Navalny’s Murder Clarifies the Putin Problem

In theory, it’s nothing new that Russian President Vladimir Putin has assassinated his peskiest opposition rival Alexey Navalny (on the opinion pages we do not need to pretend that he was “imprisoned” for “convictions” by a “court” of certain “charges”). Navalny’s murder was one of many—but it may be pivotal, nonetheless.

The timing of Navalny’s reported death at an Arctic Circle penal colony is laden with significance, coming around the two-year mark of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and a month before the latest fake presidential election in Russia. Putin—in charge as either president or prime minister since 2000—is “running” again, having passed a special constitutional amendment a few years ago to get around term limits.

The symbolic timing seems right, because Navalny himself was a symbol—since he was so obviously the ultimate anti-Putin. A charismatic crowd-pleaser to Putin’s sinister misanthrope; transparent, liberal, and modern where Putin is a lying, shadowy, 20^th century-issue KBG retread; Navalny a globalist half-Ukrainian, whereas Putin is a souped-up nationalist disruptor who invaded Ukraine. Tall, young, and presentable whereas the always-awkward, now-mummified Putin makes Tucker Carlson look dashing by comparison.

Mainly, Navalny was courageous—insanely courageous, returning to Russia in 2021 after barely surviving a poisoning attempt even though he knew his freedom and life were in danger. Putin? He’s scared of a free election and cowers in the Kremlin with his food taster (I assume). Navalny was arrested immediately upon his return to Moscow, met by authorities at the airplane when it landed at Sheremetyevo airport.

Putin’s dispatching of his 47-year-old rival is not surprising, but it is certainly a ramping up. The last serious (and younger) rival, billionaire energy tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsy, who dared establish an opposition political movement, was jailed from 2003 to 2013 on trumped-up charges, then released. The 60-year-old is a politer regime critic now, in exile and more mindful of the value of discretion.

Navalny was unfazed by his arrest and ordered his team to release the two-hour documentary, “Putin’s Palace” (which he wrote and narrated), accusing Putin of fabulous corruption and spending more than a billion dollars building an opulent imperial retreat (Putin reportedly claims an oligarch actually owns it).

The charges against Navalny were typical of cartoonishly evil regimes, in that they were so brazenly absurd: breaking parole while being in a German hospital, where he was recovering from being poisoned by Novichok, a nerve agent favored by the regime. Had he died due to the poison, one wonders if they would have charged him posthumously with breaking parole on account of death. More serious charges followed, but none of them a death sentence—not an official one. A photo of Navalny last week shows him robust and smiling; a day later, he had “collapsed.”

As I said, Navalny simply met the same fate as many others who ran afoul of Putin—most recently, last year, the mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, who seems to have tried to lead a short-lived rebellion in the summer. Others include Pavel Antov, the “sausage tycoon” who fell to his death from a hotel window in India in 2022, and Ravil Maganov, who criticized the Ukraine war and then apparently fell from a hospital window in Moscow. The corrupt Russian elite sure is full of klutzes!

This apparent killing spree surprised no one, since Putin has become synonymous with lethal political skullduggery. His regime, building on a tradition that goes back to Rasputin, has been at it since the 2006 killings of killing of critical journalist Anna Politkovskaya (murdered in an elevator in 2006) and rogue spy Alexander Litvinenko (poisoned with polonium in London that same year).

Putin has been widely believed to falsify Russian elections and has, in effect, taken over most of the Russian media to aid him—now a favored trick in other countries. Before the current term-limit trickery, he got around presidential term limits by installing Dmitry Medvedev as puppet president. He then made himself prime minister, and after Medvedev’s “term” was over and they once again switched roles. Putin has since machinated to stay in power for the rest of his likely lifespan.

Well before his 2022 full-blown invasion of Ukraine, he seized Crimea from his neighbor—and has been accused of a role in shooting down a Malaysian passenger jet over the country as well. In other foreign policy, Putin interferes with elections in the United States and other countries, through digital disinformation campaigns and assorted cyber-tricks. And he saved Syria’s evil ophthalmologist/strongman, Bashar al-Assad, who has presided over the utter ruination of his country and used chemical weapons against his own people on a number of occasions.

All over the world, outright dictators (of whom Putin is now one) and fake-democracy authoritarians (which is how he began his journey) are nefarious in undermining people’s faith in the spoken word—theirs, and anyone’s. They have used social media so successfully that it has clarified something terrifying: the digital marketplace, which in some ways reflects our actual nature and real instincts, amplifies the radical and the evil. Where do you go from that? Until we figure out what to regulate and what to ban, populists may have burned down the house.

This may be the most devastating thing: Almost no one believes Putin is a good person, or that he speaks the truth, or that he even has the interests of the Russian people at heart—yet somehow it doesn’t hurt him. A similar phenomenon is seen with his fellow travelers, in America, Europe, and elsewhere; (they know who they are). They are bad for their countries and bad for the world yet have support. That’s bad for the underlying assumption about democracy—that people are good.

This leaves us, in the West, with a series of awkward questions. Should we want to intervene? Sure, we should. Have we the right to intervene? Complicated; imagine foreigners boycotting America because a reinstalled Donald Trump was messing with its democracy. And how effective can we be? That’s the hardest, perhaps, of all.

The West has already slapped pretty serious economic sanctions on Russia over Ukraine. To this point, they have failed, with Russia’s GDP actually growing last year. Regime insiders, close to the proverbial food taster, are somewhat insulated from market fluctuations and seem passive and remain compliant.

It is possible to be more decisive, sure. It is possible to sanction third parties like Azerbaijan that are suspected, for example, of helping Russia bust the sanctions. The West could also lobby allies and semi-allies like the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, respectively, to stop letting in Russian tourists, who have been banned across Europe. It is certainly possible to be tougher with Russia’s trading partners—is the West willing to pay the price of all that disruption, including confronting China, which might be primed to invade Taiwan?

So, an intriguing question hangs in the air: Will the killing of Navalny close the book on Putin for reasonable people around the world? Is he now utterly irredeemable, a pariah for life, and an enemy of humanity?

Maybe so—but also unclear. If he sued for peace in Ukraine, I bet he might find himself forgiven. That’s how desperate we are to avoid World War III.

Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.