[litwin]

[noemon]

Analysis: How Putin prepared the ground for Navalny’s death

For more than a decade, the Russian president has tightened the noose around his most prominent opponent

Nataliya Vasilyeva,
MIDDLE EAST CORRESPONDENT
16 February 2024 • 8:45pm

Putin has crushed all opposition within Russia’s borders CREDIT: ALEXANDER RYUMIN /POOL SPUTNIK KREMLIN
The Kremlin has been trying to kill Alexei Navalny for several years – but there has probably never been a better time to do it than now.

Vladimir Putin has laid the groundwork in domestic society. For more than a decade, he has tightened the noose around his charismatic younger foe, with the operation against him mirroring a broader crackdown on Russian society.

At first, there was enough life in the Russian opposition to prevent Navalny’s elimination. In the summer of 2013, a Russian court in a provincial town jailed him in his first criminal case – but it was forced to release him 24 hours later after thousands of people blocked the streets in central Moscow.

Even when the Kremlin was emboldened by its popular annexation of Crimea in 2014, Putin did not jail the pesky protest leader – it was clear at the time that the Kremlin would suffer more damage from the move than it was worth.

Dissenters have fled or been silenced
By 2020, that rationale had shifted. Internal repression had steadily grown. As the public increasingly shied away from direct protest – and the long prison sentences that resulted – FSB agents poisoned Navalny.

They failed to kill him, and hoping that there was still a heartbeat in the anti-Putin movement, he took the decision to return to Moscow.

Then, the full-pressure of the Kremlin vice was applied. He was thrown into prison, with spurious sentences piling up on top of each other. Where once he had commanded thousands in the streets, only the foolhardy raised their voices in the face of draconian new laws. Most of Navalny’s allies fled to exile or were jailed.

In retrospect, these moves appear to be part of Putin’s years-long preparations for invading Ukraine. By coming down so hard on the political opposition, he ensured there were few people willing to come out and protest against his criminal war, launched on Feb 24, 2022.

Almost two years into the war in Ukraine, Russian civil society has been decimated; almost every single prominent anti-Putin political figure and hundreds of thousands of anti-war Russians have fled abroad. The rare critics who have stayed, such as Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, joined Mr Navalny behind bars.

The Kremlin does not have to fear protests in a country where a 72-year-old retired woman was sent to jail for five years last month, simply for an anti-war post on social media. Putin can torture, jail and kill the country’s most popular opposition politician safe in the knowledge that he is untouchable within Russia’s borders.

Outside of them, he does not fear the West. It took several months of the war in Ukraine before sanctions were imposed on Russia’s energy sector and oil exports in particular.

But the Russian economy is nowhere near the point of collapse; the Kremlin can still sell oil and gas on global markets, if not in Europe, and linchpins of the Russian export market such as the diamond trade have not been affected at all.

Meanwhile, the death of Mr Navalny comes at a moment when the West is clearly getting tired of having to fund Ukraine’s military. Putin, for his part, is signalling that he would not mind freezing the frontline where it stands and calling it a victory.

If Putin was not being blamed for the death of Mr Navalny, one could foresee US and European politicians following in the footsteps of Tucker Carlson and visiting him for talks in Moscow, sooner or later.

Whether Mr Navalny died in an assassination or as a result of the torturous conditions he had been exposed to for three years, his death should put a halt to any such overtures – at least for now.

This is Mr Navalny’s parting blow against the man he fought against for more than a decade.

[albionfagan]

Saudi Arabia is really irrelevant to the topic nor are they waging the largest armed conflict in the 21st century with 100 of thousands military casualties dying if not a million by now if you include all Civlians. Nor has Saudi Arabie has ever pretended to care about human rights or democracy.

Having said that was SA does or did was also horrible and they did get a lot of shit for it and lost relations and money and power. There were consequnces for killing Kashogi. Although nobody can do anything the crown prince since he has immunity and nobody is going to extradite him because he is the leader and a monarch. The situations are totally incomparable though due to SA not being a democracy and not even pretending to be one nor have they ever cared about human rights in the first place.

This is mealy mouthed nonsense. They are both states who murder those who criticism them. We are are allies with SA, that's all that matters. It's risible but hilarious seeing the gymnastics. We care about nothing else but money, that's been the same for 500 years.

[Rugoz]

This is mealy mouthed nonsense. They are both states who murder those who criticism them. We are are allies with SA, that's all that matters. It's risible but hilarious seeing the gymnastics. We care about nothing else but money, that's been the same for 500 years.

So you want to turn Saudi Arabia into a liberal democracy? Good luck with that .

With Russia that's a possibility, since it's fundamentally European.

[Potemkin]

This is mealy mouthed nonsense. They are both states who murder those who criticism them. We are are allies with SA, that's all that matters. It's risible but hilarious seeing the gymnastics. We care about nothing else but money, that's been the same for 500 years.

“If they tell you it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.” - HL Mencken.

[Potemkin]

So you want to turn Saudi Arabia into a liberal democracy? Good luck with that .

