Help weaken Putin's regime and end the war

September was an intense and productive month for the Anti-Corruption Foundation. Despite relentless repression and censorship, our team continues to investigate corruption, expose Putin’s regime, and reach millions of people inside and outside Russia. 

Here’s what we’ve accomplished this month:

launched a major campaign against Putin’s ruling party, United Russia
released three new investigations
strengthened international pressure on Putin and his allies
conducted a nationwide survey showing Russians’ growing fatigue with the war
helped Russians avoid forced military service and win cases at the European Court of Human Rights

Campaign against Putin’s United Russia

Next year, Russia will hold parliamentary “elections.” Of course, they won’t be real—Putin’s regime controls every aspect of the process. But election periods are one of the few times when millions of people inside Russia start thinking about politics again.

That’s why we’ve launched a campaign to expose United Russia—the party of war, corruption, and poverty. Our goal is to show that no one genuinely supports it and that Putin’s so-called “national unity” is a myth.

Local initiatives across Russia—from Udmurtia to Voronezh—have already joined the campaign. Together we will show that there is no real support for Putin or his party.

Investigating the murder of Alexei Navalny

In September, Yulia Navalnaya released new details about the final days of her husband, Alexei Navalny, who was poisoned and killed in a Russian prison in February 2024.

We have testimony from prison staff and confirmation from two independent European laboratories: Alexei was poisoned. Yulia is demanding that the labs publish their findings—the world deserves to know the full truth.

Exposing corruption and propaganda

Igor Krasnov—Putin’s loyal prosecutor turned Supreme Court chairman

Krasnov was responsible for political repression, the destruction of independent media, and the prosecution of Alexei Navalny’s lawyers. Our new investigation reveals that his family acquired luxury real estate worth 1.5 billion—including an $8 million apartment near the Kremlin registered in the name of his two-year-old son.

Vladimir Medinsky and Anatoly Torkunov—rewriting history for Putin

Vladimir Medinsky, best known internationally as the Kremlin’s chief negotiator during peace talks with Ukraine, has long been one of Putin’s key propagandists. Together with Anatoly Torkunov, the rector of the elite MGIMO university that trains Russian diplomats, he wrote a new state-approved high-school history textbook now mandatory for all 11th graders in Russia.

The textbook glorifies Putin, justifies the invasion of Ukraine, and spreads conspiracy theories about the West. At the same time, both Medinsky and Torkunov have personally profited from the system they helped sustain.

What Russians really think about the war

Our sociological team conducted a nationwide poll, showing a clear trend: Russians are tired of the war and want peace.
Only 8% support additional military spending—the lowest level in three years.
75% want immediate peace talks.
31% believe healthcare should be the top government priority.
41% say the authorities are failing in their duties.
75% oppose criminal prosecution for opinions or speech.
Even under propaganda and repression, the demand for peace and normal life is growing.

International work
Europe. When media reports suggested that the EU might ban tourist visas for Russians, ACF sent an official appeal to Brussels. We urged the EU to target oligarchs and regime officials—not ordinary Russians. As a result, the latest sanctions package was adopted without a visa ban.

Australia. Yulia Navalnaya met with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong. Australia introduced new sanctions against Putin’s cronies on the same day—many of them featured in our investigations.

Canada. Together with Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, Yulia Navalnaya appealed to the Canadian government to accept Russian asylum seekers facing deportation from the United States—to save them from imprisonment or torture back home.

Legal work
Since 2017, ACF’s legal team has filed over 1,100 applications to the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of Russians unlawfully detained or persecuted by the regime. We have won 979 cases and secured almost €4 million in compensation for victims of political repression.

In September alone, our lawyers won six cases related to the 2021 pro-Navalny protests, totaling €24,500 in damages awarded to the victims.

Thank you for standing with us
Each investigation, each court case, each campaign

Links:

• Together against Putin's party
• Whan was Navalny poisoned with
• The secret life of the prosecutor general

May was a month of milestones—from preparing the second This Is Navalny festival, to a major victory for the Black Notebook project, to Patriot winning a British Book Award. Here's what we've been working on.

Platform of a Future Russia
On May 9–11, we held the second Russia of the Future forum, led once again by Yulia Navalnaya. Our team helped organise and run the event. Dozens of experts from across various fields attended, and for the first time, so did university students.

ACF
This month brought several important international achievements for the ACF:
First, the EU imposed sanctions on many of the judges, prosecutors, and investigators featured in our Black Notebook project—those responsible for sentencing people to prison for opposing the regime.

Second, Alexei Navalny was posthumously awarded the Charles Kettering Prize for Democracy. This is the award’s first-ever year, and the ceremony will take place in Washington this autumn.

Third, Navalny’s book Patriot received two British Book Awards—for Best Book and Best Non-Fiction.
Also, Yulia Navalnaya gave several powerful speeches this month. At the Truth Tellers summit in London, she spoke about where she finds the strength to carry on Alexei’s work and what drives her mission.

As Chair of the Human Rights Foundation, she delivered the opening speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum, calling on activists everywhere not to give up—to embrace imagination and remember that resistance is always possible, even under dictatorship.

ACF Annual Report
We published our Annual Report 2024, reflecting on the past year’s achievements and sharing our financial results. It was one of the toughest years for FBK, but we kept going—just as Alexei asked us to.
You can check out the full report in the presentation (in Russian) or watch the video version (with English subtitles). 

Investigations
In May, we took a closer look at Natalya Popova, the wife of Putin’s top negotiator Kirill Dmitriev. She hosts TV shows, speaks at forums, and travels abroad representing “Innopraktika”—a project linked to Katerina Tikhonova, Putin’s daughter.
Who is Popova really working for, and how does her friendship with Putin’s daughter shape her life? Irina Alleman investigates in our latest video.

Video Production
Navalny LIVE hit 13.5 million views and gained 3,000 new subscribers. We covered how Kremlin mouthpiece Dmitry Kiselyov lives, and how Putin’s oligarchs and officials throw their lavish weddings — with Putin himself attending some!

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV1B9bW5nHI

Popular Politics videos were watched 54 million times, and we gained over 15,000 new subscribers. Highlights included: a feud between Belarusian propagandist Azarenka and Putin’s chronicler Andrei Kolesnikov; the entitled daughter of a top Kremlin official; and a look into Sergei Shoigu’s new business ventures

Sirena
Our Sirena Telegram channel racked up over 8 million views this month. Some of the stories we broke: how Putin handed out Russian citizenship to those working at his private winery; how people in Moscow were hired as fake crowds for Victory Day events; and how the government responded to an oil spill in the Black Sea by hauling sand back and forth under the guise of clean-up—in reality, a money laundering scheme.

As we gathered material for our annual report, we were struck by just how much we’ve achieved—and none of it would be possible without the incredible support of our donors. Thank you for always standing with us.