THERE is no doubt in my mind that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was killed on the orders of the Kremlin.
On Thursday he made jokes in a typically defiant court appearance via video link.
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And his mother said he was healthy when she saw him in prison on Monday.
As long as Navalny was alive, he was a symbol for the resistance and the demand for democratic change.
His murder shows how paranoid Vladimir Putin is about the forthcoming presidential elections on March 15 to 17.
Even though Navalny was in a penal colony in the Arctic Circle and his party Russia of the Future was banned from fielding candidates in the elections, he was still seen as a threat.
READ MORE ON ALEXEI NAVALNY
His supporters, who are mainly young people living in Russian cities, have found ingenious ways to get round suppression — such as putting up posters with QR codes to sites that shed light on Putin’s corrupt regime.
Putin is no longer willing to allow any dissenting voices, either in the Press, on the streets or on the ballot.
Rivals Boris Nadezhdin and Yekaterina Duntsova, who are anti-war, have been barred from standing in next month’s presidential elections.
As soon as Nadezhdin started polling more than ten per cent of support, he was removed from the ballot on the grounds of irregularities in his application procedure.
Navalny’s murder is clearly intended to frighten the opposition.
I suspect there will be an uptick in support for his party in Russia following news of his death, but the authorities will bank on it dying down.
The party’s most likely successor to Alexei for the time being is his wife Yulia Navalnaya, who is in exile and can therefore speak out without fear of being detained.
Navalny showed incredible courage, which no one will forget.
He knew Putin wanted him dead, because Navalny had already been poisoned with the deadly nerve agent Novichok during a flight to Moscow in the summer of 2020.
Despite being lucky to survive that assassination attempt, he returned to his homeland six months later and was arrested on his arrival.
I think Navalny hoped he’d survive in prison, like South Africa’s anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela did, and be freed once Putin was gone.
Tragically, that wasn’t to be.
But even after his death, Navalny’s name will represent freedom in the face of violent repression — much like Mandela’s did. And that is a powerful message.
l Michael Clarke is a Visiting Professor of Defence Studies at King’s College London.
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- Michael Clarke is a Visiting Professor of Defence Studies at King’s College London.
VLAD’S VENGEANCE
TRAGIC Alexei Navalny is the latest in a long line of Putin opponents to die in mysterious circumstances.
His death comes six months after the tyrant’s last public challenger, Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, died in a fireball jet crash.
Warlord Prigozhin’s days were numbered after he launched a failed coup in which his troops marched towards Moscow — and Putin is thought to have directly ordered the air “accident”.
Other victims include politician Boris Nemtsov, gunned down on a Moscow bridge in 2015; journalist Anna Politkovskaya, shot in a lift in 2014; and Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with radioactive polonium tea in London in 2006.
