THE Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, who died in prison in February, believed his death “wouldn’t change anything” in the fight he was fighting in Russia and that “many others were ready to take his place,” according to a video of an interview he gave in December 2020 that had never been shown until today. This video was made public today by the French media Libération and LCI.

“I believe that if they kill me, nothing will change because there are other people ready to replace me,” Navalny said at the time. Members of the groups supporting him “know how to work without me because I spend a long time in prison every year and they are used to working without me,” he added. His organization “would continue to operate, but it would certainly be more difficult psychologically and in terms of motivation,” he continued, stressing: “But there are others who can lead.”

Navalny died on February 16, under circumstances that have not yet been clarified, in an Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence for “extremism”. His funeral took place last Friday in Moscow. He was imprisoned in early 2021 but continued to denounce relentlessly the repression and corruption of the Russian elite, as well as Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.

On December 17, 2020, in Berlin, exactly one year before his return to Russia and his arrest, Navalny met with Frenchman Jacques Mer who was then a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Mer had been appointed special rapporteur in the Navalny poisoning investigation and his aim was to examine the events from a legal point of view and ascertain the responsibility of the Russian authorities, according to the Libération newspaper.

In the videotaped testimony Navalny gave at a hotel, he spoke, in English, about the circumstances under which he was poisoned in Siberia in the summer of 2020, the role of the secret services in his life after he decided to run for the Russian presidency, and what he believed about the Vladimir Putin.

When Jacques Mer asked him if he thought he would be arrested on his return to Russia, he replied: “It’s a question I prefer not to answer (…) They are constantly making threats, they have seized my apartment and my bank accounts (…) They will get arrested at the airport? Or later? I have no idea”.

“There are millions of people who refuse to live in a country where all power is concentrated in the hands of one man,” he continued, adding: “At least half the country wishes Russia was a normal European country but (Vladimir Putin) wants to do everything to suppress them, to discourage these kinds of thoughts or political movements.”

The interview will be published tomorrow Thursday in the newspaper, under the title “Navalni, the posthumous interview”.