Alexei Navalny's last strike

The Russian opposition leader spent the last weeks of his life locked up in a penal colony north of the Arctic Circle, a notoriously cold, dangerous and uncomfortable place with conditions so extreme they amount to torture.

For more than a decade, Navalny was the most prominent opponent of the Russian president and his biggest political threat.

He was under state surveillance, physically assaulted and imprisoned. Poisoned. But despite being isolated in the far north of the country, he was still able to convey messages to his supporters, contributing to the plan to mobilize the opposition during the presidential election.

Navalny's latest plan

On February 1, a message posted on his X social network account was the first instruction in the run-up to the presidential election:

"I like the idea of anti-Putin voters going to the polls together at 12 o'clock. Noon against Putin," he wrote. 

As explained by Politico and quoted by Index, that plan has its advantages. A nationwide protest would be national, legal and relatively safe.

"What can they do? Are they going to close the polling stations at 12 o'clock? Are they going to organize an action in support of Putin at 10 o'clock? Are they going to register everyone who came at noon and put them on the unreliable list?" added Navalny.

Navalny's death a little more than two weeks later gave that movement a new impetus.

Thousands of people came to his funeral, despite fear of police and arrest, and Navalny's mission was taken over by his widow and political heir, Yulia Navalnaya.

"Alexei invited people to participate in this protest and that's why for me personally this is so important," she said recently in a video in which she invited Russians to join the event "for Navalny": "I want to do what he thought was right ."

So, buried in Moscow's Borisovo cemetery, Navalny is still Putin's most powerful challenger. Regardless of whether crowds of Russians turn out at noon on Sunday to voice their dissent, his death further underscored Putin's lack of legitimacy.

"Even after he died, Navalny is doing the most damage to Putin," said Maxim Reznik, also an opposition politician from whom Navalny took the idea of "Noon Against Putin."