To stay in power: how Putin is gradually eliminating his opponents

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Vladimir Putin (71) does not tolerate any contradiction. Almost all prominent opponents of the Russian president have now been captured, fled into exile or are dead. The persecution of the opposition in Russia at a glance:

For more than ten years, Alexei Navalny (†47) was the Kremlin’s biggest critic. For this he was harassed, poisoned and imprisoned. He died on February 16 in a penal colony in the Arctic Circle. His supporters and many Western politicians blamed Putin for Navalny’s death, with some calling it murder. In 2020, Navalny fell victim to a serious poison attack. After his treatment in Germany, he returned to Russia in January 2021. Navalny was immediately arrested there and sentenced to 19 years in a prison camp for, among other things, ‘extremism’.

Boris Nemtsov (†55) was deputy head of government and was sometimes discussed as the successor to President Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007). But then Putin became head of state and Nemtsov became one of his fiercest critics. In February 2015, the 55-year-old was murdered with four shots in the back on a bridge just meters from the Kremlin. His supporters accused the president of the Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov (47), of ordering the killing. Five Chechens were convicted without the mastermind officially named.

In October 2006, journalist Anna Politkovskaya (†48) was shot dead in her home in Moscow. She worked for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and documented the crimes of the Russian army in Chechnya for years.

Many other opponents of Putin are in prison. Human rights activist Oleg Orlov (70) was sentenced to two and a half years in camp by the banned organization Memorial on Tuesday. His crime: criticizing the war against Ukraine.

Opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Mursa, 42, said he had been poisoned twice. In April 2023, a court sentenced him behind closed doors to 25 years in prison for spreading “false information” about the Russian military. He is serving his sentence in Siberia.

The sentence against politician Ilya Jaschin (40) in April was eight and a half years in prison. He had denounced the ‘murder of civilians’ in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.

Xenia Fadeyeva (31), a former MP and Navalny ally, was due to begin a nine-year prison sentence at the end of 2023. Authorities accuse the 31-year-old of founding an “extremist organization.” Lilia Tschanyscheva (42), Navalny’s first employee, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison on the same grounds in June 2023.

Many opposition figures now live abroad, such as former world chess champion Garry Kasparov (60). When opposition activist and former oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky (60) was released in 2013 after ten years in prison, he fled to London, from where he finances opposition platforms.

Many supporters of Khodorkovsky and Navalny have left the country in the past three years as repression has increased, especially since the attack on Ukraine. But even in exile, opposition members do not remain untouched: in February, Russian authorities launched an investigation for “incitement to terrorism” against writer Boris Akunin (67), who has lived in London since 2014.

Another method to silence critics is to classify them as “foreign agents.” Hundreds of human rights activists, opposition figures and journalists were given this label, including former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov (66) and the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry Muratov (62). Organizations such as Memorial and the Sakharov Center were also dissolved for violating the “foreign agents” law. (AFP/jmh)

Source: Blick