Asia (Page 2,420)

It wasn’t enough that Russian courts had convicted dissident politician Alexei Navalny on bogus corruption charges, sentenced him to 19 years in jail and sent him to a penal colony 1,200 miles from Moscow near the Arctic Circle where he recently mysteriously died.

Or that government agents tried to poison him with a nerve agent known as Novichok in 2020. Now, the authorities are tormenting his mother, 69-year-old Lyudmila Navalnaya, by not allowing her to see and retrieve his body.

The ongoing display of state cruelty under Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a sudden eye-opener. Rather, given the history of Putin’s 30 years of political dominance, Navalny’s death was almost to be expected.

“It’s shocking but it is not surprising,” flatly remarked Maria Popova, a political science professor and expert in Russian politics at McGill University, during a television interview.

The events showed that Putin’s authoritarian regime is, even while it has made inconclusive war on Ukraine and faces hostility from European neighbors and the United States, self-assured enough not to hide domestic atrocities.  

“He is confident he is firmly in power,” Popova said of the Russian leader. “If he was afraid of instability, he would try to make sure that Navalny would remain well and in prison.”

The sense of shock may simply come from the suddenness of Navalny’s still-unexplained death— hospital officials are calling it a result of “sudden death syndrome,” a term used in Russia when the authorities are unsure how to frame a controversial death.

Conversely, the lack of surprise reflects a kind of resignation – a knowledge that, after all, Russians have seen this picture before.

Bloody examples run a century from Lenin’s order to kill Tsar Nicholas II and his entire incarcerated family, to Stalin’s habits of persecuting “enemies of the people” dispatched to his Siberian gulag or of the forced starvation of a million Ukrainians, to the post-World War II period of imprisonment or exile of dissidents, through to Putin’s repression of challengers to his three-decade authoritarian rule.

In the age of instant social media that can spread fear and outrage across the vastness of Russia in a moment, Putin doesn’t need massive massacres to remind Russians and foreign governments, too, whose iron fist is in charge. Just a Navalny or two will do.

Brazen assassination has been a hallmark of the Putin era. The 2015 shooting death of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov on a bridge just outside Red Square was a prime example. Nemtsov, like Navalny, was a democrat who took daring political stands. He criticized Russia’s 2014 first invasion of Ukraine, after which Moscow occupied eastern parts of the country and the Crimean Peninsula.

Another signal of the danger of opposing Putin took place in 2003, when Sergei Yushenkov, a former army colonel, was assassinated near his Moscow apartment just hours after he founded an opposition political party. Opposition personalities started filtering out of Russia thereafter.

Prominent human rights campaigners have fallen victim to the slow-motion terror. In 2009, Natalya Estemirova, a meticulous researcher into atrocities during Russia’s turn of the 21^st Century invasion of Chechnya, was kidnapped from her apartment in Grozny, the Chechen capital, tortured and then shot dead in a forest.

Journalist and writer Anna Politkovskaya was also an ardent critic of wanton killing in Chechnya. She was once subjected to a mock execution by Russian soldiers there. In 2006, the threat turned real: gunmen shot her dead in an elevator of her Moscow apartment building.

The same year, businessman Sergei Magnitsky was beaten to death in a Moscow jail at a time when he was investigating fraud among government officials. In 2004, investigative reporter Paul Klebnikov, an editor of Forbes Russia business magazine who had written about government corruption, was killed during a drive-by shooting in Moscow. News of several murdered journalists throughout Russia barely registered outside the country.

In some major cases, killers were convicted; several notorious ones happened to be paid Chechen gunmen, but who paid for their services remains unknown.  

On Putin’s watch, the assassination map also spread beyond Russia. In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, an exiled former Russian intelligence agent, died of radioactive poisoning slipped into a drink by two Russian spies in London. Twelve years later, Sergei Skripal, an ex-Russian spy in exile, and his were infected by a nerve agent known as Novichok, but the pair survived.

