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Who Will Save Alexei Navalny?
Michael Weiss on Yahoo News
Thu, April 22, 2021
“If you saw me now—maybe you would have a good laugh,” Alexei Navalny wrote on Facebook April 20. “Look at him! A skeleton walking, wobbling around his prison cell. In his hands he is holding his court ruling, rolled up in a tube. With that tube he fervently swings away at mosquitoes covering the walls and the ceiling of his cell. Those buzzing stinging monsters can finish up a man faster than any hunger strike.”
The tone is characteristic of the world’s most famous political prisoner: comic stoicism in the face of approaching death combined with a Gogolian fascination for all the absurdities and trivialities still imposed by a cruel Russian system responsible for its arrival.
Navalny has been starving himself for three weeks. It is a feeble protest, perhaps, against being an involuntary guest of a 21st century gulag, but at least it is wholly his own. For someone who eight months ago was almost killed with a weapon of mass destruction (Novichok), Navalny seems determined to go on being Navalny until the very end, which could be “any minute” now, according to his physician who has not been allowed to examine his patient and can only make diagnoses from afar, based on blood test results.
Navalny risks kidney failure and cardiac arrest owing to abnormally high levels of potassium and creatinine in his blood (“After Novichok,” Navalny wrote, “potassium is not a biggie”). He has been transferred from one miserable penal facility to another where he is now on a regimen of “vitamin therapy.”
No one believes Navalny is being treated; rather, he is being gradually murdered in an internationally exhibited snuff film executive produced and directed by Vladimir Putin.
“I think they will kill him,” a former senior U.S. official, someone I typically turn to for good news, not bad, told me this week. “I don’t think they’ll do a last-minute release back to Germany [where Navalny recuperated from his Novichok poisoning last August] or something like that. Their goal is to watch Navalny slowly die in prison.”
And what can the United States do, or better yet, what is it willing to do to stop “them” and this obscenity? Judging by President Joe Biden’s rhetoric, not much. Navalny’s plight, Biden told reporters last week, was “totally, totally unfair, totally inappropriate,” which is something one says of a lousy referee call on the pitch, not live-streamed, slow-motion homicide.
The messaging, however, is clear: Putin may be a soulless killer but he nevertheless runs an aggressive nuclear hyperpower with which the United States seeks to have “a stable and predictable relationship,” as the White House readout of Biden’s call with him on April 13 stated. Good luck with that, you might say, but the readout ended by telegraphing Biden’s openness to a “summit meeting in a third country in the coming months.” It made no mention of Navalny, who may well be dead by then.
The backdrop to this cautiously extended olive branch is also obvious: the Russian Army could very well be in a “third country” uninvited in the coming days: Ukraine.
As of this writing there are reportedly anywhere between 80,000 and 100,000 Russian troops currently deployed to occupied Crimea and the Russian border of the Donbas, itself occupied by undeclared Russian soldiers and intelligence officers masquerading as “separatists.” These troops are joined by a steady increase in warplanes, attack helicopters, tanks, cruise missiles and all the other matériel necessary for a conventional invasion.
Is one forthcoming or is this just a well-choreographed intimidation exercise intended more for Washington’s sake than for Kyiv’s? Russia’s Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu ordered a partial withdrawal from the border a day after Putin’s annual press conference April 21, in which the Russian president spoke of “red lines” against “insults and interference, including in elections,” and he darkly insinuated that the U.S. had just failed to assassinate his client, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, a claim White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said has “no basis in fact.” Last year, the fear among Russia watchers from Washington to Tallinn was that Putin might intervene militarily in Belarus, if not annex the entire country in a definitive move to quell a rising protest movement over stolen election and expand Russian hard power closer into NATO’s backyard. Now, he threatens to re-invade Ukraine.
Biden would no doubt think it more than “unfair” and “inappropriate” of his having to navigate any hot crisis in Easter Europe within the first year of his presidency. A pandemic still rages, China rises, and the U.S. has to withdraw from a 20-year campaign in Afghanistan, to say nothing of roiling domestic cultural crises.
Moreover, Biden already has his hands full with peaceful Europe. See Czechia’s recent disclosure that in 2014, a team of Russian military intelligence operatives blew up an ammunition depot in a village in the east of the country. And not just any operatives: two of them, Col. Alexander Mishkin and Col. Anatoly Chepiga, were the assassins responsible for later trying to murder Emilian Gebrev, a Bulgarian arms dealer in Sofia in 2015 and the former intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in 2018. Mishkin and Chepiga’s weapon of choice in both instances was Novichok in what may have been proof of concept for the later operation to kill Russia’s opposition leader, at least the first time around.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told CNN there would be “consequences” if Russia eliminated Navalny in prison. What kind? Sullivan did not elaborate. Nor do we know if he relayed them to Nikolai Patrushev, the chairman of the Russian Security Council, with whom he has his own phone call this week, this one ending with “let’s keep in touch.”
