Hi, I'm Dampramack and welcome to Axios Recap.

Today's Tuesday, January 19th.

Stocks are up.

The Trump presidency is down to the wire.

And we're focused on Joe Biden's first major foreign policy test.

For the past several months, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been in Germany,

recovering from an assassination attempt via nerve agent, which Navalny pins on Vladimir Putin.

Then last week, he announced his intentions to return home, soon boarding a plane from

Berlin to Moscow. Now, that flight was diverted

from one Moscow airport to another, and Navalny was promptly detained upon touchdown.

As of Sunday, no one seemed to know where he was. Then, yesterday, Navalny appeared inside a makeshift

courtroom inside a Moscow police station, where a judge ordered him to be held for the

next 30 days. Nivalny then taped a video message to supporters, telling them to take to the streets

and protest. Inside of Russia, state media is portraying Navalny as an insurrectionist, but to most

outside observers, he appears to be a political prisoner and possibly the first major flashpoint

in the relationship between Russia and the incoming Biden administration. Already, Joe Biden's

expected national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, has publicly sided with Navalny. But neither Sullivan nor

Biden have said what they plan to do about the situation, nor if it will impact a February

5th deadline to renew a major arms control treaty between the two countries.

So we wanted to go deeper with Bill Browder, an investor who has his own history of running

a foul of Vladimir Putin, culminating in the passage of anti-Russia sanctions known as the

Magnitsky Act.

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