USA TODAY
MOSCOW – To his supporters, anti-corruption figure Alexei Navalny, whose detention has sparked massive protests across Russia, was sent to prison for the crime of daring to survive President Vladimir Putin s efforts to poison him. Putin is turning his main threat into a martyr, a kind of Russian Nelson Mandela, said Jaka Bizilj, the director of the Berlin-based humanitarian group Cinema for Peace Foundation, referring to South Africa s anti-apartheid hero and former president.
In August, Bizilj organized for Navalny to be evacuated by private plane to Germany after he fell into a coma in the Siberian city of Omsk. Russia says there is no evidence the longtime Kremlin critic was poisoned. But German scientists determined Navalny had been exposed to the Russian military grade nerve agent Novichok, a claim backed by the U.S. and several European countries. An investigation by Bellingcat, a digital research organization, traced the poisoning to Russian sec