World Affairs Brief, February 23, 2024 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.

Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com).

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ALEXEI NAVALNY

Alexei Navalny was the most effective voice in Russia against the perpetual strong-man rule of Vladimir Putin. He didn’t have all the true free-market answers for Russia’s semi-controlled economy and facade of democracy, but he did recognize that Russia didn’t really have free elections. He was well spoken and openly challenged the corruption of Putin and his oligarchs, and was charismatic as well, with a rising popularity garnering tens of thousands at protest rallies. All of these things made him a formidable threat to Putin and his control over almost all the opposition parties, and that was precisely why Navalny was targeted for arrest and imprisonment where he died this week after being transferred to one of the worst gulag-style prisons in Siberia. Tucker Carlson again showed his ignorance (not treason) of the real Putin by defending him against charges that he had Navalny killed, and so I’ll take readers through the long list of persons Putin ordered killed since oligarch chief Boris Berezovsky brought Putin to Power in 2000. A few years later Berezovsky himself was exiled to London and later assassinated upon Putin’s orders but made to look like a suicide.

John Hayward of Breitbart News provided this biographical sketch of Navalny’s short life, even voluntarily coming back from exile to challenge Putin after already suffering a poison attack on his life.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died under murky circumstances in a brutal prison camp at the age of 47 on Friday, was a fierce critic of strongman Vladimir Putin and the corruption of the Russian elite.

Navalny was himself imprisoned on [false] corruption charges [which is how corrupt leaders in Russia always cover for their own crimes] he dismissed as false and supposedly died while taking a walk after surviving an attempt by the Putin regime to assassinate him with chemical weapons.

Navalny was the son of a Soviet military officer and an economist who spent much of his youth living in his father’s military garrison posts. He often visited his grandmother in Chernobyl and the government coverup of the horrific nuclear disaster there in 1986 seems to have been a formative experience for him.

Navalny grew up to become a lawyer. He also earned an economics degree three years later and, while studying for that degree, he joined a pro-democracy, pro-market political party called Yabloko [which means “apple” in Russian, but is actually an acronym for the 3 names of the original founders]. He was expelled from Yabloko in 2007, supposedly because he engaged in prohibited “nationalist activities,” but Navalny said it was a power play by a rival for party influence.

Navalny did take a more stridently nationalist tone during his early political career… He said in 2014 that he disapproved of annexing Crimea, but a post-Putin government could not simply give it back to the Ukrainians, a position that did not endear him to the Ukrainians.

Navalny’s exit from Yabloko was the first of many times he would claim to be accused of wrongdoing for political reasons. Such accusations came with increasing frequency as he reported on the corruption of the Russian elite and became a persistent critic of Vladimir Putin, who rose to power in 2000.

Navalny won some major victories over the past two decades. During a brief interregnum in Putin’s power when Dmitry Medvedev was president of Russia, Navalny’s persistent criticism forced Medvedev to admit corrupt officials were embezzling over $30 billion a year from the national treasury.

Putin was back in the saddle soon enough, rewriting the Russian constitution to effectively make himself president-for-life. Navalny founded an anti-corruption website that pulled a million visitors a month. He dubbed Putin’s United Russia the “party of crooks and thieves,” and it stuck.

Navalny was able to fill the streets of Russian cities with protesters on several occasions. The protests were broken up with mass arrests, one of which was invariably Alexei Navalny. He joked about his arrests in social media posts and media interviews… [until] he was sent to the Arctic penal colony where he died.

One of Navalny’s first big protest marches was against election fraud in 2011. Even though the vote was heavily rigged to keep Putin in power, Navalny managed to hold United Russia down to less than half the vote. He ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013 and was promptly sentenced to five years in prison for “embezzlement” in a politicized trial.

The Putin regime settled for suspending Navalny’s sentence, which allowed him to remain free but effectively barred him from running for office, maintaining a fiction of opposition that Putin’s regime called “managed democracy” or “competition without change.”

