Three years ago I said that President Putin was carrying out a slow-motion assassination of leading Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. Today my worst fears came true.
Navalny was principled and brave, but in the end he tragically underestimated the malice and brutality of Putin and his cronies.
Like everyone who has worked with him over the years to expose the egregious corruption of the Russian ruling class, I am devastated by the news of his death.
The only positive we can take from this is that Alexei’s legacy will live on in the campaigns of his many followers around the world.
And I will be one of them. We first met at the turn of the millennium, when I was a fund manager in Moscow campaigning for shareholder rights at a time when corruption was rife in the Russian business world.
Officers arrest Alexei Navalny in Moscow in 2013
“Navalny was motivated by a deep sense of patriotism and furious indignation at the way Putin’s mafia state was robbing the Russian people,” says Bill Browder.
After I was kicked out of the country in 2005, we continued to work together to expose the blatant greed of the men at the top.
I redoubled my efforts in 2009 following the murder of my lawyer and friend Sergei Magnitsky, a man with the courage of a lion, who died in a Moscow prison after being horrifically tortured.
Navalny was motivated by a deep sense of patriotism and furious indignation at the way Putin’s mafia state was robbing the Russian people.
And despite being arrested repeatedly for speaking out, he continued to fight.
In August 2020, the authorities had enough and agents of the FSB (successor to the KGB) tried to kill him with a nerve agent.
He only survived because his followers managed to fly him to Germany for cutting-edge medical treatment.
Despite the obvious dangers he faced in his homeland, after spending a month in the hospital, he returned to Russia against the advice of his friends because he believed he could not be an effective politician unless he was on the ground.
Alexei was arrested the moment he landed in Moscow. But he was never a man to back down, and within two days he had authorized his team to release a highly embarrassing investigative video about the flashy $1.5 billion palace Putin had built for himself on the Black Sea. At last count, it had attracted more than 100 million views on YouTube.
More recently, in an almost suicidal move, he asked them to compile a file on the warden of the same prison in which he was incarcerated.
The resulting investigation not only named Colonel Dmitry Nozhkin’s mistress, but also revealed his and his wife’s penchant for threesomes.
Their punishment was transfer to an even more inhospitable penal colony deep in the Arctic Circle, where the temperature can drop to -30°C at this time of year.
I am currently at the Munich Security Conference where I am campaigning for the release of Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian dissident who was sentenced to 25 years for “treason” a year ago after denouncing the invasion of Ukraine.
We can only hope that the global outcry over the death of my friend Alexei offers Vladimir and so many other heroic activists a degree of protection from the murderous death cult in the Kremlin.
Bill Browder is the author of Freezing Order: Vladimir Putin, Money Laundering, and Murder in Russia: A True Story