The BBC reported at least a hundred police officers fired due to support for Navalny

The BBC Russian Service reported at least a hundred police officers fired because of their support for politician Alexei Navalny since December 2021.

BBC sources in the Ministry of Internal Affairs say that “by February we were already talking about hundreds” of dismissed employees. “In Volgograd, according to the BBC, 17 employees had to leave. In the Yaroslavl region, more than 30 people are reluctantly resigning, in Perm - 22 employees, in the Tomsk region - almost 30, 5-15 people each in the Kaluga, Voronezh, Sverdlovsk and Tyumen regions,” the publication writes.

“This is the FSB. They conduct a check and release ready-made names to the regions. No one will argue with them,” added the publication’s source in the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

The BBC notes that the email addresses of all their interlocutors were in the Smart Voting database, which, according to the oppositionists , was uploaded by former employee Fyodor Gorozhanko.

We are probably talking about the database from the website free.navalny.com , which became publicly available in April 2021. Gorozhanko was accused of stealing this particular database, and not the Smart Voting database.

In July of the same year, a Habr user found a vulnerability on the Smart Voting website, which allowed him to see the emails of those registered on the site.

In December 2021, the TV channel reported that police officers across Russia began to be fired because of subscriptions to Navalny’s public pages, registration in the Smart Voting project and likes on posts. Then 14 employees spoke about layoffs.