Navalny, Putin’s number one enemy, is dying

Blogger, anti-corruption lawyer and organizer of the biggest anti-government protests since the collapse of the USSR, Alexei Navalny, The number one enemy of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, died this Friday in prison.

“Vladímir the poisoner,” is how Navalny called the head of the Kremlin in February 2021 during the first of the trials against him, political processes criticized by the Russian opposition and the West.

It was the beacon of the first free generation in the history of Russia. The Kremlin was so aware of this that in the middle of a military campaign in Ukraine The Russian judiciary gave him the last sentence, which amounted to almost 30 years in prison.

UKRAINE, CRIMINAL WAR

Prison did not prevent Navalny from openly condemning what he called “criminal war” in Ukrainewhose only goal, according to the opponent, is to allow Putin to “retain power”.

He also attacked the partial mobilization ordered by the Kremlin chief, whose aim would be to “draw the largest number of people” into the crime and “stain the blood of hundreds of thousands of people”.

Furthermore, he claimed that “Putin is losing” and predicted “a huge number of dead (…) in the war breaker”.

He used the unpopularity of the conflict to reactivate his political movement, banned as “extremist”, with the motto “no war, no mobilization, freedom for Navalny”.

NVICHOK AND PRISON SENTENCE

The Kremlin’s patience with Navalny ended in August 2020. Then, according to the claims of the extra-parliamentary opposition, the authorities said enough was enough and decided to eliminate the Russian politician with the greatest appeal in the West.

“Putin ordered my murder,” Navalny said after recovering in Germany from poisoning with a poisonous agent from the Novichok family.

The secret operation of the special services went completely wrong and in mid-January 2021, Navalny returned to Russia like a phoenix to challenge the Russian leader.

But the Kremlin was waiting for him. Authorities used his refusal to appear before authorities because of an old criminal record to send him to prison.

With this, Putin got rid of another enemy, as once happened with the richest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, imprisoned in Siberia (2003), or his opponent Boris Nemtsov, killed in front of the Kremlin in 2015.

Navalny was the most popular opponent, but after being the victim of an assassination attempt by the Federal Security Service (FSB), he became a celebrity abroad.

Until then, this honor, poisoning with toxic agents, was reserved almost exclusively for former FSB spies who defected to the enemy, such as Skripal or Litvinenko.

THEY WERE KILLED

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said today that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was “apparently killed” in the Russian prison he was in, because Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn’t care who he dies with in order to stay in power.

“It is very sad that Alexei Navalny died in a Russian prison. It is obvious to me: he was murdered,” he said at a press conference after a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

“Like thousands of others who were tortured to death because of this person,” Zelensky added.

Putin, he said, “doesn’t care who dies as long as he stays in his position.”