Alexey Navalny knows about CNN documentary’s Oscar win, his daughter says

By Erin Burnett and Mia Alberti, CNN

Imprisoned Russian anti-corruption campaigner Alexey Navalny knows the CNN film about his life has won an Oscar, his daughter said Monday.

“Yes I can confirm that he knows that he won an Oscar. It’s still crazy to say out loud, and I’m sure he is incredibly happy,” Dasha Navalnaya told CNN’s Erin Burnett.

“Navalny” won best documentary feature at Sunday’s Academy Awards. The film explores the plot to kill Navalny, an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin, who is now serving a nine-year sentence at a maximum-security prison east of Moscow.

Navalnaya said the Oscar win is a realization of her father’s work and that everyone who “has been fighting against the Putin regime is not going unseen.”

“[It shows] we are fighting the fight and it seems like we are winning,” she said.

Directed by Daniel Roher and presented by CNN Films and HBO Max, “Navalny” highlights an investigation by CNN’s Chief International Correspondent Clarissa Ward and journalist group Bellingcat into the former presidential candidate’s poisoning with the nerve agent Novichok in 2020.

Navalny and several Western officials blamed the failed assassination attempt on the Kremlin, which has denied any involvement.

After several months in Germany recovering from the poisoning, Navalny returned to Moscow, where he was immediately arrested for violating probation terms imposed from a 2014 embezzlement case that he said was politically motivated.

He was initially sentenced to two-and-a-half years, and then later given nine years over separate allegations that he stole from his anti-corruption foundation.

The activist’s daughter has voiced escalating concern about her father’s prison conditions, saying that her family has had limited access to him and his attorneys are able to see him only “through a guarded veil.”

“So we can’t really know for sure his health circumstance and he hasn’t seen his family in over half a year,” she said on March 3. “I haven’t seen him in person in over a year and it’s quite concerning considering his health is getting worse and worse.”

Navalnaya said the “main goal” of her father’s work and anti-corruption foundation “is for Russia to become a free state, to have open elections, to have freedom of press, freedom of speech, and just you know, to have the opportunity to become a part of the normal Western democratized community.”

“We will not stop fighting,” until the end of Russia’s war in Ukraine and until her father is released, Navalnaya previously told Burnett.

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CNN’s Marianne Garvey, Sophie Tanno and Caitlin Hu contributed reporting.