Presumably Navalny would rather Sullivan got his retaliation in first, as a form of deterrence. But neither the U.S. nor E.U. seems eager to impose sanctions before Navalny’s demise. And Angela Merkel, once Navalny’s primary caretaker-in-exile, has reaffirmed her commitment to Russia’s controversial Nord-Stream 2 natural gas pipeline to Europe, which the U.S. opposes.
What about sanctioning those hemisphere-hopping Russian oligarchs Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation named when he was first arrested upon his arrival back in Moscow from Berlin in January? That list was divided in three categories, the last two consisting of Russian human rights abusers and those specifically linked to Navalny’s persecution. But the first category is the one that would rattle the Kremlin the most: “Oligarchs upon whom Putin has bestowed wealth and power, and who wield it on behalf of the regime.”
The official excuse I hear from U.S. policymakers is that designating “oligarchs for being oligarchs isn’t how sanctions work.” Washington has to establish a predicate offense. The unofficial excuse I hear is that going after foreign billionaires who act as agents or plenipotentiaries of the Kremlin abroad is embarrassing because they’re so deeply entrenched in the Western financial system—banks, media companies, sports clubs, and real estate. Doing so would only expose the West’s see-no-evil policy with respect to money-laundering, lobbying and kleptocracy, the taints of which should now be obvious to anyone who survived the Trump era.
Putting our own house in order might make it more difficult for Putin to destroy his since there’s no use stealing in Moscow what you can’t spend in London, Paris and New York. As Navalny’s aide Vladimir Milov told me recently, “You don’t have to separate the human rights agenda from realpolitik. They’re inextricable now.”
And so, all across Russia’s eleven time zones, the people have done what they can and turned out to demonstrate for the dying hunger striker who has spent a decade telling them with blog posts and YouTube videos that they deserve better. Again we have seen the stirring scenes of young and old defy riot police and arbitrary detention in an authoritarian state. The solidarity and support have already made a difference to the prisoner. “[T]here is no better weapon against injustice and lawlessness,” Navalny wrote. “This is what keeps me alive right now. Despite the very high level of potassium.”
We in the West are left to hope it will work—while secretly suspecting, like the former U.S. official, that it won’t.
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TIME: Alexei Navalny's Ailing Health Is Worrying the World
ALEXEI NAVALNY, the Russian opposition figure and Kremlin antagonist, has been moved into a prison hospital, Russia’s state penitentiary service (FSIN) said on Monday, after doctors warned he was in extremely poor health and could have only days to live. But friends and colleagues called the transfer a Kremlin “ploy” to convince the world he was being treated, and that his life was still very much in danger.
FSIN said that Navalny’s health was “satisfactory” and that he was being examined by a doctor every day. But Vladimir Ashurkov, Executive Director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) told TIME that the hospital does not offer an “adequate level of care for his condition”, and that the prison authorities continue to deny independent doctors the ability to assess Navalny. “There is nothing positive about this transfer – it is a ploy by the Kremlin to convince Russians that everything is okay,” Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian democracy activist and chair of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation For Freedom, said.
Navalny’s health has been deteriorating since he was imprisoned, and he began a hunger strike three weeks ago to protest his lack of medical treatment. On Saturday, Yaroslav Ashikhmin, a cardiologist, published test results in a Facebook post that he said showed Navalny had heightened creatinine levels that could cause kidney failure, and high levels of potassium that could lead to a cardiac arrest at “any moment”.
His friends and colleagues say that the Russian government is denying him proper care to make a statement. “The Putin regime is trying to kill him slowly, painfully and for the whole world to see. This echoes back to some of the most horrific pages in the history of the Soviet gulag and now the modern gulag under Putin,” said Kara-Murza.
When did Navalny’s health begin to deteriorate?
Putin’s fiercest critic only recently spent five months in Berlin recovering from a poisoning that he said was ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin. (The Kremlin denies Navalny’s claims and has said it has seen no evidence that Navalny was poisoned.) Upon his return to Moscow on Jan. 17 he was arrested and on Feb. 2, he was sentenced to two and half years in jail for violating parole from a case dating back to 2014, which he claims was politically motivated.
The sentence prompted international outrage, with President Joe Biden on Feb. 4 saying “He should be released immediately and without condition.” The E.U. and U.S. slapped sanctions on several Russian officials, including asset freezes and travels bans.
