Navalny tweeted on July 11 that the new Anti-Corruption Foundation will function as an international organization with an advisory board including his wife, Yulia Navalnaya; former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, who is currently a member of the European Parliament; Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum; and U.S. philosopher Francis Fukuyama.

"The Foundation will be completely transparent and clear, and the first contribution to its existence will be the Sakharov Prize, awarded to me by the European Parliament (50,000 euros)," Navalny's tweet said.

FBK and other groups associated with Navalny, as well as his political movement, were declared "extremist" organizations by the Russian authorities in June 2021 and disbanded.

"We talked about the fact that Putin and his crooks will not succeed in destroying the Anti-Corruption Foundation. On the contrary, it will become a global international foundation," Navalny wrote.

Navalny was arrested in January 2021 upon his return to Moscow from Germany, where he was treated for a poison attack in Siberia in 2020 with what European labs defined as a Soviet-style nerve agent.

He was then handed a 2 1/2-year prison sentence for violating the terms of an earlier parole during of his convalescence abroad. The original conviction is widely regarded as a trumped-up, politically motivated case.

In March, Navalny was sentenced in a separate case to nine years in prison on embezzlement and contempt charges that he and his supporters have repeatedly rejected as politically motivated.