Alexei Navalny exposed Putin’s $1.4B mansion, $700M superyacht ‘to mobilize people to fight’: expert
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny rose to prominence capturing the hearts and minds of the Russian people at the same time that Vladimir Putin stole their votes.
Instead of self-imposed exile following a failed 2020 assassination attempt using Novichok poison, Navalny chose to bravely return to Russia in 2021, where he was arrested and paid the ultimate price, dying in a remote prison Friday.
Thanks to his fearless reporting and anti-corruption foundation — a non-profit that investigates corruption by high-ranking Russian officials — the world learned about all of the palaces, yachts and private planes that Putin’s oligarchs allegedly built for their tsar and themselves, with all the money they stole from the Russian people.
The oligarchs are really “Kremligarchs” because they are merely wealth handlers — and holders — for the Kremlin, anti-corruption and kleptocracy expert Ilya Zaslavsky told The Post Friday.
Navalny highlighted the corruption and kleptocracy that poisoned Russia and threatens the world.
He remains one of the only Putin foes to die in jail instead of at the hands of Kremlin assassins who operate inside and outside Russian borders — like Boris Nemtsov, a Putin rival assassinated in the shadow of the Kremlin in 2015.
“Throughout his life, Navalny proved to the world that Russia is not only about Putin’s gang of killers, but that it is also about millions of people who wish to see the country prosperous, wealthy and peaceful,” Lyubov Sobol, a Russian anti-war opposition politician — and a key member of Navalny’s team — exclusively told The Post Friday.
“Corruption is the Achilles’ heel of Putin’s regime, the basis on which loyalty to Putin is built in Russia,” added Sobol, who produced Navalny’s influential videos.
“Navalny, with his inherent charisma, talked about the specific crimes of Putin’s regime, and his narrative resonated in the hearts of Russians. His video investigations are the pinnacle of journalistic art. He fought for the rights of Russians to know the truth and dedicated his life to this.”
It took time but the West finally came to understand that global corruption is a national security threat, as President Biden finally noted in 2021.
Some of Navalny’s most damning Putin exposés include:
Putin’s palace
In 2021, Navalny revealed Putin’s palace — a $1.35 billion Black Sea fortress — with a casino, Orthodox church, two helipads, a vineyard and even an underground ice hockey rink.
This exposé, complete with drone footage, has garnered 120 million hits since it was first posted on YouTube in January 2021, Sobol told The Post.
Oligarchs paid to build it — and it has been called the largest bribe in the world.
”They will keep on stealing more and more until they bankrupt the entire country,” Navalny said of Putin and his gang in the 113-minute video, according to the New York Times.
”Russia sells huge amounts of oil, gas, metals, fertilizer and timber — but people’s incomes keep falling and falling, because Putin has his palace.”
Putin’s superyachts
Navalny also exposed three of Putin’s massive superyachts, held in other people’s names to evade public relations fallout, not to mention sanctions.
The yachts include the Olympia and the Scheherazade, a 459-foot long, $700 million superyacht with a movie theater, helipad, pool and a security system that could shoot down drones.
It was seized in Italy, where another billionaire oligarch claims to own it.
There’s also the Graceful, which was moved from a German shipyard to Russia shortly before Putin’s illegal invasion of Crimea in 2022; its nickname is Kosatka, which means “Killer Whale.”
That yacht has a pool that turns into a dance floor and a helipad.
The Graceful, Navalny said, was staffed by members of the Russian Federal Security Service and sails with a motorcade; it has been spotted accompanied by a Russian Coast Guard boat helmed by the FSB, and it’s equipped with a special government-level “top secret” phone line.
Putin’s retreat near Finland
In 2017, Navalny exposed Putin’s massive holiday island retreat near Finland, according to the Guardian. Known as Villa Segren, the mansion sits on 50 acres around Lodochny island in the Gulf of Finland.
Navalny showed drone footage of new homes, a villa, a helipad and pier on the property — and said the site was heavily guarded.
“All the evidence clearly points towards one of Vladimir Putin’s standard corruption schemes,” Navalny said in the video.
“His personal assets are registered under the names of his close friends who have become fabulously wealthy over the last 17 years.”
Medvedev’s manor
In 2016, Navalny exposed the 200-acre “Milovka Manor,” about five hours from Moscow, where then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was said to holiday with his family, according to the Moscow Times.
It included a marina, ski slope, a special communications tower, giant outdoor chess board, three helipads and a special home for ducks who lived like tsars — yellow ducks then became a symbol of protest.
In a “fear and loathing” essay that Navalny wrote in August, after being handed a 19-year jail sentence, he wrote that he blamed the “reformers” of the 1990s who squandered a historic opportunity to bring democracy to Russia in favor of getting rich by rigged privatization auctions, overriding the courts, fixing elections, creating a culture of lies and the fetishization of wealth — they even sold Russians on a constitution that gave the president the powers of a tsar.
“There was no creeping or overt coup in our country led by people from the special services,” Navalny wrote.
“They did not come to power by pushing the democrat reformers out of power. They did it themselves. They called them themselves. They invited them themselves. They taught them how to fake elections. How to steal property from entire industries. How to lie to the media. How to change laws to suit themselves. How to suppress opposition by force. Even how to organize idiotic, stupid, talentless wars.”
“That is why I can’t help it and I fiercely hate those who sold, drank, and wasted the historical chance that our country had in the early 90s … I hate the swindlers, whom we used to call reformers for some reason,” he continued.
“Now it is very clear that they did nothing but intrigue and take care of their own wealth. Is there any other country where so many Ministers of the “Government of Reforms” became millionaires and billionaires? I hate the authors of the most stupid authoritarian constitution, which they sold to us idiots as democratic, even then giving the president the power of a full-fledged monarch.”
What Navalny witnessed made him believe that Putin’s Russia was even worse than the Soviet Union.
“I have no good words about the Soviet Union, but at least they had some restraints thanks to a party ideology and followed some rules of the game on the global scene at least in the later stages — they avoided killing their opponents in front of the whole world deliberately and openly,” Zaslavsky told The Post.
“Only under Putin have the execution-style deaths of rivals and gradual torture of Navalny become standard. Navalny was very brave. He understood what happened and he still went back to Russia. He exposed the systemic corruption on an unprecedented scale — not just of Putin but of everyone around him.”
“Navalny tried to mobilize people to fight. He lived by his actions. Not just his words.”
