Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Ragi, and today we're going to listen in on an excellent talk by Leonid Volkov from the Trace Forum in London.

Welcome. Leonid Volkov is the chief of staff to Alexei Navalny and political director to the Anti-Corruption Foundation.

Thank you for joining us.

Alexei is obviously a Russian opposition leader and an anti-corruption activist and currently in prison.

So let me start with, how is he?

Well, thanks for asking. Frankly, not very good.

He spent like a year and a half there under, well, decent conditions.

But the situation started to worsen a month ago.

When the prison administration is now trying to isolate him from the outer world. They are now not

letting him interact with his lawyers. They put him into solitary confinement. And frankly, the

situation is now quite bad. We are doing whatever possible, also trying to raise awareness on

the international level. We'll be launching a huge international campaign,

like Free Navalny campaign, very soon, yeah, because otherwise it's just going to kill him there.

But still, in terms of spirit, he remains very strong. There are still some ways to communicate.

Despite now, it's quite challenging. And the messages he sends us,

well, just encourage us to move on and keep fighting. When was the last time his lawyer was able to meet

with him? His lawyer was getting regular access initially, I think. For a while, yes. So now it's

much more complicated. So I believe last week we were able to arrange

one meeting with the lawyer this week, not yet. It will not surprise you that Putin is not coming

out of this conference very well. Can you talk a little bit about the joint effort to

expose corruption in Russia that you can... The Anti-Corruption Foundation has been founded by Alexine

Novelin in Russia in 2011. It identified actually like corruption as a main pillar of Putin's regime.

...