From the editor
The Kremlin has made sure that it will be impossible to determine the true cause of Alexei Navalny’s death at age 47 in the “Polar Wolf” prison in Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug last Friday by withholding his body from his mother and lawyer. Lyudmila Navalnaya has not been allowed to view her deceased son despite trekking to the prison and then to the morgue in the town of Salekhard, 35 miles away. She has made a video appeal to Vladimir Putin to immediately hand over Navalny’s body, but authorities have claimed they need to keep it for 14 days for “investigations”.
Navalny at a rally in Novokuznetsk in December 2017. Photo: Evgeny Feldman
Sources inside the prison told media that security had already been tightened there on the night of Thursday Feb. 15, and Navalny was likely dead first thing in the morning rather than in the afternoon as officially stated. The opposition leader had appeared cheerful the day before his death, joking with court officials during a remote hearing. Anything could have happened after that, whether poison or violence was used, or Navalny really did expire due to the stresses of prison on his health, after previously recovering from novichok poisoning. On Feb. 14 he had been placed in solitary confinement for the 27th time. This was usually done for petty reasons such as “not stating his name correctly”.
Either way of course the Kremlin killed Navalny, stamping out the last remnant of opposition to Putin in the country a month before staged presidential elections are due to be held. Putin himself was in an excellent mood at his public engagements after Navalny’s death, and he didn’t bother to comment on the event that outraged the world (but did give the deputy head of the prison service a promotion). Instead Dmitri Peskov and the Foreign Ministry expressed fake anger that the West was blaming Russia. Police all over the country tried their best to limit commemorations of Navalny and tributes to him, detaining many people who had brought flowers to monuments to victims of repressions and some who held signs with slogans. Russian state TV barely mentioned Navalny’s death.
Alexei Navalny, a lawyer who had received a scholarship to Yale in 2010 and enjoyed watching the animated comedy series Rick and Morty, was not a tool of the CIA as claimed by the Kremlin but fully dedicated to bringing democracy to Russia for the benefit of its people. In 2011 and 2012 he was one of the leaders of the mass protests in Moscow against rigged parliamentary and presidential elections that brought Putin back to power. In February 2015 Russia’s most charismatic liberal opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, was shot dead in front of the Kremlin. Navalny had to take on the struggle alone, and try to shed his nationalist past in the process.
Navalny fought on two fronts: through his Anti-Corruption Foundation, which produced videos exposing the wealth of Russian leaders, and through his regional political offices that campaigned in local and national elections as well as documenting the frequent arrests and trials of protesters. The “Don’t Call Him Dimon” video, published in March 2017 and uncovering Dmitri Medvedev’s luxury properties, acquired 46.9 million views on YouTube and was followed by protests around the country organised by Navalny and his team. Later that year Navalny announced that he was running for president and held rallies in dozens of cities at which he debated on stage with critics. But Russia’s electoral commission refused to allow him on the ballot for the election of March 2018 due to a conviction in a fabricated criminal case. From then on his movement slowed until it was delivered another blow by his novichok poisoning on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow in August 2020 and he was evacuated to Germany in a coma.
In January 2021 Navalny announced that he would return to Russia to continue in politics and published his video “Putin’s Palace: A History of the World’s Largest Bribe,” which achieved 130 million views on YouTube and again sparked mass protests in Russia. Navalny was arrested on his arrival at the airport in Moscow and subsequently sentenced to various lengthy prison terms intended to keep him behind bars for the rest of his life. Putin had gauged that he could withstand the public reaction, and he was right. Navalny’s team quickly called for an end to protests, fearing that too many people were being arrested. Navalny’s leading team members fled to other countries and his organisations were designated as extremist, so anyone associated with them, even before that ruling, could be arrested. Most remaining dissent in Russia was quashed after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was launched on Feb. 24, 2022. Three of Navalny’s lawyers are currently jailed on extremism charges, as are some of his former regional office heads.
Many Ukrainians believe that Navalny was as imperialist as Putin, but this is not entirely true. His famous comment in October 2014 that “Crimea is not a sandwich to be passed back and forth” was weak. But he did speak out from prison about the 2022 invasion. He pointed out that the passport of someone with the surname Navalny had been prominently displayed in photos of the Bucha massacre, obviously to make a point. On Feb. 20, 2023, in tweets conveyed via his lawyers, he wrote: “Tens of thousands of innocent Ukrainians have been murdered, and pain and suffering has befallen millions more. War crimes have been committed. Ukrainian cities and infrastructure have been destroyed.” He called for Ukraine’s borders of 1991 to be recognised.