Putin would occasionally set up hapless punching-bag opponents to run against him in dubious elections he would “win” by gigantic margins, stuffing the ballot boxes as needed to ensure his margin of victory made headlines, while legally barring genuine opposition leaders like Navalny from contesting his power. When Navalny tried to run for president in 2018, his embezzlement conviction was invoked to disqualify him. [Shades of how the US Deep State in trying to disqualify Trump.]

Navalny intensified his anti-corruption activism as head of a non-profit agency called the Anti-Corruption Foundation [FBK]. Members of his …foundation tried to run for the Moscow city council in 2019 but were banned from the election, prompting more street protests. Navalny developed a strategy called “smart voting” that basically meant “vote for anyone except Putin’s United Russia party.” He used it several times over the years to dent United Russia’s power.

In August 2020, Navalny was flying back to Moscow after working with activists in Siberia when he became mysteriously ill, sweating profusely and losing consciousness. Navalny’s team immediately suspected he had been poisoned. His plane made an emergency landing in Siberia, where Navalny spent some time hospitalized and breathing through a ventilator.

Navalny’s friends and family insisted he was not safe in Russia, especially after Siberian doctors blithely insisted they could find no trace of toxins in his system. He was transferred to a German hospital, whose doctors quickly determined he had been poisoned with a lethal nerve agent called Novichok, the same poison Russia used on former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the United Kingdom in 2018. [Also done on Putin’s orders.]

Navalny survived and in December 2020 he claimed he was able to trick an agent of Russia’s FSB security service into admitting he was part of the unit assigned to shadow Navalny during his trip to Siberia and put Novichok in his underwear.

Navalny returned to Moscow from Germany in January 2021, fully aware he would be arrested upon arrival. The Russian government charged him with violating his probation from the 2013 embezzlement case and took him into custody at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow.

While imprisoned in January, Navlany’s investigative team released its most provocative corruption report to date, a video expose of the lavish “billion-dollar Putin palace” constructed in southern Russia, [in Sochi] allegedly by oligarchs who wanted to demonstrate their fealty to the authoritarian ruler. The palace was the size of a small city and included amenities to indulge all of Putin’s expensive hobbies including wine-making, ice-skating, tennis, and cinema. It even boasted a nightclub with a stripper pole.”

“Putin’s friends, who received from him the right to steal whatever they wanted in Russia, thanked him a lot. But they also chipped in, collected 100 billion rubles and built a palace for their boss with this money,” Navalny said.

The Putin regime was infuriated by the expose, bouncing Navalny into increasingly harsh prisons and heaping more charges and sentences on him.

When he was sentenced to nine more years in prison for embezzlement in March 2022, Navalny quoted from the American television show The Wire: “You only do two days. That’s the day you go in and the day you come out.”

Navalny disappeared for most of December 2023, to the great alarm of his friends and allies. He reappeared in the Arctic prison camp known as Polar Wolf near the end of the month, having been transferred in secret.

In January 2023, hundreds of Russian doctors signed a letter to Putin asking him to “stop abusing” Navalny, whose health was deteriorating in prison.

This pleading fell on deaf ears, and Navalny reportedly died in the Polar Wolf camp on Friday, supposedly collapsing soon after he complained of feeling unwell after an exercise walk. The prison claimed its medical team tried to resuscitate him and failed. Navalny was seen in good health, and in good cheer, in a video of his court appearance on Thursday.

So, he was fine the day before his death. Navalny’s friends suspect he was again being poisoned in prison, as happened to many others fighting against Putin. As evidence of this they cite Russia’s refusal to hand over his body for 14 days until “chemical examinations are complete,” which should never take that long. Yulia Navalnaya has accused the Russian authorities of hiding Navalny’s body in order to wait for traces of the nerve agent to disappear, as cited by the Daily Mail.

