Alexei Navalny is dying. Millions of Russians need him alive
Have you ever watched a person being killed? I will answer for you. You have. You are watching it right now, not in some sick social media experiment, but as Vladimir Putin and his corrupt regime slowly but steadily murder a prisoner. It isn’t the first time they have done that, but this time, their intended victim is Alexei Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition, who also happens to be my boss.
Navalny has been on hunger strike for 20 days now. He is demanding medical attention from an independent civilian doctor. A basic request, but not when Putin views you as his number one problem. No food, no supplements, just water. His health is deteriorating quicker than world leaders can express concern, as he loses at least 2lbs a day. We got his blood test results last week. I couldn’t read a word of the scribbled note on a scrap of paper. But when we showed it to the doctors, there was that long doctors’ pause everybody knows, followed by their unanimous agreement: “He could die any minute.” He needs urgent treatment in an ICU, starting yesterday.
It was the second time in a year
that we faced that reality. In August 2020 Navalny and his team, myself included – I’m the chief investigator at the Anti-Corruption Foundation – travelled to Siberia. We were making short films about corrupt local politicians. Nothing too fancy. Not the palaces and yachts at the top of Russia’s pyramid of corruption but small-time regional leaders, using their position to steal money for a new Range Rover.
Local elections were imminent and the films worked like magic. People watched and remembered them, and didn’t vote for Putin’s party. We were delighted with how things were going. Until 20 August. Alexei had to return to Moscow early. We later learned he lost consciousness on the plane back to Moscow, and after an emergency landing in Omsk, fell into a coma while being driven to the local hospital. We all rushed to Omsk.
I hope those 40 hours in Omsk will be the worst of my life. Most of that time I sat on a narrow wooden bench at the entrance of this grim, depressing hospital feeling helpless. It looked like we had travelled back in time to a bleak, small-town medical institution in the 1990s. Putin’s 20 years of selfproclaimed prosperity certainly hadn’t reached Omsk. The hospital looked like it had survived a Blitz. Chipped paint, cracks in the walls and windows. A trip to the loo was an adventure on its own – no toilet, just a hole in the ground.
Navalny was somewhere upstairs in the ICU, on a shared ward for several people, mostly alcoholics and drug overdose casualties, the patients the local toxicologists are trained to deal with. We were unable to find any doctors to speak to. No diagnosis and no explanations. But while doctors were in short supply, secret service officers were there in abundance. A small army of unidentifiable grey-suited men had taken over the building. We knew Navalny was dying but we didn’t know why. Only a few weeks later, after Alexei was transferred and treated in Germany, we found out – he had been poisoned with novichok, the militarygrade chemical agent also used by Putin’s operatives in Salisbury in 2018.
As soon as they loaded a “biohazard”-labelled capsule with Navalny in it on to a German medevac plane, we knew it was over. He would live.
We were certain of that until now. Navalny went back to Russia in January and was detained at the airport. He was charged with violating parole from an embezzlement case that was trumped up by the Kremlin in 2014, and his supposed “parole violations” were absurd. He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison and sent to a notorious penal colony. Navalny isn’t the first person to go through a rough Russian prison experience – one can definitely survive that, though many of the Kremlin’s opponents have not. But he is the first person to be put through this having already suffered attempted murder with a chemical weapon.
I shudder to write it, but Navalny is dying. Again. He’s on hunger strike. But he’s been brought to this point by dozens of people in the penal colony and in the prison’s so-called hospital; by the judge who rubber stamped his politically motivated sentence; by the prosecutors who concocted the case; by those who deny him independent medical treatment and, not least, by Vladimir Putin, who is upset that someone challenged his right to rule Russia for ever.
The whole world is watching, as if sat on that narrow wooden bench where I watched and waited in the dilapidated hospital in Omsk. But this time, the wait is longer than 40 hours, and the likely outcome is less optimistic. Putin’s system is killing Navalny, slowly and agonisingly.
Sometimes, saving a person means more than saving one life. Saving Navalny means saving the hope of millions of Russians. The hopes of an entire generation of young people who were born when Putin was in power and already have children of their own. It is our responsibility to give each other a chance of a world without Vladimir Putin. And Navalny, free and healthy, has the best shot in delivering that.