Navalny’s team in exile has not, however, focused on supporting Ukraine, but rather on organising “Free Navalny” rallies, setting themselves up as competition to Ukrainians and looking as if they are indifferent to or at times hostile to the Ukrainian cause. But the fact is that Ukrainians are fighting Putin and Russians are not. Yulia Navalnaya has bravely said she will continue her late husband’s work, while telling the EU Council that “Putin does not equal Russians” and that Russians fleeing the country deserve help. She has not said anything about Ukraine. If Russians won’t rise up on their own streets then they must support Ukraine if they want to defeat Putin, and that would be the best way to do something to make Navalny’s sacrifices worthwhile.
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Ukrainian forces withdraw from Avdiivka, Russian troops killed
Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from the destroyed town of Avdiivka in Donetsk Oblast after a lengthy battle to keep control of it. Russian military blogger Andrei Morozov, who had also been fighting for Russia in Ukraine since 2014, shot himself after being forced to delete a post that said 16,000 Russian troops may have been killed in the battle for the town. Separately it was reported that 65 Russian soldiers from the town of Borzya in Zabaykalsky Krai were killed in a missile strike after being told to stand in formation in Donetsk Oblast while waiting for the arrival of a “big boss”.
Russian pilot who defected with helicopter murdered in Spain
Russian military pilot Maxim Kuzminov, 28, who defected to Ukraine in August last year with a Mi-8 helicopter carrying a cargo of spare parts for fighter aircraft, has been shot dead by a hitman while living under an assumed identity in Spain. Kuzminov had been relocated to the Costa Blanca as a Ukrainian called Igor Shevchenko. He was shot several times and run over in an underground parking garage. Spanish media claim he may have given himself away by calling an ex-girlfriend and inviting her to visit him. The car used as a getaway vehicle by the killer had been stolen and was found 20 minutes from the scene having been set alight. Kuzminov decided to undertake his daring feat after reading about relations between Russia and Ukraine and realising that the war was unjust.
Two more sentenced for treason, dual US citizen arrested
A court in Moscow has sentenced former adviser in the Russian embassy in France Igor Kondratsky to 18 years in a maximum-security prison for treason and removed his reserve colonel rank from him. Kondratsky, who was born in Kyiv and had been a diplomat for 18 years, was arrested in summer 2022. He was accused of giving state secrets to a representative of a foreign government but the country in question was not named.
A court in Krasnoyarsk has sentenced Ukrainian Dmitri Kiselev to 13 years in prison for treason and “planning sabotage” for allegedly photographing the infrastructure of the region on a mission from Ukraine’s SBU security service and providing them with information about the location of Russian troops. Kiselev was also accused of planning an explosion on a railway line. He was arrested in early 2023. He was born in Ukraine but left there with his family in 2014 at age 13, fleeing the war.
Meanwhile US-Russian citizen Ksenia Karelina, 33, from Los Angeles, has been arrested in Yekaterinburg and charged with treason over a $51.80 donation she made to the Ukrainian armed forces on the first day of the war. Karelina, a former ballerina turned aesthetician, had been visiting her 90-year-old grandmother in Russia. Dual US-Russian citizen Alsu Kurmasheva, who works for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague, is also being held in a Russian jail after entering the country last year to visit relatives.
THE ENEMY INSURRECTIONIST ARE AT THE GATE, DEFEAT TREASONOUS , TERRORIST, AND CON REPUBLICONS EVERYWHERE AND JAIL CORRUPT AND TRAITOR RTRUMP AND CRONIES.THE ENEMY INSURRECTIONIST ARE AT THE GATE, DEFEAT TREASONOUS , TERRORIST, AND CON REPUBLICONS EVERYWHERE AND JAIL CORRUPT AND TRAITOR RTRUMP AND CRONIES. VOTE PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRATS , AND RESTORE DEMOCRACY. YES, CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL, DANGEROUS, AND EXPENSIVE.
I don't need "guiltless putins" running from ruzzia in EU, don't you want to take "guiltless putins" to Britain and see what the British people or police say? Our countries today are relatively free only because there weren't enough of them here at the right time. after all, they have a national hole in the ground.