From the newsroom of the Washington Post.

Hi there is the Mary Marissa Lang with the Washington Post.

Hey it's Dossie, I want to pick your brain on the truck.

Hi, it's Janet Johnson.

This is Post Reports.

I'm Martin Powers.

It's Thursday, February 4th.

Today, the crackdown on protests in Russia.

And Pfizer's attempts to squeeze an extra dose out of its vaccine vials.

Earlier this week, a Lexi Navalny was sentenced to two years and eight months in a Russian prison.

Navalny is an opposition leader in Russia and a prominent critic of Vladimir Putin.

The post-Mosco Burechi, for Abundixson, has been reporting on his court case and how it started a huge outcry around the country.

We're seeing at the moment protests across Russia, not just in Moscow, but in more than a hundred cities across the country in freezing temperatures in many places.

And we're seeing riot police dispersing those protests very forcefully at times using batons, stun guns and violence.

And the reason why people are protesting is because of the arrests and jailing of opposition leader Alexey Navalny.

Who is essentially Putin's strongest rival and he's also a strong anti-corruption campaigner who's been working hard to expose the kleptocracy of the Russian state since around about 2011.

And he's done that by releasing a whole lot of viral videos telling the story of how some of the bureaucrats, security chiefs, politicians, even spokesmen have acquired palaces and large duches and millionaire lifestyles, yachts, mistresses and so forth.

And how those types of lifestyles are really out of sync with their rather modest state salaries. He keeps asking the question, where is the money coming from? And he's managed to illustrate to many Russians just how corrupt the state has become.

What has precipitated this most recent round of protests and outrage from Russians?

In late August, Alexey Navalny was in the city of Tombs where he was meeting with members of his local headquarters and he suffered a terrible poisoning attack.

It was very dramatic. He was on an aeroplane and audio footage of that incident. We could hear him screaming in pain.

The only reason he really survived this was that the pilot took dramatic action and diverted the plane to Omsk and the medical crew on the ground worked very quickly to save his life.

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