If it wasn’t obvious from the heavy police presence and official warnings how the Kremlin would respond to anti-government protests across Russia, the sound of an OMON officer’s swift kick to Margarita Yudina’s stomach and her pained screams as her head hit the pavement helped provide clarity.

VIDEO: WARNING VIOLENT CONTENT
https://www.currenttime.tv/a/margarita-yudina/31066205.html

The violence employed by Russian security forces against the 54-year-old St. Petersburg resident was far from an isolated incident — thousands of protesters were rounded up and taken into custody, and there were scores of images showing police taking a heavy-handed approach to tamp down the largest anti-government protests in Russia in years.

But none captured the moment like the short clip showing Yudina stepping in the path of three riot police as they led a young protester away in central St. Petersburg, one of many cities nationwide where Russians had risked assembling in groups to protest the jailing of opposition politician and staunch Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny.

“Why did you grab him?” Yudina asked as she stepped into Nevsky Prospect, the city’s main thoroughfare, with the OMON officers in full riot gear several meters away. “Get out of the way!” came the reply, with one emphasizing the point in stride with a boot to her stomach.

The force of blow caused Yudina to double over and fly backward, striking her head on the pavement and reportedly leaving her unconscious and in intensive care to treat a skull injury.

Russian officials were quick to go into crisis-management mode as they attempted to touch up the bad image left by the video as it spread quickly on the Internet.

The local Interior Ministry branch promised an investigation into the incident, while state-friendly media outlets were flooded with audio published by the Telegram channel Mash of a local police official apologizing to Yudina during a visit to her hospital room. https://t.me/breakingmash/2314

“These are not our methods; this is not our system!” Colonel Sergei Muzika, head of the ministry branch’s department for protecting public order, can be heard saying. “We stand guard over law and order.”

The further aftermath of the incident also caused controversy, with government critics voicing skepticism about the narrative of apology and forgiveness that played out in reports from media organizations close to the state.

Yudina reportedly accepted Muzika’s apology, and Kremlin-friendly REN TV showed footage in which she appeared to be pleased with the flowers brought to her hospital room on January 24, reportedly by the unidentified officer who took responsibility for kicking her.

Explaining that he was suffering from the effects of being tear-gassed and a fogged-up helmet visor, the masked officer is seen in REN-TV footage saying that he “did not see what was happening” and that when he found out what had happened to her he took it as a “personal tragedy.” https://ren.tv/news/v-rossii/795206-politseiskii-izvinilsia-pered-postradavshei-na-aktsii-v-peterburge-za-udar

Yudina, who has since been transferred to another facility, is shown commenting on the chrysanthemums and telling the officer not to worry.

The St. Petersburg news agency Fontanka later cited her as saying that she forgave the officer — whose visor is partially raised in the video footage of him kicking her — because she was an Orthodox Christian and that “I understand that our young people are in a difficult situation.”
https://www.fontanka.ru/2021/01/24/69721911/

Some pro-Kremlin commenters were touched by the apologetic tone taken by the authorities, with one suggesting on Telegram that this was “commendable” and suggesting that Yudina had essentially rushed into the path of a tank. https://t.me/kononenkome/29423

But observers both inside and outside Russia were incredulous.

Dmitry Aleshkovsky, co-founder of the media organization Takiye Dela, expressed bewilderment that the use of violence could be so easily forgiven with an apology.

“What, so this was possible?” he wrote on Twitter, alluding to protesters who were jailed on what they said were fabricated charges of violence against police at an anti-government demonstration on the eve of Vladimir Putin’s inauguration to a third presidential term in 2012 and rallies related to Moscow elections in 2019.

“The prisoners of Bolotnaya and those who received sentences for the Moscow Case, should they just ask forgiveness and give flowers to the riot police?”
https://twitter.com/aleshru/status/1353376699849830400

Despite obvious evidence to the contrary and media estimates that more than 100,000 people protested nationwide, state and state-friendly media have pushed the Kremlin narrative that the rallies on January 23 drew minimal crowds,

In Moscow, city officials claimed that just 4,000 people took to the streets in support of Navalny — the Kremlin critic who was arrested upon his return to Russia on January 17 after receiving treatment abroad for a near-deadly poisoning in Siberia that he blames on the Federal Security Service and Putin himself — while Reuters reported its own tally of about 40,000. Nationwide, the OVD-Info group, which tracks police actions, reported that more than 3,700 people were detained for participating in the banned mass demonstrations.
https://ovdinfo.org/

The level of violence was high, with videos showing police beating protesters with truncheons and some demonstrators pelting police with snowballs and in some cases fighting with officers.