Nobody really wants to turn Saudi Arabia into a liberal democracy, just as nobody really wanted to turn Russia into a liberal democracy in the 1990s. We want only to extract wealth from nations, or to castrate them if they dare to challenge us. Nothing else matters. HL Mencken knew the score.

With Russia that's a possibility, since it's fundamentally European.

That’s not what @litwin tells me. Are you calling him a liar, @Rugoz?

[late]

Nobody really wants to turn Saudi Arabia into a liberal democracy, just as nobody really wanted to turn Russia into a liberal democracy in the 1990s. We want only to extract wealth from nations, or to castrate them if they dare to challenge us. Nothing else matters. HL Mencken knew the score.

The West pumped about a billion dollars in Russia trying to turn it into a democracy. People that understood the situation wanted it bad.

This isn't as simple as you make it out to be. In your view, we still live in the old empire way of doing things. If that was true, we wouldn't have had global capitalism, or the emergence of new democracies.

[Rugoz]

Nobody really wants to turn Saudi Arabia into a liberal democracy, just as nobody really wanted to turn Russia into a liberal democracy in the 1990s.

That's complete nonsense, even if you think money is all that matters.

[Skynet]

Creating a martyr is not smart.

[litwin]

“If they tell you it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.” - HL Mencken.

[litwin]

Creating a martyr is not smart.

not really, Muscovite are the natural slaves and cowards , 95 % of them hate Navalny , who had the balls to challenge Muscovite tsar

Putin will simply check Navalny off his hit list. Done deal.

1708089628136.jpeg

Prigozhin launched an abortive mutiny in late June, two months to the day before his death, that he said targeted Russia’s military leaders but embarrassed Putin and exposed the limits of his control, making a leader cast as a strong and reliable protector of the people look weak. Died in a plane crash on August 23.

1708089775896.jpeg

April 17, 2003: Sergei Yushenkov, a veteran politician and leader of the anti-Kremlin party Liberal Russia, is shot in front of his Moscow home.

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October 7, 2006: One of Russia's most prominent journalists and a persistent chronicler of rights abuses in Chechnya, Politkovskaya is shot dead in her apartment building, in an execution-style killing.

The list goes on.
November 23, 2006: The former Russian security agent dies in London after being poisoned with radioactive polonium-210. Litvinenko had fled to Britain in 2000 after accusing the FSB of plotting to kill oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He later co-authored a book blaming the agency for the 1999 apartment-building bombings.

July 16, 2009: The body of the renowned human rights activist, with bullet wounds to her head and chest, is found in Ingushetia, hours after her abduction near her home in the capital of Chechnya, Grozny.

November 16, 2009: The whistle-blowing lawyer who had implicated Russian officials in an alleged $230 million tax fraud dies one year after being jailed on similar charges. Sergei Magnitsky suffered from pancreatitis and was denied medical care in pretrial detention, conditions rights activists said were tantamount to torture. According to the Kremlin's own human rights council, he was badly beaten before his death.

February 27, 2015: The reformist former regional governor and deputy prime minister who was a rising political star in the 1990s but became one of Putin’s most vocal opponents is shot dead in a gangland-style killing on a bridge near the Kremlin, at age 55.

[litwin]

[litwin]

[litwin]

[litwin]

[Robert Urbanek]

I don’t understand why enemies of Putin, like Navalny and Prigozhin, returned to Russia when they should have known they would be murdered. Is there some cognitive dissonance at work here or is it some Russian “thing” I just don’t understand?

[late]

I don’t understand why enemies of Putin, like Navalny and Prigozhin, returned to Russia when they should have known they would be murdered. Is there some cognitive dissonance at work here or is it some Russian “thing” I just don’t understand?

Same reason Nikki Haley is running. She can't win, but she can be standing there if Trump falls.

Strongmen don't usually die from old age, he gambled that Putin would fall, and he could do a Nelson Mandela and walk out of prison and into the president's office.

Humans discount the future..

[litwin]

Nobody really wants to turn Saudi Arabia into a liberal democracy, just as nobody really wanted to turn Russia into a liberal democracy in the 1990s. We want only to extract wealth from nations, or to castrate them if they dare to challenge us. Nothing else matters. HL Mencken knew the score.


That’s not what @litwin tells me. Are you calling him a liar, @Rugoz?

only ultra - imperialist like Utkin (killed ) and Girkin can really challenge czar putin, do you agree?


ps where's Gerasimov?

[KurtFF8]

The West pumped about a billion dollars in Russia trying to turn it into a democracy. People that understood the situation wanted it bad.

False, the West pumped a billion dollars to ensure that Yeltsin would win, not for Russia to become a democracy.

This isn't as simple as you make it out to be. In your view, we still live in the old empire way of doing things. If that was true, we wouldn't have had global capitalism, or the emergence of new democracies.

Imperialism is a core part of global capitalism in both the 20th and 21st centuries.

[late]

False, the West pumped a billion dollars to ensure that Yeltsin would win, not for Russia to become a democracy.

I know one of the lawyers who went there to try and teach you guys about law in a democracy.

Let's just say it was an uphill battle...

Russia had too much emotional baggage to become a democracy. Not that becoming one is fun.