“Nataliya, every time we meet you’re asking about the same thing: ‘What’s going to happen to Russia?’”

These were the words Alexei Navalny said to me during an interview at his office in Moscow in 2016, one of at least six I carried out with the opposition leader while he was still a free man.

Navalny was always the opposite of Vladimir Putin, the man he spent most of his life struggling against – witty, charming, and driven by a profound moral core.

Although my job was to remain impartial, his good nature often got the better of me.

I first met Alexei almost 14 years ago, when he was using minuscule holdings in several state-owned Russian companies to call for greater corporate transparency. Here was the beginning of his career as a campaigner against the corruption that has flourished to extraordinary heights under Putin.

On a winter afternoon in 2010 he invited me, a young business reporter with the Associated Press in Moscow, to a one-room office over a busy Moscow highway. He had a modest law practice, and activism was a hobby.

As soon as we started to talk about abuses at the shady state-owned oil company Surgutneftegaz, he leapt to the whiteboard and started to draw graphics and diagrams showing how much taxpayer money was being pilfered.

Navalny was totally passionate about what he was doing – and sought to bring others along. He was upset when I had to decline an invitation to attend a court hearing he was due to attend shortly. Still, he waved goodbye to us from his window as we were leaving.

Less than two years later, Navalny was impossible to get hold of: by December 2011, he had emerged as a budding leader of the Russian opposition movement and was inundated with media requests.

Once on stage, his presence was magnetic. Dressed in layers of thermal underwear, I stood at a central square in Moscow that winter, along with some 200,000 others who had taken to the streets to protest the rigging of the 2011 parliamentary elections. Several speakers condemned Putin, then prime minister and nominally second-in-command, and urged a fresh vote. But it was only when Navalny, then 34, started to speak that the crowd transformed.

Refusing to wear a hat in -20C degrees, he roared: “I can see enough people to storm the Kremlin right now but we’re a peaceful people – we’re not going to do it right now but if these thieves and crooks keep lying to us and stealing from us, we will take back what’s ours!”

In retrospect, the months-long wave of protests was the tipping point for Russia – something that might have stopped its decline into autocracy.

Navalny refused to call for violence. Instead, he found himself struggling to fit into the sanitised political landscape constructed by the Kremlin.

While others stayed within the limits of acceptable opposition, he grew bolder. It became clear he was a real headache for Putin because, unlike the Russian president, he could claim a genuine following.

I remember his allies breaking down in tears when he was handcuffed and taken away at a court hearing in 2013 – only to be released 24 hours later after tens of thousands blocked central streets in Moscow in protest.

That summer, Navalny ran for Moscow mayor and came in second, an embarrassing blow for the Kremlin. They never let him appear on the ballot again.

In early 2014, Putin launched a lighting operation to annex Crimea, while sending a clandestine Russian force into eastern Ukraine to foment separatist insurgency.

In the year that followed, Navalny struggled to stay relevant as Putin’s revanchist policies and the Crimean annexation briefly won the hearts of the public.

When I went to interview Navalny in spring 2015, he was under house arrest at his home on the outskirts of Moscow, in a drab and polluted neighbourhood that felt a world away from the de luxe lifestyles of the Russian elite.

When he opened the door to me, he apologised he couldn’t step outside: his tracking bracelet would go berserk if he crossed the threshold by even a foot.

As a natural-born firebrand, Navalny was clearly bored sitting at home all those weeks: at one point his wife, Yulia, came into their kitchen to joke about his restlessness.

Soon, the euphoria over the bloodless annexation of the Crimean peninsula wore out, and Navalny managed to reinvent himself again. His team doubled down on investigations into high-level corruption and started packing them in easy-to-digest video clips on YouTube. One of them, an hour-long investigation about Russia’s prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, garnered more than 46 million views and spurred a summer of opposition protests.

As a growing number of dissidents in Russia were being thrown in jail, some of them dying in in suspicious circumstances, Navalny was steadfast. He kept on supporting a network of allies he built all over the country after the Kremlin barred him from running in the 2018 presidential elections. During one of those trips in the Russian regions he fell suddenly ill and almost died – he had been poisoned by FSB agents. As he was convalescing in Germany, his allies warned him about returning to Russia.

But on a January afternoon in 2021 he boarded the plane and arrived in Moscow, only to be arrested at passport control.

Because he had sought treatment for poisoning in Germany, Navalny was put on trial for violating the terms of his parole – a typical piece of Kremlin thuggery. He stood in a glass defendant’s cage at a brand new court building in Moscow, projecting defiance and making heart signs for his wife. That was the last time journalists, including myself, ever saw him.

Not doomed to autocracy

In my interviews with Navalny over the years – at his office, at his flat, on the sidelines of filming a YouTube clip or on the campaign trail – I would often ask him about his future and that of Russian democracy.

He maintained his good humour on those subjects because his beliefs were unwavering: Navalny truly believed that Russia was “no worse than other countries” and was not doomed to live in an autocracy. As for his own future, Navalny dismissed the risks, saying it was his choice to fight for “a wonderful Russia of the future” and that “sitting at home and doing nothing” was not an option.

Navalny’s optimism was genuine, and it was contagious. That’s probably why all of his family, his wife and two children have been unwaveringly supportive of him even when he decided to come back to Russia.

He believed in the power of a personal example.

“I’m not scared – and you shouldn’t, either,” he scrawled on a piece of paper and showed it to the cameras standing inside his glass defendants’ cage in winter 2021. Even in the Arctic prison colony to which he was sent, he maintained the same defiance. That is what made him still dangerous to Putin. The only way to break his spirit, it appears, was to kill him.