Navalnaya deserves protection
After Russia’s grotesque bombardment on Monday of a Kyiv children’s hospital crowded with young cancer patients, no one will be surprised that wanted war criminal Vladimir Putin now has his evil sights fixed on settling scores with the still grieving widow of his arch enemy Alexei Navalny.
Yulia Navalnaya, 47, is in mourning over the suspicious death in February of her husband, also 47, in a remote Arctic gulag where he was serving a 19-year sentence for his opposition to the despotic regime. His supporters believe he was killed, like so many of Putin’s opponents, on Putin’s direct orders. As with the unconscionable, utterly unforgivable targeting of children in the cancer hospital, however, the Russian tyrant is clearly untroubled by any normal concern for Mr Navalny’s widow.
A warrant for the arrest of Ms Navalnaya on so-called “extremism charges” was issued by a Moscow court on Monday. Since she fled Russia in 2021 after her husband was arrested on politically motivated charges, and lives outside Russia, that may not matter much. But, given Putin’s appalling record of dispatching his thugs across the world to kill his opponents, any such assumption would be a mistake. It is imperative the international community – or that part of it that cares about human rights – does what it can to ensure Ms Navalnaya’s safety.
Putin’s 25 years in power are replete with gross transnational crimes committed against his opponents. In 2018, even the quiet English cathedral town of Salisbury was drawn into the tyrant’s web of revenge murder when he dispatched killers with deadly novichok nerve agent to liquidate former military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and daughter Yulia. There have been countless similar “hits” on the dictator’s opponents. Ms Navalnaya has been courageous in defending her late husband and supporting his demands for freedom and democracy. She has described Putin as “a murderer and a war criminal … His place is in prison, and not somewhere in The Hague (the International Criminal Court) in a cosy cell with a TV, but in Russia in the same 2m-by-3m in which he killed Alexei”.
Ms Navalnaya’s anger is understandable. Many more opponents of Putin’s regime – including those opposed to his war against Ukraine – have become targets for his malevolence. There is currently deepening concern about the fate of Russian/British, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, 42, a Cambridge graduate serving a 25-year sentence for criticising Putin’s war on Ukraine. The sentence is the longest imposed on a Putin opponent in post-Soviet Russia. It follows references by Kara-Murza to “the dictatorial regime in the Kremlin”. Last month, he was placed in solitary confinement in a so-called “punitive cell” in a prison in Omsk, 2000km from Moscow. He has since been transferred to a prison hospital, adding further to fears about his health.
Meanwhile, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, 32, arrested in March last year, is due to return to court in Moscow on August 13 for the next stage of his trial on bogus spying charges that could potentially imprison him in a gulag for 20 years. Gershkovich’s fate, no less than that of Ms Navalnaya, Navalny, Kara-Murza and the many others who have fallen victim to Putin’s jackbooted regime, demands unrelenting global outrage and unflinching support for the sanctions that are already doing significant damage to the dictator’s economy. Joe Biden was right, in his address to the NATO 75th anniversary summit in Washington on Wednesday, when he emphasised the critical importance of Western support for Ukraine and its significance to defeating the Putin regime’s designs on Europe. From the perspective of our own Indo-Pacific region, outgoing NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg was no less right when, in sharply criticising China for supporting Russia over Ukraine, he said: “Should Russia be victorious in Ukraine, that would embolden Iran, China and North Korea, and shape the global security environment for decades to come.”