Like many of his compatriots, Alexeï Navalny, a Russian opponent who died this Friday at the age of 47 in his freezing prison in Siberia, also had Ukrainian roots.
Although he grew up not far from Moscow, his father, on the other hand, came from the small village Zalissia, near the Chernobyl power plant, close to the Belarusian border.
“It is obvious to me that he was killed like thousands of others who were tortured to death because of one person, Putin, who does not care who dies as long as he maintains his position »
Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky explained this Friday in Berlin, adding that Putin
“should be held accountable for his crimes”
.
A statement which recalls comments made by Alexeï Navalny himself in his last press interview, given to
Time
magazine in January 2022 in the form of an epistolary correspondence.
The Kremlin's bête noire anticipated the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which would be launched a few weeks later, on February 24, 2022:
“To consolidate the country and the elites, Vladimir Putin constantly needs all these extreme measures, of all these wars – real, virtual, hybrid or simply confrontations on the verge of war
,” he explained in the pages of the American weekly.
“War criminals”
Since this prophecy of doom, Alexeï Navalny has not hidden his strong rejection of the conflict which is bloodying Ukraine.
During his trial for
“extremism”
in July 2023, the Russian opponent did not hesitate to denounce
“the tens of thousands of deaths in the stupidest and most senseless war of the 21st century”
.
He was subsequently sentenced to 19 years in prison, which was added to an initial sentence of 9 years.
A few months earlier, he had accused Vladimir Putin of
“destroying the future of Russia”
by
“simply wanting to make his country appear bigger on the map”
of the world.
Already during a hearing on September 21, 2022, Alexei Navalny strongly criticized the
“partial mobilization”
announced by the Russian president after the success of the Ukrainian counter-offensives in Kharkiv and Kherson.
"I do not understand something.
The army has one million men, the national guard 350,000, the Ministry of the Interior has one and a half to two million additional men.
Why did you mobilize civilians?
, he asked himself, accusingly.
As early as April 2022, the Russian dissident had estimated on Twitter (now X) that the
“warmongers”
were
“war criminals”
who should be
“judged”
one day.
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However, the champion of the fight against corruption, whose echo in Russia is less than in the West, has always aroused a certain distrust in Ukraine, despite his virulent denunciation of the Russian invasion since February 24, 2022. At issue , older remarks much less favorable to kyiv.
In 2021, in an article published by the Atlantic Council - an American think tank based in Washington -, Andreas Umland, researcher at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs in Stockholm, wrote:
“Navalny's vague position on the future of Russian-occupied Crimea and his often ambiguous statements regarding Ukrainian sovereignty have generated considerable pessimism among the Ukrainian public about his possible future role in Russian politics
.
The academic mentioned in particular a column published by Alexeï Navalny in the
New York Times
in 2014, after the annexation of Crimea by Russia and the outbreak of war in Donbass.
Certainly, the opponent denounced the
“nationalist fervor cynically brought to its climax”
by Vladimir Putin to
“strengthen the survival of his regime”
.
But, at the same time, he did not propose to immediately return Crimea to kyiv, but rather to organize a second referendum on whether the peninsula should belong to Russia or to Ukraine.
It is not
“a kind of sausage sandwich that you can pass from one side to the other
,” the dissident justified himself graphically.
For him, Vladimir Putin would talk about the
“Russian world”
while
“shrinking”
it :
“In Belarus, they sing anti-Putin songs in football stadiums;
in Ukraine they simply hate us
,” he analyzed.
“Russian liberalism stops at the border with Ukraine”
Alexeï Navalny had been the defender of this idea of the
“Russian world”
only two years earlier, on Russian television.
It was these comments in particular that fueled suspicion among Ukrainians.
“In 2012, at the height of Russian street protests organized by liberals and nationalists [against Vladimir Putin and the results of the presidential election which they considered distorted], Alexei Navalny said of Ukrainians and Russians: 'In fact, we are one nation,'”
recalled Taras Kuzio, a researcher at the Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, in 2017 in another Atlantic Council article entitled
“Why Are the leaders of the Russian opposition democrats at home and imperialists abroad?
.
In the same television interview, Navalny added:
“Ukraine and Belarus are Russia's main geopolitical allies.
Our foreign policy must aim as much as possible at integration with Ukraine and Belarus.”
A reference to an
“old proverb”
cited by Andreas Umland in the other Atlantic Council article, which he applies to Navalny's first political years:
“Russian liberalism stops at the border with Ukraine”
.
For a long time, Alexeï Navalny defined himself as a nationalist.
In 2006, he participated in the
“Russian March”
, a demonstration in Moscow bringing together the different Russian nationalist components, which he even co-organized in 2011, calling himself a
“democratic nationalist”
.
Alexeï Navalny also preferred to use the qualifier
“Russkyi”
(Russian in the ethnic sense) than that of
“Rossiyanin”
(Russian by citizenship), like many Russian nationalists who sometimes also use it to qualify Ukrainians and Belarusians, but not for Russian minorities (notably those in the Caucasus), recalled Taras Kuzio, who summed things up as follows:
“Solzhenitsyn and contemporary democrats are essentially imperialists.
The imperial conception of the term 'Russian' refers to a common past that goes back as far as
the medieval state of Kievan Rus
and predetermines a common future.
If Russians and Ukrainians are the same people, it follows that their destiny is to remain close 'brothers'
.
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Asked about the
“why”
of this choice between the two words in one of his last interviews, given in 2021 to the magazine
Le Grand Continent
, the Russian opponent still seemed to hesitate:
“I don’t know.
The term 'russkyi' unfortunately does not suit everyone, since it contains an ethnic connotation
.
In 2018, after the creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine - a significant break with the Moscow Patriarchate - Alexeï Navalny regretted this turn on Twitter, while accusing the Russian president:
“What took centuries to be created been destroyed in four years by Vladimir Putin and his idiots.
Putin is the enemy of the Russian world
.
Russian world.
A formula that kyiv cannot hear without shuddering.