Navalnyj stoppas – får inte utmana Putin i valet 2018

Alexei Anatolievich Navalny (Russian: Алексе́й Анато́льевич Нава́льный, Russian pronunciation: [ɐlʲɪkˈsʲej ɐnɐˈtolʲjɪvʲɪtɕ nɐˈvalʲnɨj]; born June 4, 1976) is a Russian lawyer, political and financial activist. A regular participant in Russian March, since 2009, he has gained prominence in Russia, and in the Russian and international media, as a critic of corruption and of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has organized large-scale demonstrations promoting reform and attacking political corruption, Putin and Putin's political allies; he has run for a political office on the same platform. In 2012, The Wall Street Journal described him as "the man Vladimir Putin fears most". A self-described nationalist democrat, Navalny is a Russian Opposition Coordination Council member and the leader of the political party Progress Party. In September 2013, he ran in the Moscow mayoral election, supported by the RPR-PARNAS party. He came in second, with 27% of the vote, losing to incumbent mayor Sergei Sobyanin, a Putin appointee. His vote total was much higher than political analysts had expected, but Navalny and his allies insisted that the actual number was still higher and that authorities had committed election fraud in order to prevent a runoff election from taking place. Navalny came to prominence via his blog, hosted on the website LiveJournal, which remains his primary method of communicating with the public. He has used his blog to attack Putin and his allies, to organize political demonstrations, to post documents showing Putin and his associates to be engaged in unsavory behavior and to promote his campaigns for office. He has also been active in other media: most notably, in a 2011 radio interview he described Russia's ruling party, United Russia, as a "party of crooks and thieves", which soon became a popular epithet. He created the Anti-Corruption Foundation in 2011. Navalny has been arrested many times by Russian authorities, most seriously in 2012, when federal authorities accused him of three instances of embezzlement and fraud, all of which he denied. In July 2013, he was convicted of embezzlement and was sentenced to five years in a corrective labor colony. The cases are considered to be fabrications in retaliation for his political activity. The Memorial Human Rights Center considered Navalny as a political prisoner. Navalny was released from prison a day after sentencing. The prison fine was suspended in October 2013. In February 2014, Navalny and his brother were prosecuted on embezzlement charges, and Navalny was placed under house arrest and restricted from communicating with anyone but his family; he was sentenced in December 2014 with another suspended prison term of 3.5 years, and his brother received an actual 3.5-year prison sentence. In March 2017, Alexei Navalny and his Anti-Corruption Foundation launched the campaign He Is Not Dimon to You, accusing Dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister and former president of Russia, of corruption. Navalny has announced his intention to run for President of Russia in the 2018 election. He and his supporters have been arrested and become victims of attacks on numerous occasions during the campaign.