Another Putin attempt to quash all opposition to authoritarian rule - Steve Cardownie

Last week we witnessed another example of the lengths Vladimir Putin will go to as he attempts to quash all opposition to his authoritarian rule.

A young woman cries after laying flowers for late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny at the Solovetsky Stone, a monument to political repression that has become one of the sites of tributes for Navalny. (Photo by NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/Getty Images)

Yulia Navalnaya has accused Putin of ordering the murder of her husband, Alexei Navalny, who died aged 47 last Friday, as he was serving a prison sentence in the remote Arctic penal colony “Polar Wolf”.

According to Russian authorities he complained of feeling unwell after a short walk then collapsed, never to regain consciousness. His body has been retained and his wife has been told that it will not be released to her for a further two weeks, which according to her, is to allow the traces of a nerve agent to become undetectable.

Her husband had faced a previous attempt to kill him. In December 2020 he fell gravely ill on a flight out of Tomsk, Siberia, causing it to be diverted to Omsk where medical treatment was urgently sought. Navalny accused agents of the FSB, Russia’s security agency, of poisoning him and it was later discovered by European laboratories that traces of Novichok, the Russian made nerve agent, were indeed found in his body.

Navalny later hoodwinked an FSB agent, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, into admitting, in a recorded phone call, that Novichok had been spread on Navalny’s underwear in the hotel he was staying at and that, had the plane not been diverted, he would have died. When he returned to Russia after successful treatment in Germany in January 2021, he was immediately arrested, as he feared, and was later imprisoned after being found guilty of the charges of “extremism” and “corruption”.

However, this was seen as no more than a blatant attempt to silence him (and serve as a warning to his supporters) due, in part, to his video exposures of corruption within the Kremlin – attracting hundreds of millions of views online.

Unfortunately, this not the only example of critics of the regime being targeted. A few years back I stood on the spot where the assassination of a Russian opposition politician, Boris Nemtsov, took place. Walking, late one evening, across the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow, in February 2015, he was shot by an assailant who fired up to seven shots, four of which hit him in the head, heart, liver and stomach killing him almost instantly. His murder was carried out just a matter of hours after he called on the public to support a march against Russia’s incursion into Ukraine.

However, Navalny’s widow, Yulia, has vowed to continue his work. In a video, posted on Monday she vowed to carry on fighting for a “free Russia”. In it she asked for viewers to stand alongside her and “share the fury and hate for those who dared to kill our future”. In an emotional appeal she said that: “Three days ago, Vladimir Putin killed the father of my children, Putin took away the most important thing that I had. The person who was closest to me and whom I loved most.

“We need to use every opportunity – to fight against the war, against corruption, against injustice. To fight for fair elections and freedom of speech. To fight to take our country back. Russia – free, peaceful, happy – the beautiful Russia of the future, of which my husband dreamed so much.”