Collision course: The Return of Alexei Navalny

Collision course Moscow: The Return of Alexei Navalny Five months after he was poisoned, the opposition leader is headed back to Russia. By Eva Hartog in POLITICO January 15, 2021

MOSCOW — The last time a plane carrying Alexei Navalny landed on Russian soil, the Russian opposition leader was unconscious and pilots had to make an emergency detour to save his life.

Five months later, after a miraculous recovery, a lucid Navalny plans to board a flight to Moscow this Sunday that will bring him back to the country where he suffered a near-fatal attack.

“I ended up in Germany, in an intensive-care box, for one reason: They tried to kill me,” Navalny said in an Instagram post announcing his arrival at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport this weekend. “Russia is my country, Moscow is my city, I miss it.”

For Navalny, his return to Russia from Germany where he underwent treatment for poisoning from the military-grade nerve agent Novichok is at once a personal risk and a political boon. Notably, he is choosing to fly back with the airline Pobeda, Russian for “Victory.”

For the Russian authorities, however, his return spells nothing but trouble at the start of an important election year — trouble they were hoping to avoid by piling on the legal hurdles for Navalny and his entourage.

Most recently, in January, Russia’s penitentiary service asked a court to rule Navalny had breached the terms of his suspended sentence by staying in Germany. In a statement on Thursday, a day after Navalny’s Instagram post, it vowed to do “everything possible” to detain him upon his return to Russia.

It had all the semblance of a last-minute warning: Stay put, or else.

Pointing at Putin

That warning — or threat — seems to have fallen on deaf ears. As Russia’s No. 2 politician after President Vladimir Putin, Navalny has built his brand on refusing to be cowed. If anything, the poison attack has made him redirect his arrows at the very top of Russia’s pyramid of power.

From the moment he woke up from a medically induced coma in Berlin’s Charité Hospital in September, Navalny has accused Putin of personally being behind the poison attack (which the Russian president has denied). And he hasn’t stopped there.

Last month, building on an investigation by the journalism collective Bellingcat, Navalny prank-called a man whom he claimed worked for the FSB, tricking him into admitting the supposed involvement of the security services in his poisoning. A YouTube video of the call has been viewed more than 22 million times.

“No one has humiliated the FSB in this way in a long, long time — if ever,” said political commentator Konstantin Gaaze. “His return will be interpreted as an explicit challenge, there’s no doubt they will want to put him away.”

There are other reasons than revenge to want Navalny sidelined.

This autumn, Russians are set to vote for a new parliament to serve during the so-called power transition in the run-up to the end of Putin’s presidential term in 2024. Pundits are unsure about what will follow — will Putin hang on to the presidential seat, or appoint a successor while maintaining his grip on power? But whatever the preferred option, the Kremlin will want full control over the process.

Ahead of that election — and amid an economic downturn because of the coronavirus pandemic — commentators have pointed to a tangible tightening of the screws against dissent, including the hurried passing of a law late last year that allows individuals to be labeled as “foreign agents.”

Navalny’s “smart voting” strategy against the ruling party United Russia, which coordinates protest votes in challenges to their biggest contenders, and his ability to organize large street protests threaten to throw a spanner into the works.

Conspiracy theories

Russia has a tradition of dissidents returning to their homeland. Sometimes — as with Vladimir Lenin’s train ride in 1917 — they have triumphed. But then there is also the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, who returned to Russia in 2003 only to disappear behind bars for a decade.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, there has been a flood of speculation as to how the Russian authorities will thwart Navalny’s arrival.

Theories have ranged from the conventional (Navalny could be refused boarding on the pretext of COVID restrictions or detained on the runway and placed under house arrest) to the outlandish (the air carrier could be shut down, his flight canceled or a freak snow storm be used as an excuse to divert the plane).

Rather than a rich imagination, the speculation reveals a general sense of lawlessness after a summer that included a controversial vote on constitutional reforms which will allow Putin to stay in power beyond 2024 and Navalny’s brazen poisoning.

“If before we understood that Navalny could be jailed at any moment, now the scenario we have in mind is that he could be killed,” Ilya Yashin, an opposition politician and a close ally of Navalny’s told the Dozhd television channel.

Moreover, most commentators agree that political unrest in the United States ahead of the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden plays into the Kremlin’s hands by drawing international attention away from Russia.

Touchdown

Presumably in an effort to prevent his immediate arrest, Navalny has called upon his supporters to meet him at the airport on Sunday. A large turnout could convince the authorities to hold back — temporarily at least.

Then again, a low turnout could backfire and convince the hardliners in government that punitive measures against the opposition politician will go largely unprotested.

A poll by the independent Levada Center late last year showed that fewer Russians believed the Kremlin was behind the poisoning than those who suspect the West — echoing the Kremlin’s own claims of a foreign conspiracy. Most Russians, however, were indifferent or believed the entire poisoning was staged.

But the authorities have to tread carefully: Jailing Navalny could risk making a martyr out of him and be interpreted as a sign of weakness. But leaving him free practically guarantees he will be a nuisance. In deciding how to respond to that conundrum, the Russian authorities are like a character in a fighting video game, forced to pick a weapon before entering into battle.

“Тhere are a million different options of how it will play out, but Sunday will undoubtedly be a very sharp start to the political season,” said Gaaze.

Or, in the words of political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya on Telegram: “The situation with Navalny is very similar to two trains rushing towards each other, doomed to collide. There will be many victims.”

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