The heavy-handed response to the protests – which were unsanctioned because rallies of more than one person are not allowed in Russia without official permission — have drawn condemnation from the United States and other Western countries.

Nongovernmental organizations, too, were sharply critical of Russia’s actions, with some suggesting they could further stoke anti-government sentiment.

“Ultimately this repression of basic human rights only galvanizes people and deepens their grievances,” Damelya Aitkhozhina, Russia researcher at the New York-based Human Rights Watch said on January 25. https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/01/25/russia-police-detain-thousands-pro-navalny-protests

And Kremlin critics within Russia also suggested that events had played out as planned.

“It is clear that the government wanted violence, the government provoked violence, from my point of view, and the government is obviously preparing a repressive response for the near future,” opposition politician and political scientist Leonid Gozman told Current Time in a video interview on January 24. https://www.currenttime.tv/a/gozman/31066541.htm

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

If it wasn’t obvious from the heavy police presence and official warnings how the Kremlin would respond to anti-government protests across Russia, the sound of an OMON officer’s swift kick to Margarita Yudina’s stomach and her pained screams as her head hit the pavement helped provide clarity.

The violence employed by Russian security forces against the 54-year-old St. Petersburg resident was far from an isolated incident — thousands of protesters were rounded up and taken into custody, and there were scores of images showing police taking a heavy-handed approach to tamp down the largest anti-government protests in Russia in years.

But none captured the moment like the short clip showing Yudina stepping in the path of three riot police as they led a young protester away in central St. Petersburg, one of many cities nationwide where Russians had risked assembling in groups to protest the jailing of opposition politician and staunch Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny.

WARNING: Viewers May Find The Images In This Video Distressing

“Why did you grab him?” Yudina asked as she stepped into Nevsky Prospect, the city’s main thoroughfare, with the OMON officers in full riot gear several meters away. “Get out of the way!” came the reply, with one emphasizing the point in stride with a boot to her stomach.

The force of blow caused Yudina to double over and fly backward, striking her head on the pavement and reportedly leaving her unconscious and in intensive care to treat a skull injury.

Russian officials were quick to go into crisis-management mode as they attempted to touch up the bad image left by the video as it spread quickly on the Internet.

The local Interior Ministry branch promised an investigation into the incident, while state-friendly media outlets were flooded with audio published by the Telegram channel Mash of a local police official apologizing to Yudina during a visit to her hospital room.

“These are not our methods; this is not our system!” Colonel Sergei Muzika, head of the ministry branch’s department for protecting public order, can be heard saying. “We stand guard over law and order.”

The further aftermath of the incident also caused controversy, with government critics voicing skepticism about the narrative of apology and forgiveness that played out in reports from media organizations close to the state.

Yudina reportedly accepted Muzika’s apology, and Kremlin-friendly REN TV showed footage in which she appeared to be pleased with the flowers brought to her hospital room on January 24, reportedly by the unidentified officer who took responsibility for kicking her.

Explaining that he was suffering from the effects of being tear-gassed and a fogged-up helmet visor, the masked officer is seen in REN-TV footage saying that he “did not see what was happening” and that when he found out what had happened to her he took it as a “personal tragedy.”

Yudina, who has since been transferred to another facility, is shown commenting on the chrysanthemums and telling the officer not to worry.

Incredulous Observers

The St. Petersburg news agency Fontanka later cited her as saying that she forgave the officer — whose visor is partially raised in the video footage of him kicking her — because she was an Orthodox Christian and that “I understand that our young people are in a difficult situation.”

Some pro-Kremlin commenters were touched by the apologetic tone taken by the authorities, with one suggesting on Telegram that this was “commendable” and suggesting that Yudina had essentially rushed into the path of a tank.

But observers both inside and outside Russia were incredulous.

Dmitry Aleshkovsky, co-founder of the media organization Takiye Dela, expressed bewilderment that the use of violence could be so easily forgiven with an apology.

“What, so this was possible?” he wrote on Twitter, alluding to protesters who were jailed on what they said were fabricated charges of violence against police at an anti-government demonstration on the eve of Vladimir Putin’s inauguration to a third presidential term in 2012 and rallies related to Moscow elections in 2019.

