On Friday February 16, 2024, Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service announced the death of Alexei Navalny.
For Russians yearning for a more democratic system of government and to end state corruption, this was devastating news.
Navalny died in a prison colony in the town of Kharp, which is north of the Arctic Circle — an area notorious for long and severe winters.
His latest questionable conviction had resulted in a 19-year sentence for extremism. At the time of sentencing, he commented, “I understand perfectly that, as many political prisoners, I’m serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime.”
His political imprisonments were meant to provide the Vladimir Putin and the Russian state with the ability to remove Navalny as a candidate in the upcoming 2024 Russian presidential election and as a continuing threat to Putin’s leadership.
Long a thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side, Alexei Navalny spent most of his 20-year career campaigning against corruption and for greater democracy in Russia.
Navalny was active in politics throughout his adult life.
He first gained notoriety for alleging corruption in a number of state-run agencies, such as fossil fuel giants Gazprom and Rosneft. He was instrumental in founding RosPil, an anti-corruption project in 2010, and the Anti-Corruption Foundation in 2011.
The Russian state began more formally to attempt to undermine him in 2011 by having the state’s Investigative Committee first charge him with embezzlement involving Kirovles, a state-owned timber company and a few months later with embezzlement from a Russian subsidiary of Yves Rocher, a French cosmetics company. Navalny maintained that both charges were unfounded and politically motivated.
Despite rulings by the European Court of Human Rights that he was entitled to a fair trial which he hadn’t received in the Kirvoles case, and that the Yves Rocher prosecution was arbitrary and unreasonable, Russian courts and authorities persisted in pursuing charges.
On April 17, 2017, Navalny was attacked when unidentified assailants threw green dye at his face, damaging his right eye. It was the second time dye had been thrown at him that year. He blamed the attacks on the Kremlin.
Navalny was then almost killed in August 2017 when he was poisoned with the Russian nerve agent Novichok. Taken ill during a flight from Tomsk to Moscow, he was hospitalized in Omsk and placed in an induced coma. Two days later, pressure from his wife led to his evacuation to a hospital in Berlin, where a team of doctors managed to save his life. He gradually improved and was released from hospital after a month. Navalny accused Putin of being responsible for his poisoning, which the Kremlin promptly denied, accusing Navalny in turn of working for the CIA.
Despite almost dying and knowing that he faced prison due to the trumped-up embezzlement charges, Navalny chose not to live the rest of his life in safety and returned to Russia in January 2021. He was immediately arrested and jailed for violating probation conditions while hospitalized in Germany.
Navalny hoped that, like Nelson Mandela many years before, he would eventually be freed and would be able to successfully run for president to undertake the country’s many needed changes and reforms. This was not to be the case. He never again left prison.
In March 2022, Russian courts sentenced Navalny to nine years in prison for embezzlement and contempt of court. Then on August 4, 2023, after a closed-door hearing, he was sentenced to the further 19 years on several charges, including inciting and financing extremist activity.
In December 2023 he was moved to the Kharp penal colony in northern Siberia. He died there two months later.
Since Navalny’s death, there have been outpourings of grief and demonstrations around the world. It has been reported that over 300 people have been detained in Russia while paying tribute to him. Western leaders are publicly blaming Vladimir Putin for his death.
I predict more of the same. There has been an unfortunate history of violent and unsolved deaths of Putin’s foes and critics, including:
- Alexander Litvinenko, a former member of Russia’s security services who opposed Putin. He died in 2006 in London of polonium-210 poisoning.
- Yevgeny Prigozhin, former head of the Wagner paramilitary group who led an aborted mutiny against Putin. He died on August 23, 2023, when his plane exploded.
- Boris Nemtsov, an opposition leader. In 2015, he was shot four times in the back within view of the Kremlin.
- Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who reported critically on Putin. She was shot on October 7, 2006, upon arriving home after grocery shopping.
There have been many others — far too many for it to be coincidence.
There can now be no doubt that Putin’s government does not hesitate to assassinate individuals it disagrees with.
After dictating this blog, I became aware of the fact that Alexei Navalny may have held very far-right racist views. However, as Al Jazeera — a source I respect — reports, he left behind his right-wing ideology years ago. I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between.
Daily atmospheric CO2 [Courtesy of CO2.Earth]
Latest daily total (February 26, 2024): 425.40ppm
One year ago (February 27, 2023): 421.62ppm
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