The late anti-Kremlin activist and liberal politician Alexey Navalny had also berated Central Asian migrants and called for a visa regime.
Glad they're mentioning it. Navalny was an anti-immigrant POS. Shameful how western liberals were supporting him.
In all the efforts to white wash Navalny as "one of the good ones", Western hagiographers at the WaPo and NYT love to glaze over why he was such a tantalizing pick for Opposition Puppet.
He held many of the views already popular within the United Russia party, sympathized with a host of European nationalist groups, and generally endorsed the Yeltsin Era turn of the USSR into an Oversized Gas Station run by a handful of plutocrats friendly with Western business interests.
His entire pitch boiled down to "Putin is doing ethnic nationalism to the wrong people and it's hurting the economy!" And when the economy is growing, that's a hard sell.