“The prisoners of Bolotnaya and those who received sentences for the Moscow Case, should they just ask forgiveness and give flowers to the riot police?”

Despite obvious evidence to the contrary and media estimates that more than 100,000 people protested nationwide, state and state-friendly media have pushed the Kremlin narrative that the rallies on January 23 drew minimal crowds.

‘The Government Wanted Violence’

In Moscow, city officials claimed that just 4,000 people took to the streets in support of Navalny — the Kremlin critic who was arrested upon his return to Russia on January 17 after receiving treatment abroad for a near-deadly poisoning in Siberia that he blames on the Federal Security Service and Putin himself — while Reuters reported its own tally of about 40,000. Nationwide, the OVD-Info group, which tracks police actions, reported that more than 3,700 people were detained for participating in the banned mass demonstrations.

The level of violence was high, with videos showing police beating protesters with truncheons and some demonstrators pelting police with snowballs and in some cases fighting with officers.

The heavy-handed response to the protests – which were unsanctioned because rallies of more than one person are not allowed in Russia without official permission — have drawn condemnation from the United States and other Western countries.

Nongovernmental organizations, too, were sharply critical of Russia’s actions, with some suggesting they could further stoke anti-government sentiment.

“Ultimately this repression of basic human rights only galvanizes people and deepens their grievances,” Damelya Aitkhozhina, Russia researcher at the New York-based Human Rights Watch said on January 25.

And Kremlin critics within Russia also suggested that events had played out as planned.

“It is clear that the government wanted violence, the government provoked violence, from my point of view, and the government is obviously preparing a repressive response for the near future,” opposition politician and political scientist Leonid Gozman told Current Time in a video interview on January 24.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

“Putin’s a thief!”

The chant rang out in cities across Russia on January 23, as crowds took to the streets from Vladivostok in the Far East to Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea and were met with a forceful police crackdown as opposition leader Aleksei Navalny’s showdown with the Kremlin entered a new phase.

The last time Russia saw a day of rallies with such geographic scope was in March 2017, after Navalny released a video alleging corruption by then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. This time, an immediate catalyst appeared to be a video report targeting the wealth of President Vladimir Putin himself.

The nationwide demonstrations were initiated by the Kremlin’s most vocal critic, who languishes in jail, and staged under the slogan “Free Navalny!” But analysts say that the “Palace for Putin” investigation has combined with anger over Navalny’s jailing in a way that may reorient the political balance in Russia going forward.

“There are two different motives for the protesters, but they are converging,” political analyst Abbas Gallyamov told RFE/RL. “Navalny is becoming synonymous with the fight against corruption.”

Navalny returned to Russia on January 17 after five months in Germany recovering from the effects of a nerve-agent poisoning he blames on Putin, apparently banking on enough popular support to help him escape a long prison sentence threatened by the authorities – and mount a robust challenge to Putin’s power.

The following day, he was jailed for a month pending a court hearing on parole violation charges that could land him behind bars for 3 1/2 years. Before he was led away, he called on Russians to hit the streets in a huge show of solidarity.

In the video report released the next day – which has now been seen more than 70 million times on YouTube — he told his viewers that Putin and his associates “will keep stealing more and more until they bankrupt the whole country.”

Revealing what the investigative report says is a $1.36 billion palace on the Black Sea that ultimately belongs to Putin, Navalny said: “Russia sells huge amounts of oil, gas, metals, fertilizer, and timber — but people’s incomes keep falling and falling, because Putin has his palace.”

Russians responded in droves on January 23, protesting in at least 60 cities and braving winter temperatures that plunged as low as minus 52 degrees Celsius in Yakutsk, Siberia. Many held placards and signs citing the “Palace For Putin” investigation and denouncing official corruption.

Police reacted with force, wading into peaceful protests, wielding batons and shields to disperse crowds, and filling riot vans with activists — including Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, who had returned with him to Moscow from Germany. By late evening in Moscow, more than 3,400 people had been detained across the country, according to the OVD-Info protest monitor group.

Russian state TV largely ignored the protests, but pro-government online streams baselessly accused Navalny of brainwashing Russia’s youth into dissent, a line often advanced by the authorities in attempts to discredit the opposition movement.

“It’s not their own kids that they’re bringing out,” a guest on an online chat show run by the state-owned RT channel said about Navalny and his allies. “Navalny’s kids aren’t even in Russia!”

