38 Time January 31/February 7, 2022
Navalny’s foundation sent a similar
message to the White House early last
year, asking for sanctions against 35 of
Russia’s most senior officials and oli-
garchs close to Putin. The proposal has
bipartisan support in Congress, where
the blacklist was dubbed the Navalny 35.
Its most vocal advocate has been U.S.
Representative Tom Malinowski, a New
Jersey Democrat and former diplomat
in the Obama Administration. Navalny’s
“central insight,” Malinowski told me,
“is that corruption is both the Putin re-
gime’s reason for being and its greatest
political vulnerability.”
The Biden Administration has been
vocal in condemning the Kremlin’s at-
tacks against Navalny and his move-
ment. But it has avoided expressing sup-
port for his dream of political change in
Russia, and it has not imposed the sanc-
tions he proposes. One Kremlin insider,
who is close to some of the people on
Navalny’s blacklist, told me that going
after them would be ineffective, because
none of the targets could change Putin’s
mind about Navalny, NATO or Ukraine.
“Can you even imagine such a conver-
sation? ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, maybe
we should ease up. We’ve got a lot of
money on the line.’ Nobody would come
to him with something like that,” says
the source. “You’d have to be an idiot.”
But the aim of the sanctions, Navalny
told me, would not be to convince Rus-
sian billionaires to reason with Putin. It
is to pressure them to turn against him.
In pursuing that goal, Navalny
had long been careful to avoid for-
eign sponsors, not wanting to be per-
ceived inside Russia as an agent of the
West. That policy became moot once
the state designated his organization a
“foreign agent” last year. “It untied our
hands,” says Leonid Volkov, a longtime
ally of Navalny who now helps run the
movement from exile.
The group now openly calls for po-
litical backing from foreign govern-
ments and solicits money from private
donors. When we met over dinner in
November, Volkov was in Washington
to speak before Congress on Navalny’s
behalf and drum up support. A few days
later, he held the movement’s first offi-
cial fund raiser in New York City, invit-
ing wealthy Russian expats to back their
cause. Hundreds showed up, snapping
selfies with Navalny’s surrogates like
they were celebrities.
The resulting windfall from such do-
nors has helped pay for their new bases
of operation in Eastern Europe. When
I visited in January, their office in Vil-
nius, the capital of Lithuania, looked
more like a media startup than a revo-
lutionary lair, though freshly exiled ac-
tivists are welcome to use its shower and
rest on the beanbags that lean against
the walls. Technicians were busy setting
up a new TV studio, where Navalny’s
allies film video investigations that are
broadcast into Russia, routinely finding
an audience of millions. In the kitchen-
ette, a poster shows a red X over two sur-
veillance cameras, alongside a caption:
They can’T see everyThing.
The nation of Lithuania, a member
of NATO and the E.U., has been happy
to host the exiles, including numerousfugitives from Russia and at least two
designated by Putin’s regime as “terror-
ists.” The Lithuanians have dismissed
Moscow’s demands to arrest members
of the group. “Our history obliges us to
welcome such people,” Vytautas Lands-
bergis, the founding father of modern
Lithuania, told me recently in his Vil-
nius apartment. “The question for us is
whether they can liberate Russia from
Putin the way we liberated ourselves
from the KGB.”
In the spring of 1990, Lithuania be-
came the first Soviet republic to de-
clare its independence from Moscow.
Landsbergis signed that declaration,
then faced down the Soviet tanks sent
to crush the rebellion the following
year. More than a dozen demonstra-
tors wound up dead before the Krem-
lin backed off and let the country break
away. Landsbergis, 89, retired long ago.WORLD
RAFAL MILACH—MAGNUM PHOTOS FOR TIME (3)