Sensemaker Daily
Vladimir Putin didn’t need to kill Alexei Navalny, who was brave and popular but posed no serious threat to the Russian regime from jail.
So what? Navalny is dead anyway, and his death conveys two messages:
- Putin will allow no possible focus for opposition before a rubber-stamp election next month hands him six more years in power.
- He is past caring what the international community thinks of him, as long as it fears him.
Those messages dominated the weekend’s Munich Security Conference, where the insecurity the Kremlin has unleashed required every Putin headline to be updated.
No rival in Russia. Navalny was by far his country’s best-known opposition figure, with “Obama-calibre presence,” as one former US ambassador to Moscow put it. Yet he was named politician of the year by only 2 per cent of Russians in a recent poll; Putin seems to have judged his death would inspire more fear than outrage. Vladimir Kara-Murza, another anti-Putin campaigner, is serving a 25-year sentence. Boris Nadezhdin, an anti-war politician whose ratings rose unexpectedly when he tried to register as a presidential candidate, admits his chances of being allowed to run are “zero”.
No unity abroad. Nato’s credibility as guarantor of European security against Russian force has been unravelling since Donald Trump invited Russia to attack alliance members last week. In addition…
- $60 billion in US military aid to Ukraine continues to be blocked by “America First” Republicans in Congress.
- One of them, House Speaker Mike Johnson, announced a two-week recess rather than allow a vote his faction might have lost. Johnson is a close Trump ally.
- The EU has failed to approve €5 billion in critically urgent funding for weapons for Ukraine.
No more resistance in Avdiivka. Ukraine’s new top military commander pulled his remaining troops out of the strategic city near Donetsk rather than sacrifice them in a repeat of the nine-month battle for Bakhmut. Frontline Ukrainian troops must now resist further advances by Russians with a 10-to-1 advantage in shells.
No body. In the Russian Arctic on Saturday, Navalny’s mother arrived at the prison camp where her son died to be told the body was at a morgue an hour’s drive away. It wasn’t. Unconfirmed local reports said it had been traced to a nearby hospital and found to have bruises on the neck and chest. An autopsy could take up to 30 days. In the least surprising development since Friday, Navalny supporters allege a cover-up.
No successor. The last traces of organised opposition inside Russia have been demolished, the political scientist Daniel Treisman says. “In 2017, Navalny had a nationwide network of offices. The security services have taken that apart.” Most of Putin’s surviving enemies are now abroad, among them Navalny’s widow, Yulia, and the head of his Anti-Corruption Foundation, Maria Pevchikh. But it’s no secret that neither could fill his shoes.
No plan. Biden promised “devastating consequences” if Navalny died on Putin’s watch.
- More sanctions are likely, but the lesson of the past two years is they work slowly if at all.
- David Cameron, the UK’s foreign secretary, added yesterday to calls for frozen Russian assets to be seized as reparations for Ukraine, but Japan and the EU fear all sovereign funds would then be at risk of being pulled from international markets.
What will Putin do? Pretend nothing happened, as he did after the deaths of Anna Politkovskaya, Aleksandr Litvinenko and Boris Nemtsov. He will then…
- win the election (with genuine support from most Russians, who continue to support the invasion of Ukraine);
- mobilise more cannon fodder for the war; and
- hope for a Trump win in the US in November.
Call to arms. Mark Rutte, the outgoing Dutch prime minister, left Munich imploring colleagues to “stop moaning and nagging and whining about Trump” and focus on ramping up European arms production.
What’s more... Denmark said it would transfer its entire artillery arsenal to Ukraine.
And yet: If Navalny’s death finally brings a step change in military aid to Kyiv or action on Russia’s frozen assets, why were hundreds of thousands of civilian Ukrainian deaths in Mariupol, Izyum and Bucha not enough to make it happen earlier?
Further reading: Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic sets out the argument that Putin’s removal of Navalny betrays weakness; Masha Gessen in the New Yorker argues that, on the contrary, “a dictator’s ability to annihilate what he fears is a measure of his hold on power”. For readers of Russian, the artist Katya Margolis is clear-eyed about Navalny’s nationalist tendencies but draws sympathetic parallels with Soviet-era dissidents in this Facebook post nonetheless.