But evidence of mass teenage participation appeared slim. In Moscow, an estimated 40,000 people came to a protest in central Pushkin Square, with few minors visible in the crowd. A 14-year-old boy who told a reporter he had come “to have a look” was later roughly detained by police amid cries of, “He’s just a child!”

Navalny’s call for a protest in the midst of winter and the COVID-19 pandemic was seen as a gamble and a test of his ability to mount significant support for a new push against Putin, who has been in power for two decades and last year, in a referendum lambasted by critics, secured the right to run for reelection in 2024 and again in 2030.

It was not immediately clear whether the sizable, widespread protests would result in Navalny avoiding a lengthy prison sentence. In 2013, large rallies in his support outside the Kremlin and other Moscow landmarks were credited with getting his five-year prison sentence suspended.

“If protests on January 23 don’t bring about an immediate result — the release of Aleksei Navalny — then such events will happen again and again,” Navalny aide Leonid Volkov told Current Time, the Russian-language network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.

The future of Russia’s embattled opposition movement also remains uncertain, but the size of the protests — even in the face of a concerted weeklong crackdown aimed at thwarting them — suggests that a substantial number of Russians may be determined to keep up the pressure.

Tatyana Stanovaya, a political analyst, said that the Russian authorities “made two critical mistakes — Navalny’s poisoning and his arrest,” suggesting that instead of sidelining him, the Kremlin has only strengthened his base.

“The results of many, many years of painstaking work by the Kremlin to push the real opposition” to the political margins “were ceremoniously buried today in a single day,” Stanovaya wrote on Telegram.

The harsh police response and high number of arrests also point to what could be a bitter and protracted standoff if the rallies persist in the weeks ahead, especially with potentially pivotal parliamentary elections due to be held in September.

In the meantime, Putin’s popularity has slipped amid the pandemic and anger over what many view as inadequate state support during Russia’s attendant economic crisis. The president has spent much of the time in recent months at his residence outside Moscow, making few public appearances.

Neither has he commented publicly on Navalny’s report about the Black Sea palace, which his spokesman quickly dismissed as “lies.”

“Navalny has taken over the initiative,” analyst Gallyamov said. “Now the state is defending itself.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

For more than a decade, Aleksei Navalny has been one of President Vladimir Putin’s most outspoken and influential critics in Russia, investigating high-level corruption, organizing protests, and traveling across the country to back opposition candidates in regional elections and nurture his network of political activists.

Navalny’s arrest has failed to rouse the population as a whole.”

Authorities have responded with a campaign of near-constant harassment, jailing the Kremlin critic almost a dozen times since 2011, repeatedly raiding the offices of his Anti-Corruption Foundation, and — Navalny asserts — staging an attempted assassination by means of poisoning that led to his extended convalescence in Germany since August.

When he announced he would return to Russia on January 17, authorities made clear their intention to jail the Kremlin critic. That evening, Navalny was detained at the airport after arrival and taken to a police station outside Moscow, where he appeared before an improvised courtroom and a state prosecutor asked the judge to jail him pending a separate hearing on whether he violated the terms of his earlier parole.

But striking footage from the previous evening continued to circulate online, showing riot police dispersing and detaining Navalny supporters as they awaited his expected arrival at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, and cars being blocked from exiting the area once news emerged that his flight was being rerouted to another airport, Sheremetyevo.

[The Kremlin] fears the man with no name.”

The Kremlin has denied involvement in the August poisoning —despite evidence from open-source investigations that it was carried out by the Federal Security Service (FSB) — and has gone out of its way to downplay Navalny’s significance as a politician, with Putin calling him “the Berlin patient” and “the man in question” to avoid even uttering his name. But the scenes sparked by Navalny’s repatriation, analysts say, expose the very real challenge he presents for the Kremlin and the reasons why authorities have moved so fast to jail him.

“The Kremlin has shown that for all its pretense of disinterest, it fears the man with no name,” Russia expert Mark Galeotti wrote in a column.

Navalny has made a name for himself despite facing what is arguably the Russian state’s most powerful political weapon: a network of state-controlled TV channels that are well-funded, often take cues directly from the Kremlin, and have baselessly painted him as a Western agent. A September poll by the independent Levada Center found that a majority of Russians see his poisoning as a publicity stunt, with only 15 percent blaming the Kremlin, despite the evidence of its complicity.

Police detain participants of a protest in support of Navalny in St.Petersburg on January 18.

