Jailed Putin critic Alexey Navalny announces new project to ‘turn people against the war’

Alexey Navalny has announced the launch of a new project that he referred to as an “electoral campaign against the war and against Putin.” A statement outlining the initiative appeared on Navalny’s website on Monday as the politician attended the first hearing in a new “extremism” case that could see an additional 30 years added to his prison sentence.

“[We’ll conduct a] long, persistent, exhausting, but fundamentally important campaign in which we’ll turn people against the war,” reads the statement.

According to Navalny, the new campaign will be run “according to the laws and strategies of high-quality electoral campaigns,” including “surveying everybody, targeting hundreds of different groups, selecting an individual approach for each one, identifying who’s wavering, and changing their minds.”

Among other groups, the opposition figure said he plans to appeal directly to “hundreds of thousands of mobilized soldiers, who have seen with their own eyes the Putin regime as it really is.”

With many of the tools traditionally used by activists, such as protest rallies and phone calls, unavailable inside Russia, changing people’s minds will require “new possibilities and new technologies” such as offshore and decentralized call centers and campaigning through messenger apps, Navalny said. “We’re starting to come up with solutions, to build, to hire, and to raise money,” he wrote. He invited IT workers, marketing specialists, sociologists, political scientists, and donors to contribute to the project.