9/19)

Yabloko, a tiny perestroika-era liberal party, won four seats. Its leader Sergei Mitrokhin was initially banned from standing at the polls but was reinstated after a court in Moscow ruled in his favor. “This is a massive achievement,” said Vitali Shkliarov, a political analyst who advised the party. Shkliarov added it is the first time genuine opposition candidates have been elected to the City Duma since the early 1990s.

Members of United Russia ran as “independents” in Moscow in an apparent bid to distance themselves from their increasingly unpopular party, after its ratings plummeted amid an increase to the national pension age and growing poverty. But neither that tactic nor reported voter fraud in favor of United Russia could save one of the party's heavyweights: Andrei Metelsky, the leader of United Russia’s branch in Moscow, lost his seat on Sunday. [...]

Although it is impossible to judge how much influence Navalny’s Smart Voting strategy had on the vote, a number of triumphant candidates acknowledged their debt to the opposition leader’s backing, and noted that had candidates affiliated with him been allowed to run, they would have won instead. Yandiev Magomet, who defeated United Russia’s candidate in central Moscow, admitted that in a fair vote he would have lost to Ilya Yashin, a blacklisted opposition politician. Yashin had a 28-percentage point lead before he was barred from the race, according to an opinion poll.

read the article