Nevertheless, millions have watched his video investigations alleging corruption among associates of Putin, and thousands across the country have heeded his call to attend anti-government protests several times in recent years. But after his poisoning, few Russians took to the streets in protest. And restrictions associated with the coronavirus pandemic and an accelerating clampdown on dissent in Russia have contributed to a widespread sense, surveys show, that demonstrating against injustice is too often a futile activity.

“Navalny’s arrest has failed to rouse the population as a whole,” wrote political analyst Vladislav Inozemtsev. “That’s sad, but you can’t ignore it.”

On January 18, at Navalny’s hearing outside Moscow, the judge overseeing proceedings inside the police station holding the opposition leader returned after more than 45 minutes to deliver her ruling. She ordered Navalny jailed for 30 days, long past an expected January 29 hearing regarding his alleged parole violation. Lawyers say the outcome of that process could be a 3 1/2 -year prison sentence, and Navalny could be hit with additional charges that carry a sentence of up to 10 years.

Before being led away, Navalny addressed Russians with a call for mass protests across the country on January 23 — throwing down the gauntlet both to a Kremlin reluctant to acknowledge his influence and to a population that he hopes will brave the winter cold, and a likely police crackdown, to demand his freedom.

“Don’t be scared,” Navalny said in a video posted from the makeshift courtroom, sitting against the backdrop of a folded Russian flag. “Take to the streets.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Poisoned Kremlin foe Aleksei Navalny has announced his return to Russia on January 17. Analysts say he is balancing the very real threat of arrest against the much slimmer prospect of igniting a massive wave of protest against President Vladimir Putin’s government.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The waning days of 2020 were rife with portentous activity in Russia.

The Investigative Committee announced a new criminal case against opposition leader Aleksei Navalny on large-scale fraud charges. The Justice Ministry added five individuals to its list of “foreign mass media performing the functions of a foreign agent” under controversial legislation that could potentially be enforced against almost anyone in the country. New restrictions were imposed on public demonstrations, and blocking streets was criminalized. Online defamation is now punishable by up to two years in prison. The government has taken on new authority to block foreign and domestic websites that it asserts are censoring Russian state-media content.

Denis Volkov, director of the independent Levada Center pollster, says developments like these form “a general context of intensifying pressure by the authorities on the active portion of society.”

The Kremlin’s actions, Carnegie Moscow Center analyst Andrei Kolesnikov adds, show that President Vladimir Putin’s government is feeling anxious in a changing social and political climate as it prepares for elections to the State Duma, the lower parliament house, that must be held by September. Those elections, in turn, are the last scheduled national political landmark before the end of Putin’s current presidential term in 2024.

“A war is getting under way,” Kolesnikov told RFE/RL. “I’m afraid that [in 2021] it will seriously intensify. The situation could become much more confrontational. It is a very dangerous moment.”

Voter Disenchantment

Putin and the Kremlin-controlled United Russia party are in a weak position as the elections approach. The coronavirus pandemic and its attendant dislocations have accelerated social processes in Russia that have been observable for about the last three years. Putin’s own approval-disapproval ratings now are similar to what they were in the restive period of 2011-12, during which he returned to the Kremlin after Dmitry Medvedev’s one-term placeholder presidency.

“Earlier we could speak confidently about the existence of a pro-Putin majority,” Kolesnikov said. “Now it is very hard to say whether it exists, whether it can be mobilized during the elections. Most likely, it is falling apart into several minorities whose members may not be democratically-minded but are unhappy with the current situation.”

A Russian police officer detains a demonstrator during a protest in central Moscow earlier this year.

Primarily, the roots of the dissatisfaction are economic. Although Russia has weathered the pandemic better than many expected, the government forecasts real disposable income to fall by 3 percent in 2020, while outside economists say that figure is 1-2 percent too low. “Incomes were shrinking continuously in 2014-17 and, by the end of 2020, they will be 10 percent lower than in the ‘pre-Crimean’ year of 2013,” wrote RBC economics editor Ivan Tkachyov last month, referring to Russia’s seizure of the Ukrainian region of Crimea in 2014, which gave Putin a massive popularity boost.

For the poorest Russians, the situation became so difficult that the government set retail price caps for some basic foods in December.

Many voters were also disenchanted by the way the constitution was rewritten in the early part of the year in a process that they believed was driven by Putin’s personal interests rather than their good or even the country’s.

