Editor’s letter

Alexei Navalny is an impossibly brave man. I hope I can still use the present tense to refer to the Russian opposition leader, because his team hasn’t seen him in over a week and prison officials won’t say where he is or whether he is alive (see The world at a glance, p.9). Navalny knew the Kremlin might one day kill him—in fact, it tried to in 2020, when FSB agents poisoned him with the nerve agent Novichok and he had to be airlifted, comatose, to a German hospital. But he returned to his homeland anyway, to continue the fight to hold President Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs to account, and he’s been in prison ever since.

The body count that can plausibly be attributed to Putin is immense. It starts with journalist Yuri Shchekochikhin (who died of a mysterious sudden illness, 2003), and politician Sergei Yushenkov (gunned down, 2003). Both men were investigating the incident that brought Putin to power: the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings that were blamed on Chechen terrorists but were more likely the work of Putin’s spies. Then there was former spy Alexander Litvinenko (poisoned, 2006), who wrote a book blaming the bombings on Putin. Journalists Anna Politkovskaya (gunned down, 2006) and Natalia Estemirova (gunned down, 2009) had covered Russian atrocities in Chechnya. Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov (gunned down, 2015) was killed hours after he appealed to Russians to march against the war that was then already simmering in eastern Ukraine. Some died in prison, such as Sergei Magnitsky (beaten and denied health care, 2009), who exposed a massive tax fraud, and Anatoly Berezikov (purported suicide, 2023), who put up antiwar posters. And there’s a long list of Russian generals and tycoons who supposedly committed suicide, sometimes by flinging themselves out of windows. Maybe Navalny is OK—maybe Putin just wants to ensure that he can’t stir up trouble ahead of next spring’s sham election. But his absence is alarming.