Vladimir Putin is a gangster-murderer. Only strength and punishment can defeat him
The coward will have to be removed by the West. Then Russian society must learn to avoid bellicose leadership
What, you might ask, is one more dead Russian among so many? Vladimir Putin’s latest war has, according to the Pentagon, claimed 60,000 of his countrymen’s lives. And, long before he invaded Ukraine, people who stood in the way of the unsmiling despot had the habit of dying. Sometimes they were journalists (Anna Politkovskaya, Natalia Estemirova), sometimes defectors (Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Berezovsky), sometimes oligarchs (Pavel Antov, Ravil Maganov), sometimes people who were in the wrong place (Dawn Sturgess, the mother poisoned in Salisbury).
So the death of Alexei Navalny in an Arctic penal colony is unsurprising. Indeed, the only shocking thing about it is how unshocking it is. Vladimir Putin occasionally poses as a defender of Christian civilisation, but his regime has abandoned the Ten Commandments as comprehensively as it has abandoned liberal humanism.
Navalny’s mother and lawyer have been told that he died of “sudden death syndrome”. The sarcasm serves a purpose, like the official denials that followed the Skripal hit, or the blowing up of Prigozhin’s plane. Putin likes us to know when his regime has dealt with someone who crossed him.
So, to repeat the question, why is one more death so significant? Navalny was hardly a goody-goody liberal. Before he began to seek the approval of Western politicians, he was a Russian nationalist with spicy views about immigrants from the Caucasus. He was not even the first opposition leader to be bumped off. Indeed, he got that role because it was suddenly vacated by Boris Nemtsov, who was shot in the back as he crossed the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky bridge in 2015.
Perhaps Navalny’s death has caught people’s imagination because of the contrast it represents. On the one hand, the (literally) suicidal courage of a dissident who would not abandon the cause of a democratic Russia, who chose to return to his country even after its regime had tried to assassinate him; on the other, the wretched cowardice of a dictator who has again resorted to murder at a distance.
We knew Putin was a dictator. We knew he was a kleptocrat. We knew he was a bully. But to have someone bumped off in prison is the act of a mafia capo. Once again, we see that the Russian Federation is a crime syndicate with a country attached.
Drawing attention to this grim truth is what got Navalny rubbed out. He was no threat at the ballot box, but the Kremlin could not abide the way he kept exposing the property empires and palaces owned by Putin and his former Leningrad KGB cronies. Navalny’s supporters continued to produce their exposés from exile even after their chief had been sent to his Siberian hellhole. To Putin, it was insufferable.
There are still, incredibly, people in the West who portray the grim Dobby the House Elf lookalike as some kind of anti-woke tough guy. They are especially vocal on the fringes of America’s Maga movement.
“Every member of Conservative Inc that backs this Ukraine war is a simp,” says Steve Bannon, Trump’s former consigliere. “I think we should probably take the side of Russia if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine,” says Tucker Carlson, who has been made an even greater fool by this latest horror. “Putin – unlike someone else we know – LOVES his country & FIGHTS for its interests,” says the Trumpian writer Dinesh D’Souza.
Really? Loves his country? He has looted, impoverished, dishonoured and brutalised his country. If anyone loved Russia it was Navalny, who sacrificed everything for it. It was Navalny’s very patriotism that Putin found intolerable.
Opponents of the Ukraine war in the US and in far-Right European parties paint Putin as a strongman, a warrior defending his people against woke, liberal deviancy. But is it a sign of strength to have prisoners murdered and then deny it? To strike at your critics with poison and assassin’s bullets? To rain missiles on women and children? In Ukraine, Putin’s regime has been anything but strong. Sure, he can be tough when it comes to assassinating the unarmed; not when he comes up against soldiers.
I write with feeling this week, having finally been sanctioned by the Kremlin. I had been feeling left out. But, a few days ago, I got the happy news that I was one of 18 newly sanctioned British politicians and academics, along with Lord Ashcroft, the Earl of Oxford and the historian Orlando Figes. According to Pravda, we were “Russophobically charged”.
If by “Russophobically charged” they mean “hoping that Russia will lose the unprovoked war that it launched against a neighbour that offered it no threat,” then I plead guilty.
For here is a hard thing that needs saying. Putin is not forcing his brutality on a resentful population. His approval ratings hover at around 85 per cent. You might argue that this simply reflects the tendency of all populations to rally to their regime in times of war. But Putin remains popular by constantly starting wars. A besieged population, wavering between self-pity and irredentist vindictiveness, is precisely the kind of population that backs dictators.
Many Russians support Putin not despite his cruelty but because of it. They always have. The criminal nature of Putinism was visible from the start.
Navalny believed, as do many Western analysts, that the 1999 Russian apartment bombings, blamed at the time on Chechen separatists, were in fact a work of FSB provokatsiya designed to bring Putin to power.
Whether or not that is true – and Putin has blocked attempts to investigate it – we saw the nature of the new regime in 2002, when real Chechen separatists seized a theatre in Moscow, taking the audience hostage. Putin’s response was to pump in a chemical agent and then go in shooting. The terrorists died, and so did 130 innocent theatre-goers. The response of the Russian population?
To cheer wildly for a leader who was not afraid to get things done.
Since then, Putin has steadily tightened his grip. Western-oriented Russians have emigrated, and much of what remains of his beaten, servile population has normalised repression and violence.
Putin’s removal is a necessary precondition for the return of Russian civilisation, but not a sufficient one. The country needs to understand the cost of adventurism and bellicosity.
Is there a chance of that happening? It depends on the West’s resolve. If Putin wins in Ukraine, he will continue to terrorise Russia and the world. He sees wars as the way to gain approval from his bloodthirsty electorate. He sees the Baltic states as part of Russia. He has lined up with revanchist leaders in China and North Korea.
If, on the other hand, he loses, then Russia can begin to heal, making an honest reckoning with its past. By “losing”, I mean palpably failing to meet his objectives in Ukraine.
This is not really a fight over a few
Loves his country? Putin has looted, impoverished, dishonoured and brutalised his country
Many Russians support Putin not despite his cruelty but because of it. They always have
hundred acres of black earth, however rich the hydrocarbon deposits beneath it. The war will be determined, not by the position of the front lines, but by economic resilience, production capacity and readiness to sustain losses. It was these things, in the end, which told against Germany in 1918. It still controlled large swathes of conquered territory when it ran out of resources and toppled its leader.
Many First World War parallels have been drawn with the Ukraine conflict. But here is another hard thing that needs saying. France, which in 1914 had a population fractionally smaller than Ukraine’s today, ended up mobilising eight million men. Ukraine has still not mobilised a million.
Winning this war will require resolve from all sides. From Ukrainians themselves, and from American and European leaders, who must explain to sceptical voters that they should continue to pay for Ukrainian drones, air defence systems and artillery.
This needs a great deal of courage. Then again, think of the courage Navalny showed when he went home to face trumped-up charges from a regime that wanted to kill him. What’s our excuse?