Widow of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader. She is chairwoman of the Human Rights Foundation and of the advisory board of the Anti-Corruption Foundation.
Mrs Navalnaya has argued that the West lacks a long-term strategy towards Russia, reacting to the Kremlin's actions rather than planning decades ahead. She addressed the Bled Strategic Forum calling for such a strategy, and a year later lamented that scant progress had been made.
She traces the roots of Vladimir Putin's authoritarianism to the 1990s, when the world naively assumed post-Soviet Russia would naturally become a liberal democracy. She argues that alarming signs were largely ignored, including the impoverishment of tens of millions through botched economic reforms and corrupt privatisation, the rigged elections of 1996, and the behind-the-scenes transfer of power from Boris Yeltsin to Putin in 1999. She contends that two decades of Western passivity followed, even after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, and political assassinations.
She urges the West to support Russian civil society, independent media and human-rights defenders, to distinguish between Putin's regime and Russian citizens and culture, and to avoid normalising the regime or treating its officials as legitimate representatives. She notes that Russia has not seen free elections in over 30 years. She also argues it would be a grave mistake to accept as legitimate any successor to Putin from within his own regime.
She opposed the EU's November 2025 decision to end multiple-entry Schengen visas for Russian citizens, arguing the ban would isolate Russia from Europe in precisely the way Putin has in mind.
A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.