Within weeks of being imprisoned, Navalny complained in Instagram posts about pain and numbness in his back and leg. (It’s not yet clear whether the pain was connected to the poisoning.) He also said that he has experienced treatment amounting to “torture” through sleep deprivation, claiming that guards woke him up every hour throughout the night. Other inmates, he said, were banned from speaking with him or forced by prison authorities to inform on his movements.
On March 31, he announced he was starting a hunger strike to protest the prison authorities’ refusal to grant him medical attention. “I have the right to be seen by a doctor and get medicine,” he said in an Instagram post on March 31.
A dozen days into his hunger strike, Navalny said in an Instagram post that prison guards shoved candy in his pockets to tease him. Navalny’s wife, Yulia, who visited him on April 13 said that he weighed 76kg (167 lbs), 9kg (19lbs) less since he began refusing food.
Navalny’s personal physician, Anastasia Vasilyeva, and three other doctors attempted to visit Navalny on Sunday, April 18. Vasilieva posted a video on Twitter claiming that they had “stood for two hours and begged” to be let into the jail, but they were refused entry.
Ashurkov said the authorities have refused to provide proper medical treatment to Navalny in prison as punishment for his anti-corruption activism, including his YouTube investigation posted on Jan. 19, alleging that members of Putin’s inner circle spent $1.35 billion in illicit funds to build the president an opulent on the Black Sea. “We are confident that all major decisions regarding his well-being are made by President Putin. The fact that he is in prison and being denied proper medical care is, in my opinion, a direct order from the very top,” he said.
How has the Russian opposition responded?
Navalny’s FBK organization had originally planned to hold protests for the release of the Kremlin’s most prominent critic later this Spring. But in response to reports about his deteriorating, health Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief of staff, and Ivan Zhdanov, FBK’s director, in a YouTube video on April 18 urged people to protest in squares across the country on Wednesday 21 April, the same day as Putin’s annual state of address. “They’re murdering Alexei Navalny — in a terrifying way right before our eyes,” Volkov said in the video.
The stakes for those Navalny’s supporters who choose to protest are high. Thousands of people were detained in a vicious police crackdown during mass protests across Russia in January and February that called for the activist’s release.
The authorities appear to have accelerated their attempts to silence Navalny’s team. On April 16, Russian prosecutors asked a Moscow court to designate FBK and other organizations linked to Navalny as “extremist”. The list currently names 33 organizations, including Islamic State, The Taliban and Jehovah’s Witnesses. If approved, the move would outlaw their operations and could result in jail time for its members. The prosecutors said such organizations create conditions for “changing the foundations of the constitutional order” and called their activities “undesirable”, in a statement.
Ashurkov believes the Kremlin is trying to distract the public from the declining level of support for Putin’s ruling United Russia Party, largely driven by frustration over deteriorating living standards, ahead of parliamentary elections in September. According to a March survey by the Moscow-based independent pollster, the Levada-Center, 27% of respondents support the United Russia party, down from 31% last August. “He’s trying to eliminate his most potent political opponent and our organization,” Ashurkov said.
A DOCTOR FOR imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is in the third week of a hunger strike, said his health is deteriorating rapidly and the Kremlin critic could be on the verge of death.
Physician Yaroslav Ashikhmin said that test results he received from the 44-year-old’s family show him with sharply elevated levels of potassium, which can bring on cardiac arrest, and heightened creatinine levels that indicate impaired kidneys.
“Our patient could die at any moment,” he said in a Facebook post.
Anastasia Vasilyeva, head of the Navalny-backed Alliance of Doctors union, said on Twitter that “action must be taken immediately”
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Navalny is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most visible and adamant opponent.
His personal physicians have not been allowed to see him in prison. He went on hunger strike to protest the refusal to let them visit when he began experiencing severe back pain and a loss of feeling in his legs.
Russia’s state penitentiary service has said that Navalny is receiving all the medical help he needs.
Navalny was arrested on January 17 when he returned to Russia from Germany, where had spent five months recovering from Soviet nerve-agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin.
Russian officials have denied any involvement and even questioned whether he was poisoned, which was confirmed by several European laboratories.
Asked about Navalny’s worsening condition, US President Joe Biden told reporters: “It’s totally, totally unfair and totally inappropriate. On the basis of having the poison and then on a hunger strike.”
Navalny was ordered to serve two-and-a-half years in prison on the grounds that his long recovery in Germany violated a suspended sentence he had been given for a fraud conviction in a case that he says was politically motivated.
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