Alexey Navalny says he will sue Vladimir Putin

Opposition politician Alexey Navalny says he will sue Vladimir Putin and the Presidential Administration over an allegedly coordinated campaign by local officials nationwide to deny his activists permits for public demonstrations.

Navalny argues that city officials are “acting in an organized, synchronized way, with clear orders from Moscow.” He says he hopes to use the lawsuit to question state officials and prove that “these illegal instructions” come “personally from Putin.” According to Navalny, “there’s simply no one else who could do this.”

Navalny says that city officials across Russia have recently stopped issuing permits to his presidential campaign, and his team has had to resort to staging events on private property (in shopping malls, movie theaters, warehouses, and so on).