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Why Putin wants Alexei Navalny dead

Navalny’s movement is unlike any in recent history.

In August 2020, Russian politician Alexei Navalny was campaigning in Siberia when he suddenly fell ill. He collapsed, was rushed to a hospital, then evacuated to Berlin, Germany, where doctors concluded that he had been poisoned with a lethal nerve agent called Novichok.

It was not completely unexpected. In recent years, a number of Russian dissidents and defectors have been poisoned. And Navalny is the most outspoken critic of the country’s president, Vladimir Putin. In less than 10 years, Navalny has risen from blogging about corruption to being the face of Russia’s opposition movement. When he was poisoned, he was organizing a campaign that threatened Putin’s party in elections across the country.

Watch the video above to find out how Alexei Navalny built a movement unlike any in recent Russian history, and how he became Putin’s greatest threat.

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