Alexei Navalny Vows to Keep Up Opposition

Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has used the second anniversary of his incarceration to reinforce his promise to keep up his opposition, as his family and allies started a campaign to free him.

Navalny, 46, was arrested exactly two years ago as he returned to Russia from Germany, where he had been treated for poisoning with a deadly Soviet-era nerve agent in what he and some Western nations said was
“a Russian state assassination attempt.” The Kremlin denied involvement.

“I’m not going to surrender my country to them, and I believe that the darkness will eventually fade away,” Navalny wrote on Twitter via his lawyers.

Navalny is the highest-profile of the few remaining opposition voices in Russia.

The lawyer-turned-activist has been sentenced to a combined 11-1/2 years in jail in two separate fraud cases, which he said had been trumped up to silence him, and his anti-corruption organisation has been banned as extremist.

Dasha Navalnaya, his daughter, appeared in a video clip on Tuesday to launch a campaign to free her father, who she said was being repeatedly and “unjustly put in solitary confinement” in prison for his fierce opposition to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Aljazeera /Shakirat Sadiq