Do we like Alexei Navalny?
Our score: 6 out of 10. He paid with his freedom and his life to take on a government, but his early nationalist rhetoric and anti-migrant platform are a real stain.
Navalny died in February 2024 in an Arctic prison, serving a 19-year sentence. He started out in nationalist politics, was kicked out of the liberal Yabloko party, then ran for Moscow mayor in 2013 and came second with 27 per cent. From there he built his name on corruption exposés.
His courtroom history is a story of the state going after him. He was convicted over the KirovLes timber case in 2013 and the Yves Rocher case in 2014, both with suspended sentences for him. The European Court of Human Rights later found both trials unfair, calling the Yves Rocher rulings “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable”. Russian courts kept the verdicts anyway.
Now the harm check, and it's not clean. In a 2007 video he called himself a “certified nationalist” and talked about exterminating “flies and cockroaches”. He went to the Russian March three times, and in 2011 called it “a significant political event, and there is nothing dangerous about it”. Amnesty alleged some of his past comments reached the threshold of advocacy of hatred, and Al Jazeera reported no apology from him.
The other side of the ledger matters too. In 2013 he said he'd allow gay pride marches in Moscow if elected mayor, saying he'd “adhere to the constitution”, and he opposed the anti-gay propaganda law. On Ukraine, his team's February 2023 statement called for Ukraine's 1991 borders to be restored, which contradicted his earlier comments on Crimea.
The recent news is about his death. In February 2026 the UK, Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands said they were confident he was poisoned in prison with epibatidine, a toxin from dart frogs. The UK said only the Russian state had the means, motive and opportunity. The Kremlin has rejected the claim.
The good stuff is substantial. His Anti-Corruption Foundation's January 2021 film on an alleged Putin Black Sea estate drew huge audiences, and the Kremlin denied it. The European Parliament gave him its 2021 Sakharov Prize, and he spent his last years in jail for it.