– The core of the matter is simply that Putin now chooses to demonstrate that he takes the lives of people as he pleases, says director and researcher at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Iver B. Neumann, to NRK.
Iver B. Neumann researches Russian politics at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute.
Photo: Lars Os / NRK
– Putin needs it as part of the increase in the militarization and tightening of the regime, he adds.
Spokesperson confirms death
It was the prison authorities in Yamal-Nenets, where Navalny was held, who announced that the well-known opposition politician had lost his life during a walk on Friday.
The Kremlin said on Friday that it had no information on the cause of death and that the death was being investigated by prison authorities.
The day before, the 47-year-old was apparently in good shape and joked and laughed via a video transmission in a court hearing.
On Saturday morning, Navalny’s mother and lawyer are on their way to the prison. At 11:31 a spokesperson for Navalny confirms that he is dead. She also claims he was killed.
– Alexei Navalny was killed. He died on February 16 at 2:17 p.m. local time, according to the official message to Navalny’s mother, the spokesperson writes Kira Jarmysh on X.
She writes that they demand that the body be handed over to the family immediately.
A little later on Saturday, Reuters reports that an employee at the only mortuary in the city near the prison claims they have not received Navalny’s body.
At 12.37 Jarmysh writes on X that the lawyer and Navalny’s mother have visited the mortuary, but that it is closed. They must have been assured that it is open and that the deceased is there.
– Aleksej’s body is not at the mortuary, writes the spokesperson.
– Demonstration of power
– I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Navalny dies now, a month before the Russian elections and on the same day as the security conference in Munich, says adviser at the Norwegian Helsinki Committee Arve Hansen to NRK.
Arve Hansen in the Norwegian Helsinki Committee.
Photo: The Norwegian Helsinki Committee
– This seems like a show of power where Putin wants to get ahead of the opposition, and show that no one can challenge his position, says Hansen.
It has been speculated whether there will be more demonstrations ahead of the presidential election in a month’s time. This may have been Putin’s warning, the adviser believes.
– This is a calculated risk, where you expect that you have enough time to put down the opposition, before all the demonstrations that you have feared in the run-up to the election, says Hansen.
I think Putin must have known
But it can also have an international aspect. On Friday, many of the world’s leaders gathered in Munich to discuss security.
– Here Putin wants to show that he rules his own country and that it is the authorities who are in control, says Hansen, who has no doubt that Putin must have known about any plans to take Navalny’s life.
Facts about Alexei Navalny
Expand/minimize fact box
- Russian regime critic and blogger (b. 1976) with millions of followers on Twitter and YouTube. Trained as a lawyer. Married and father of two.
- In 2007, started an anti-corruption campaign by buying into state-controlled companies in order to be able to ask critical questions at the general meetings.
- Has organized a number of demonstrations against President Vladimir Putin.
- Excluded from the liberal party Jabloko in 2008, where he had been active since 2000, for damaging the party with his nationalist tendencies.
- Leader of the tiny Partija Progressa – the Progress Party – since its creation in 2013.
- Received 27 percent of the vote in the mayoral election in Moscow in September 2013.
- Has been arrested and sentenced for embezzlement and money laundering, debts he himself claims were politically motivated. He has also been arrested and convicted for taking part in illegal demonstrations several times.
- Wanted to stand as a presidential candidate and challenge Putin in the 2018 election, but the candidacy was not approved.
- On 20 August 2020, he became acutely ill on a passenger plane en route from Siberia to Moscow. Two days later he was evacuated to Berlin after strong Western pressure.
- Tests have shown that he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok.
- On 17 January 2021, Navalny was arrested when he returned to Russia.
- He was sentenced in February 2021 to serve 2.5 years in a labor camp for breaching the duty to report following a conditional sentence from 2014. The sentence was based on a fraud case that Navalny rejects as forgery.
- In the spring of 2021, he led a hunger strike lasting over three weeks with demands for better health care. The strike was ended at the request of the doctors and after large demonstrations of support in Russia.
