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 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 tsar.
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 life-saving 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.
Those economic realities were revealed in Putin’s state of the union speech, in which he admitted to worsening social inequality and poverty and a declining population. While touting Russia’s response to the coronavirus, he failed to mention that Russia’s real death rate from the virus is reportedly the third highest in the world (after the United States and Brazil). Despite producing the Sputnik V vaccine, Russia has been woefully slow in vaccinating its own public.
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.
“Navalny is the first 21st-century politician in Russia,” I was told by phone from Moscow by prominent independent Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats.
“Navalny is the kind of politician capable to appeal to different walks of life through personal example,” she added, “not because he has power or money but because he presents this amazing high moral standard that Russians have been looking for since the death of Andrei Sakharov, someone you can look at and say this guy knows about heroism and moral courage.
“They put him in a penal colony because they hoped to isolate him and he somehow managed to make this penal colony the center of Russian politics.”
Indeed, 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 is on a hunger strike, demanding treatment by his own physicians.
“He is constantly proving he is ready to die for his beliefs,” says Albats. “He wrote on Instagram, ‘There are so many like me who have nothing but a mug of water and our belief in the future of Russia.’” (Navalny has no internet access but is allowed to speak to his lawyers, who post messages for him.)
Perhaps Putin will try to forcibly deport Navalny. But, Albats, who knows him well, says he will never leave Russia willingly.
So the Russian leader – and President 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.
Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the The Philadelphia Inquirer. Readers may write to her at: Philadelphia Inquirer, P.O. Box 8263, Philadelphia, Pa. 19101, or by email at trubin@phillynews.com.