“It was clear to everyone that the amendments to the constitution were adopted with one goal in mind – to secure the possibility [for Putin] to run for more presidential terms,” said Boris Grozovsky, an economics columnist and editor of the Events And Texts Telegram channel. “That is why it also ‘nullified’ Putin’s popularity and the legitimacy of the political regime. That is why immediately after the amendments, he had to significantly increase repressive measures both on the level of legislation and in practice.”

Paradigm Shift?

Either instinctively or by design, Putin seems to have shifted his political paradigm. And the clearest example of this shift is the fate of his Direct Line call-in program.

For most of his two decades in power, Putin has held the annual, marathon Direct Line question-and-answer program in which he fielded carefully choreographed questions from average Russians on issues such as the availability of playgrounds, the notorious condition of Russian roads, shortages of medicines, or the plight of teachers or doctors.

In later iterations of the program, regional and cabinet officials were forced to listen in as Putin heard the complaints and then were grilled by the president about why their region was experiencing such a problem. In some cases, the officials returned to screens later in the same broadcast to report, for instance, that road crews had been sent to fill in potholes or that a new playground had already magically appeared.

In short, Putin positioned himself as the traditional Russian “good tsar,” who was ready to rain benefits on the people but who was prevented from doing so by “bad boyars,” or noblemen. This kind of populism played well among much of the Russian public, strongly reinforced by Kremlin-directed state media.

In 2020, however, the Direct Line show was cancelled completely, although a few elements of it were incorporated into Putin’s end-of-the-year press conference with journalists on December 17. At that event, however, no cabinet ministers or regional officials appeared. Putin praised all levels of government for its handling of the coronavirus crisis.

If anyone was to blame for the problems of average Russians, Putin both stated and implied, it was the CIA and other nefarious foreign influences that were determined to restrict Russia in every way. Such statements strongly overshadowed the tiny populist gesture that Putin threw in at the end of the four-hour program when he announced the government would give families 5,000 rubles ($67) for each child under the age of 7.

“Looking at the recent press conference, I had the feeling that Putin was defending the bureaucratic system,” said Mikhail Kasyanov, who was prime minister during Putin’s first term, in 2000-04, and is now an opposition politician. “That is, he defended the power vertical that enables him to run the country.”

“Populism is an effort to appeal to the people, to be on their side, to criticize officials and various bosses while promising citizens that things will be fixed,” he continued. “This time, Putin could not do that since his own negative rating among the majority of Russians is growing. Putin is no longer above the fray, above the bureaucrats.”

Instead of this traditional populist-authoritarianism, “standard authoritarianism” has begun, Kasyanov said, adding that it “could develop into totalitarianism.”

“If automatic systems for running the country are developed,” he said, “Putin won’t have to communicate with the public or meet with business leaders or political elites. He will simply sign little pieces of paper.”

Analyst Kolesnikov agreed that Putin’s old populist approach no longer works as his long reign in power comes up against the growing discontent.

“In this personalized political system, he has come to personify not only everything that is good, but everything that is bad as well,” he told RFE/RL. “And that is where the problems start.”

Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny gestures during a court hearing in Moscow in 2017.

Kremlin political consultants have not forgotten the wave of mass protests that swept Russia in 2011-13, driven mainly by anger over evidence of fraud benefitting United Russia in December 2011 parliamentary elections and dismay over Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012.

“The people want change,” Kasyanov said. “This is clear. More than half of Russians want change. But the people sitting in the chairs of power fear such changes. They fear that they could go too far. I mean, street protests. We know that our leaders, if they listen to anything, only listen to street protests. We saw that in December 2011 and early 2012.”

That is why the Kremlin has focused its attention on Navalny, Kasyanov said. Russian security agents allegedly attempted to poison Navalny at least three times in recent months, including a near-fatal poisoning with a Novichok-type nerve agent in the Siberian city of Tomsk in August.

In addition, the authorities have opened a new fraud case — who is recuperating from the August poisoning in Germany — that analysts say is aimed at preventing Navalny from returning to Russia. If he does return, he could face prison in connection with the new case and with a previous conviction that he contends was based on fabricated charges.

“Aleksei Navalny is definitely the leader of the street,” Kasyanov said. “When the political struggle intensifies in this way, when the authorities act repressively, then, of course, street protests become the main instrument of struggle against them. So the authorities are trying to remove the leader of any possible future mass protests.”

With reporting by RFE/RL’s Russian Service and Current Time

This post was originally published on Radio Free.