UK officials identified a pair of Russian agents as the would-be assassins. Authorities in the Czech Republic then singled out the same pair for having caused a 2014 explosion in the country that killed two people. The officials said the explosives were meant to be transported to Bulgaria for an assassination job but had detonated prematurely.

“In a way, Navalny’s death marks the culmination of years of efforts by the Russian state to eliminate all sources of opposition,” wrote Andrew Soldatov and Irina Borogan, founders of the Agentua.ru, a site monitoring Russian secret service activities. “Putin has made political assassination an essential part of the Kremlin’s toolkit.”

The Ukraine war and possible distress among some Russians about making war on Slavic brethren has put Russian authorities on high guard against critics.

Last summer, Memorial, the human rights group that was banned by Putin in 2023, estimated around 560 political prisoners had been jailed during the conflict. Among them is Ilya Yashin, an opposition politician who was sentenced last year to eight years in prison for denouncing the Ukraine war.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, an associate of Boris Nemtsov, was also sentenced in 2023 to 25 years in prison for treason and “discrediting” the armed forces after he criticized the Ukraine war. Kara-Murza, like Navalny, had survived Novichok poisoning—not once but twice.

His wife, Evgenia Kara-Murza, directly blamed Putin for killing Navalny. “I was horrified, of course, but unfortunately not surprised because political assassinations are something Vladimir Putin has been doing for years,” she claimed.

Navalny had returned to Russia in January 2021 after successful treatment in Germany for Novichok poisoning. He returned against the advice of friends and a Putin government threat that he would face criminal corruption charges. He justified his decision in simple terms: “I have to go back because I don’t want this group of killers ruling Russia,” he told a television interviewer.

In that sense, he differed from Soviet-era dissidents who were unsure they could change the murderous system but had to try. Navalny was driven by a strong sense of optimism about changing the system, combined with foreboding that Putin was out to get him. “Guys, it doesn’t matter. I’m going to be in jail as long as Putin is alive,” he wrote to friends when he was first imprisoned.

“He believed that it was his mission to continue fighting the corrupt, repressive Russian system under President Vladimir Putin, and he acknowledged in a video posted before his arrest that he might not survive prison,” wrote Angela Stent, an advisor at the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University in Washington.

Western governments all condemned Navalny’s death, but that was all. US President Joe Biden had said that, in 2021, he told Putin Russia would face “devastating consequences” if Navalny died in jail. On February 17, reporters asked him what he was going to do about it now.

Biden indicated that sanctions placed on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine would cover the outrage of Navalny’s death, too.  During a brief television appearance, he noted that his comment on consequences was made “three years ago” and that Russia had ” faced a hell of a lot of consequences” since.

Then, perhaps realizing that expressing an inclination to do nothing made for bad TV, Biden added: “We’re contemplating what else can be done.”

Sanctions, after all, have not brought Russia to its knees for the Ukraine invasion. Less than a week before Navalny’s death, Joseph Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, acknowledged that Russia has been able to skirt EU sanctions and maintain international trade with countries that have declined to impose punitive measures for the war.

Last year, revenues from Russian oil exports hit US$183 billion, comparable to pre-Ukraine war levels. Much of it goes to China and India. Some countries that nominally support sanctions maintain trade through so-called “ghost ships” that falsify their ports of origin or destination, turn off mechanisms that are meant to trace their itineraries or transfer cargo to and from Russian ships at sea.

In 2023, German car and parts exports to Kyrgyzstan inexplicitly increased by more than 5,000%. Kyrgyzstan is also a primary destination through which military and non-military technology now enters Russia, according to press reports. Kyrgyzstan is a member of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, which also includes Belarus, Kazakhstan and Armenia.

“Look, the European sanctions are not extraterritorial, we can put sanctions on our subjects because they are subject to our law but we cannot impose sanctions on third countries,” Borrell said. It all means Navalny’s death in a frigid Siberian prison will go largely, if not entirely, unpunished.

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