All posts tagged: Navalnys

Navalny’s Unfinished Work | Benjamin Nathans

Navalny’s Unfinished Work | Benjamin Nathans

Published by José Betancourt

No matter what form it has taken—land of the tsars, nucleus of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or today’s All-Russian Federation—the place known as Russia has displayed an enduring capacity to spawn dissidents and an equally striking inability to tolerate them. This is not unusual for authoritarian systems, but in Russia’s case what stands out is the persistence of the phenomenon across centuries and widely varying types of rule, as if “loyal opposition” were a foreign substance rejected by generation after generation of the host organism. “We are a nation of optimists,” Zhores Alferov, a 2000 Nobel laureate in physics, once joked, “because the pessimists have all left.” Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, nearly a million people, mostly young and well educated, have fled Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Some (men) sought to avoid the military draft, others (men and women) feared arrest for criticizing the war—or for simply calling it a war, as opposed to the farcical official designation of “special military operation.” According to the Russian human rights organization …

Navalny’s mother calls for ‘justice’ after Europeans say he died of poisoning

Navalny’s mother calls for ‘justice’ after Europeans say he died of poisoning

Published by Sam Flores

MOSCOW: The mother of deceased Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said on Monday (Feb 16) she felt vindicated by a European assessment that her son died of poisoning and called for “justice”, as his supporters marked two years since his death in prison. Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest domestic opponent, died in an Arctic prison colony in February 2024 while serving a 19-year sentence. Britain, Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands issued a joint statement on Saturday saying they believed he had been poisoned with epibatidine, a toxin found in poison dart frogs. They based their assessment on samples taken from his body, the statement said. “This confirms what we knew from the very beginning. We knew that our son did not simply die in prison, he was murdered,” Navalny’s mother Lyudmila Navalnaya told reporters, including AFP, outside the cemetery where he was buried in Moscow. “I think it will take some time, but we will find out who did it. Of course, we want this to happen in our country, and we want …

Russian Officials Dismiss Navalny’s Cause Of Death As Nonsense

Russian Officials Dismiss Navalny’s Cause Of Death As Nonsense

Published by Sam Flores

Russia has furiously denied the claim from European experts that Alexei Navalny was killed by frog toxin. Navalny, Russia’s former opposition leader, was a vocal Kremlin critic who died under mysterious circumstances while in prison in February 2024. Russian officials insisted Navalny died of natural causes after collapsing on a walk. But the UK, Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands announced as the Munich Security Conference that the Russian opposition leader was poisoned. In a statement, the countries said: “Given the toxicity of epibatidine and reported symptoms, poisoning was highly likely the cause of his death. “Navalny died while held in prison, meaning Russia had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this poison to him.” The countries called for the need to “hold Russia accountable for its repeated violations of the Chemical Weapons Convention, and, in this instance, the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention”. Russia has furiously denied the claims. Its embassy in London called it a “political pageant”, and said there is “no reason whatsoever to credit such ‘findings’ by Western ‘experts’”. “We …