Author’s Note | The CNN film “Navalny” premiered in April 2022 and won the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary. Can be found on HBO Max, owned by the same owner as CNN
Russian dissident Alexei Navalny’s daughter, Dasha Navalnaya, urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine and free her father and the country’s political prisoners in a wide-ranging interview with CNN on Friday.
“We will not stop fighting” until both goals are achieved, Navalnaya said.
His father Navalny – an outspoken critic of the Kremlin and its war in Ukraine – is serving a nine-year sentence in a maximum-security prison east of Moscow after being convicted by a Russian court last year of large-scale fraud.
He was poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent in 2020, which many Western officials and Navalny publicly blamed on the Kremlin. Russia has denied any involvement.
After months in Germany recovering from the detox, Navalny returned to Moscow, where he was promptly arrested for violating probation in a 2014 embezzlement case he said was politically motivated.
He was initially sentenced to two-and-a-half years and then nine years after being accused of stealing from his anti-corruption foundation.
Navalny, who once ran for political office in Russia, has long been a thorn in the side of the Kremlin.
Tasha said the “main goal” of her father’s work and anti-corruption foundation was “to see Russia become a free country, with open elections, freedom of the press, freedom of expression, and the opportunity to be part of a normal Western democratic society”.
He also described growing up in a family closely watched by the Kremlin, saying he and his brother would play a game on public transport to avoid spies.
“We’d look around, and then we’d start talking to the guy in the bad camouflage and the black hat and the weird strappy bag, and we’d jump — not off the train, but out of the cab,” he said.
But Navalnaya has expressed growing concern about her father’s current conditions in prison, saying his family has limited access to Navalny and his lawyers can only see him “through a screen”.
“So we can’t be sure of his health, and he hasn’t seen his family in over half a year.” “I haven’t seen him in person for over a year and it’s very worrying considering his deteriorating health.”
Dasha Navalnaya in an interview with Erin Burnett on CNN
Concerns about Navalny’s health persisted for months. Footage of his sentencing last year showed Navalny leaning with his lawyers in a room full of security officers.
Navalny himself has tweeted about the harsh conditions in prison, saying in November he was isolated from other prisoners in what he described as a move designed to silence him. Prisoners in Russian prisons are usually housed in wards rather than cells, according to a report Think tank Based at the Polish Center for Oriental Studies.
The “truly unspeakable brutality” of his imprisonment, however, was the limits on family visits, he said at the time.
Navalny’s poisoning and subsequent legal troubles attracted Russian and foreign public interest. Following his arrest, Russia was the scene of large-scale anti-government protests in towns and cities across the country, with authorities arresting 11,000 protesters within weeks.
In June last year, Navalny was transferred from the penal colony in Pokro to the maximum security prison in Melekovo in Russia’s Vladimir region.
Throughout his imprisonment, Navalny strongly condemned the Russian occupation of Ukraine through the media, emphasizing the nationwide anti-war demonstrations as “the backbone of the movement against war and death”.
In a tweet about his prison conditions last year, he vowed to keep speaking out.
“What then is my first duty? That is right, not to fear and be quiet,” he wrote. “At every opportunity, campaign against war, Putin and United Russia. Hugs to you all.”
“Hardcore explorer. Extreme communicator. Professional writer. General music practitioner. Prone to fits of apathy.”