- On 26 April 2021, a court in Moscow decided that Navalny’s foundation had to stop all activities while they waited for a legal decision on whether the foundation was extremist.
- On 30 April 2021, the Navalny Foundation appeared on the extremist list of Russia’s financial monitoring service Rosfinmonitoring.
- On 16 February 2024, the prison authorities in the Yamal-Nenets region, where Navalny is imprisoned, announced that he had died. They state that he lost consciousness after a walk and died.
(Source: NTB, NRK)
– Navalny has been protected in prison for a long time, because he is a high-profile political prisoner. So if he was to be killed, it must have come from the very top. It is difficult for me to see someone take the life of Putin’s biggest critic and Russia’s most famous opposition politician without him himself knowing about it, says Hansen.
May have been to stop anti-war winds
Sky News foreign affairs editor, Dominic Waghorn, writes Saturday that Putin challenger and war opponent Boris Nadezhdin may have given Putin a shot, although he will not be allowed to run against Putin in the March 17 presidential election.
Putin opponent Boris Nadezhdin at a press conference on 8 February, after it became clear that he was not allowed to run as Putin’s opponent in the upcoming presidential election.
Photo: Maxim Shemetov / Reuters
Nadezhdin is said to have done well in polls, but last week it became clear that Putin will only get three opposing candidates, all of whom support the war in Ukraine.
Nadezjdin was refused by the central election committee on the grounds that there must have been deceased people on the signature list who supported the candidacy.
Before that, with the support of jailed British-Russian writer Vladimir Kara-Murza, the campaign was going strong.
Waghorn writes that while Nadezhdin would never have won in the Kremlin-controlled election, his popularity demonstrated a current in society that Putin would have been eager to stem.
– That may also have been the reason why some will claim he ordered Navalny’s death now: To silence a much more charismatic opponent and critic of his war in Ukraine, before the anti-war spirit gathered more strength, writes the foreign editor.
– Surprising
Associate professor and Russia researcher at the University of Oslo, Helge Blakkisrud, thinks the news of the death comes as a bit of a surprise.
– Because there is no tension linked to who will win. The Kremlin has always been very careful not to allow anything that could cause unrest in the ranks that could affect Putin in the run-up to the election.
Helge Blakkisrud is a Russia researcher at the University of Oslo and NUPI.
Photo: Olaf Christensen / University of Oslo
– So even though the political opposition in Russia has a broken back, Navalny’s organization has been disbanded and alternative leaders, those who could potentially front a protest, are mostly in exile or prison, I think it is strange that it comes so close at the election, says Blakkisrud.
Do it because they can do it
He agrees with Waghorn that Nadezhdin’s campaign revealed that it was still possible to mobilize in Russia.
– That all opposition had not been defeated was shown by the long queues outside his election campaign offices in Russia, where people stood for hours to give the necessary signatures. But it was still not necessary to take Navalny’s life. He represented no threat to this election.
Alexei Navalny at a political event in Moscow in October 2013.
Photo: Maxim Shemetov / Reuters
Blakkisrud believes it would have been more logical if the death had occurred after Putin had been elected for a new six-year term. At the same time, he points out that it can also be seen from another side:
– The alternative is that Putin and the Kremlin think they have such complete control that even if it doesn’t look like a rational move, they do it anyway, to demonstrate that they can do it.
Protesters arrested
On Friday, more than 100 people were arrested across Russia in connection with memorial demonstrations in honor of Navalny, according to the independent group OVD, which monitors arrests of opposition figures in Russia.
Aleksei’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, at a press conference in Munich on Friday.
Photo: Kai Pfaffenbach / AP
Alexey’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, is currently in Germany where she is attending the security conference in Munich. She attended a press conference on Friday and said the man would have wanted her to be there.
– If this is true, I want to tell Putin and his friends that this will not go unpunished, she said, and asked for the support of the international community to fight against the Russian authorities.
Several heads of state, including US President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, on Friday blamed Putin and the Kremlin, should the report of the death turn out to be true.
2024-02-17 10:46:49
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