Vladimir putin

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.

If we are to believe the gossip, Vladimir Putin draws up death lists the way ordinary people jot down their shopping. And bang on schedule, as Joe Biden makes a point of labelling him a ‘killer,’ not one but two death lists materialise from parts unknown. This weekend the Daily Mirror — not, it has to be said, usually a Kremlinologist’s ‘must-read’ — claimed that Putin is ‘now beside himself with rage’ and is drawing up lists of would-be victims, saying ‘we have long arms. No scum can hide from us.’ The quotes come from an unnamed office of Russia’s much-feared Federal Security Service (FSB), which is apparently planning how to execute Putin’s laundry list of kidnappings and murders.

There is an assumption that those fighting tyranny must instead want Western-style democracy, that the arc of history bends towards liberal representative government, allied inevitably to Washington and Brussels. Many former Soviet Union countries saw their politburos overthrown by young middle-class people espousing the desire for this kind of politics — from the Rose Revolution in Georgia to the Orange Revolution and Euromaiden protests in Ukraine (whether or not they eventually received that form of government is a different matter). But there is no logical imperative that connects dissatisfaction towards an autocrat with the kind of government and geopolitical order that will replace him, whether in Eastern Europe or elsewhere.

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised to approach Russia and its irascible President Vladimir Putin with a new sense of toughness and purpose. Now calling the shots in the White House, President Biden appears to have made good on that promise — at least symbolically. On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced several sets of sanctions against Moscow for last summer's attempted assassination of the Russian activist Alexei Navalny, a plot that involved the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok. The sanctions, taken in concert with the European Union’s own measures, included asset freezes and travel bans on seven Russian officials deemed responsible for the poisoning, imprisonment, and prosecution of Navalny.

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.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov kicked off his tour of Latin America this week with a visit to Cuba. The choice is not a mere coincidence. Lavrov's visit comes at a time when Moscow and Havana are enjoying their closest relationship in decades. The Soviet Union was once Cuba’s greatest patron. It lavished the island with economic subsidies and favourable trading arrangements in an attempt to bolster the lone communist outpost on America’s doorstep. Infamously, the United States and the Soviet Union neared the brink of nuclear war in 1962 over Moscow’s attempt to deploy ballistic missiles in Cuba. But as the Cold War approached its end, Cuba became less and less of a priority for the Kremlin.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Sochi to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and, of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was the first such trip by a high-ranking US official since the release of the Mueller report in April. During his meeting with Lavrov, Pompeo struck a conciliatory tone while calling for cooperation more between the United States and Russia. If that sounds familiar that’s because it is. US-Russia diplomatic efforts always start pushing in the same direction, then something goes wrong. ‘We have differences.

Vladimir Putin is not nearly as clever as American liberals like to believe. His meddling in the 2016 election backfired, after all — spectacularly. The Kremlin did not expect Donald Trump to win, just as no one in Washington did. If Trump had lost, the Kremlin’s gambit would have paid off: stolen emails would have damaged America’s newly elected president as she faced a hostile, Republican-controlled House and Senate. She could hardly expect cooperation from them on Russian sanctions or anything else, and the GOP could be counted on to react to another Democratic administration by adopting an oppositional foreign policy.