Navalny’s fate will define how West must deal with Russia
On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his state of the union address — extolling his country’s moral values and lashing out at the West. The same day tens of thousands of Russians demonstrated across the nation’s 11 time zones, at huge personal risk, calling for Russia’s most famous political prisoner to be freed.
But Alexei Navalny, Putin’s chief political opponent — whom Russian agents nearly murdered by poison last year — still lay near death in a Russian penal colony on Thursday. On that same Thursday, Putin was prating on about international cooperation at President Joe Biden’s virtual climate summit.
So we have a Russian leader who demands respect from the world but scorns the West and seeks to kill his opponents. A Russian leader who has ensured that he can remain as president for life. He probes and tests the West’s weak points, as with his massing of Russian troops on the border of Ukraine. But then he often sidesteps — ordering a partial pullback of those troops from the Ukraine border on Thursday, the day of the summit. Clearly, Putin wants to present himself as a man for dialogue and reason.
Navalny’s fate — whether Putin allows him to die from lack of medical care in a Soviet-style penal camp — will define how the West must deal with this new Russian czar.
There is good reason why Navalny appears to freak Putin out, despite the fact that he has been banned from running for office or forming his own party. Navalny was arrested the moment he returned home from lifesaving care in Germany after the poison attempt.
The 44-year-old lawyer has done what no other Russian politician has ever done: appeal to the public’s frustration with a stagnating economy that depends mainly on revenues from oil and gas. That economic malaise has been magnified by Russia’s failures in dealing with COVID-19.
In addition, Navalny’s team has laid bare, via brilliant use of social media and YouTube videos, astonishing details of corruption in the highest Kremlin circles, including a grand palace built for Putin on Russia’s southern coast.
And, unlike any other Russian opposition figure, Navalny has organized followers in cities all across Russia — and turned them out in local elections to vote for candidates other than from Putin’s party. He has tapped into Russian weariness with a president-for-life who is cracking down more severely on any form of opposition than at any time since the Soviet Union’s fall.
Sent to a penal colony while still recovering, Navalny was refused any medicine but ibuprofen when he was in terrible pain and could barely walk. He has been on a hunger strike, demanding treatment by his own physicians.
Perhaps Putin will try to forcibly deport Navalny. But those who know him well say he will never leave Russia willingly.
So the Russian leader — and Biden — are facing a test.
Putin has been probing Biden, and the NATO allies — with the Solar Winds hack, the Ukraine buildup and his warning of “asymmetric response” to perceived Western threats. Biden has responded with more sanctions, while agreeing to meet Putin face to face, presumably to lay down U.S. red lines.
This approach makes sense. But if the Russian leader lets Navalny die — in full view of the world — all Western bets should be off. “We have communicated to the Russian government that … there will be consequences if Mr. Navalny dies,” Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told CNN.
That threat should be made clear to Putin in private so that Navalny’s life is saved.
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