BILL BROWDER: Alexei Navalny was my friend… we worked together tackling Russia’s corrupt oligarchs. Despite obvious dangers he kept on fighting from his prison cell, even exposing his prison governor’s penchant for threesomes

Three years ago I said that President Putin carried out a slow-motion assassination of Russia’s leading dissident Alexei Navalny. Today my worst fears came true.

Navalny was principled and fearless, but in the end he tragically underestimated the malice and brutality of Putin and his henchmen.

Like everyone who worked with him over the years to expose the abhorrent corruption of Russia’s 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 supporters 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 Russian business.

“Navalny was motivated by a deep sense of patriotism and angry outrage at the way Putin’s mafia state stole from the Russian people,” says Bill Browder

After I was deported in 2005, we continued to work together to expose the naked greed of the men at the top.

I redoubled my efforts in 2009 after 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 horribly tortured.

Navalny was motivated by a deep sense of patriotism and angry outrage at the way Putin’s mafia state stole from the Russian people.

And despite being arrested repeatedly for speaking out, he continued to fight.

In August 2020, authorities had had enough and officers from the FSB – the successor to the KGB – tried to kill him with a nerve agent.

He only survived because his supporters were able to fly him to Germany for advanced medical treatment.

Despite the obvious dangers he faced in his home country, after spending a month in hospital, he returned to Russia against the advice of friends, believing that he could not be an effective politician unless he was on the ground used to be.

Alexei was arrested as soon as 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 deeply embarrassing video investigation into the ostentatious $1.5 billion palace Putin had built for himself on the Black Sea. At last count it had over 100 million views on YouTube.

More recently, in an almost suicidally courageous move, he had them draw up a dossier on the governor of the prison in which he was imprisoned.

The resulting investigation not only uncovered Colonel Dmitry Nozhkin’s mistress, but also revealed his and his wife’s predilection for threesomes.

His punishment was a transfer to an even more inhospitable penal colony deep in the Arctic Circle, where temperatures can drop to minus 30 degrees Celsius at this time of year.

I am currently at the Munich Security Conference, campaigning for the release of Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian dissident who was sentenced a year ago to 25 years for ‘treason’ after denouncing the invasion of Ukraine.

We can only hope that the global outrage over the death of my friend Alexei Vladimir and so many other heroic activists will provide some measure of protection against the murderous death cult in the Kremlin.

Bill Browder is the author of Freezing Order: Vladimir Putin, Russian Money Laundering And Murder – A True Story