Alexei navalny

The death of Alexei Navalny has dramatically increased the risk for other key figures currently imprisoned by Vladimir Putin, whether for reasons of dissident behavior, protest against the war in Ukraine or supposed suspicion of espionage. The fact that Putin would cross this line, and do so with impunity in the midst of both the Munich Security Conference and a western influence push spearheaded by willing patsy Tucker Carlson, is a sign that we are now in a new reality — one that it is the duty of the next administration to irrevocably reverse. In the past, when the United States’s top officials identified an American citizen or important dissident held in another nation and said “do not touch this person, lest you find out what terror awaits you,” it meant something.

Even with Alexei Navalny imprisoned, Russia’s opposition continues to struggle against Vladimir Putin and his quarter-century of Kremlin rule. This already daunting task has been made harder by the fact that key figures are now imprisoned or in exile: the opposition leader’s principal aides Vladimir Ashrukov and Leonid Volkov have fled to London and Vilnius respectively, while Navalny himself is serving a three-year prison sentence for supposed fraud. Still, his inner circle continues to plan Putin's downfall from beyond Russia’s border ­— and they now believe they have the support to succeed. The first stage, Volkov tells me, is mass protests. Already Navalny's movement has led to thousands of people rallying in public since January.

Yesterday Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny achieved his martyrdom, with a panelled courtroom packed with journalists and Western diplomats standing in for Golgotha. A Moscow judge turned an outstanding two year, eight month suspended sentence for fraud into a prison term on the grounds that Navalny had missed probation hearings — dismissing as frivolous his excuse that he was lying in a Novichok-induced coma in a Berlin hospital bed at the time. In one sense, Navalny has achieved what he set out to do. Two weeks of street protests in 85 cities across Russia followed his arrest after a voluntary return from his German convalescence — the most serious overt political challenge to Putin’s authority since his return to the presidency in 2012.