Russia‘s Supreme Court declares Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation ‘terrorist organisation’

Russia’s Supreme Court has deemed ACF Inc., the American legal arm of late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), a “terrorist organisation”, TASS reported on Thursday.

The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office petitioned the court to declare ACF Inc. a “terrorist organisation” last month. The presiding judge, Oleg Nefedov, announced his ruling in a court session held behind closed doors on Thursday.

Nefedov has previously also recognised the non-existent “international LGBT movement” and the “international Satanism movement” as “extremist” organisations, making them illegal in Russia.

Leonid Volkov, the former director of the FBK, told independent news outlet Meduza last month that should the court indeed rule it to be a “terrorist organisation”, the FBK’s international activities would be made “even more difficult”, as foreign banks would likely refuse to work with an entity that had been given such a designation.

According to Volkov, the FBK’s US subsidiary had been necessary to set up to facilitate the foundation’s ability to collect donations, saying “anyone involved in crowdfunding registers an American legal entity for that very purpose”.

Responding to the news on Thursday, the FBK said that it was, if fact, “Vladimir Putin and his henchmen” who were terrorists, describing them as “the people who started a war and killed civilians and political opponents”. It added that the decision had been taken to intimidate the FBK’s supporters in the hopes that they would be too frightened to lend the organisation their support.

The FBK was founded in 2011 and made a name for itself by publishing fearless investigations into high-level corruption in the Russian government, including landmark reporting on the unprecedented corruption schemes connected to former Russian president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev in 2017, which led to mass protests across the country.

In 2021, the FBK was officially deemed an “extremist organisation”, having released damning investigations into the FSB poisoning of its founder Alexey Navalny and an exposé of Vladimir Putin’s vast Black Sea palace, both of which were watched by tens of millions of people.