(L-R) Navalny allies Georgy Alburov, Maria Pevchikh, Ruslan Shaveddinov and Ivan Zhdanov. Photo: Maria Pevchikh / Telegram
The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office has demanded ACF Inc., the American legal arm of slain opposition politician Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), be declared a “terrorist organisation”, Navalny’s team reported on Wednesday.
The Russian Supreme Court will consider the request behind closed doors on 27 November, though Navalny’s associates are in no doubt of the outcome. “On behalf of the Russian Federation, we will be included on the same list as Al-Qaeda,” Leonid Volkov, the former chair of the FBK, told independent news outlet Meduza.
Volkov added that the ruling would make the organisation’s international activities “even more difficult”, as international banks and other entities may refuse to work with a “terrorist” organisation, unaware about the political motivations behind the ruling.
Volkov explained that the FBK needed an American legal arm to make it easier to collect donations, saying “anyone involved in crowdfunding registers an American legal entity for that very purpose”. Russia declared the FBK “extremist” in 2021.
Last week, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced it had opened a criminal case against exiled Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky and 22 other members of the Russian Antiwar Committee for “involvement in a terrorist community” and “attempting to seize power by force”.
The FSB said that Khodorkovsky, who co-founded the Russian Antiwar Committee in February 2022 to oppose Vladimir Putin and his war in Ukraine, had called for the overthrow of the Russian government in its Berlin Declaration, adopted in April 2023.
Other members of the organisation being charged include prominent opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was exchanged as part of the largest ever prisoner swap between Russia and the West in August 2024, political scientist Yekaterina Schulmann and Novaya Gazeta Europe editor-in-chief Kirill Martynov.
The charges also relate to a platform set up for Russian democratic forces at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which the FSB said was positioning itself as a “constitutional assembly of the transition period” and an “alternative to the Russian authorities”.