As you can see, the opposition in Russia sees the reality of what Putin is really like—a dictator, unlike the naive analysis of Tucker Carlson, who continues to dig himself deeper into a hole in his defense of Putin who completed snookered Carlson in his Kremlin interview.

The Gateway Pundit came out with a story today, trying to add to conservative’s misplaced defense of Putin, claiming that a Russian released video of a Navalny’s associate asking British intelligence for $10-20M in money to help fund a revolution against Putin, means “Navalny was working for the CIA.” But wouldn’t any of us living under a tyrannical state be asking for foreign financial help to break free? Does that make them an agent of the CIA or the Deep State? Hardly.

Even after Putin admitted that the Russian leadership ordered the collapse of the Soviet Union, (which Tucker completely missed) Putin lied about it as being a move to promote greater “peace and cooperation with the West.” As I documented in the past two weeks it was really done instead to gain more economic and technological aid and trade from the West as Russia was falling behind in the arms race.

In saying this, I’m not defending or trying to excuse the US Deep State and media who are equally as evil and deceptive, but rather to convince my readers that all three predators centers (Russia, China and the Western Globalists) are evil and trying to each gain control of a future world tyrannical government.

PUTIN’S LONG LIST OF VICTIMS

For those who require more evidence of Putin’s strongman history, here is a dossier on those Putin has ordered killed since his reign began. While I can’t prove he ordered these killings, he was in control of the state appraratus which carried them out, and he never objected to or expressed legitimate apologies for these killings or tried to investigate who was responsible. Josh Meyer of USA Today has the list, beyond Boris Berezovsky the chief Oligarch who brought Putin to power, which he doesn’t mention:

Boris Nemtsov–Russian opposition leader and activist, Nemtsov was murdered on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015 after lobbying the U.S. Congress and European Parliament to investigate suspected Putin corruption. A physicist and liberal politician, Nemtsov was deputy prime minister – and likely successor – to President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s before Putin’s rise to power. He later campaigned on exposing corruption and injustice, and denouncing Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. A recent U.K.-based investigation found he was shadowed by an agent linked to a Kremlin political assassination team for almost a year before he was shot to death.

Sergei Magnitsky —a rising-star young Russian tax lawyer, Magnitsky died in 2009 at age 37 in a Russian prison after being beaten and denied medical attention. Magnitsky had been hired by the American-born William Browder, at the time the biggest Western investor in Russia, to investigate the theft of taxes paid to the Russian government.

As Browder would later testify, Magnitsky helped blow the whistle on what he said was a $230 million fraud scheme implicating Putin. Eleven months later, he was dead. The Kremlin said he died of a heart attack, but Magnitsky’s family and investigators said he was tied to a bed and beaten to death by eight prison guards with rubber batons.

William Broder, ironically, was the US ex-patriot who was the grandson of a US Communist Party leader in decades past, Earl Browder. This family relationship was partially the reason he was allowed to deal in lucrative Russian financial schemes after the phony fall of the Soviet Union, even though he had privately repudiated his family’s Communist past.

The London-based entrepreneur testified before Congress in 2017 that Putin was the “richest man in the world,” worth $200 billion, and that “the purpose of the Putin regime has been to commit terrible crimes in order to get that money.”

According to Browder’s testimony at the time, “There are seven people who have died either from murder or suspicious circumstances, and there’s a number of other attempted murders” in connection with the Magnitsky Act and related efforts to uncover Kremlin corruption. (One, Magnitsky family lawyer Nikolai Gorokhov, survived a plunge from a fourth-floor balcony right before he was supposed to testify in court about it, a fall he later said was “no accident.”)

Vladimir Kara-Murza –a staunch supporter of Magnitsky’s, Kara-Murza was poisoned twice and nearly died from multiple organ failures after what he said were assassination attempts by Russian agents. He was left in a coma after both attempts on his life, in 2015 and 2017, but recovered. Both incidents were widely viewed by Russian opposition figures as the Russian government’s retribution for his work on the Magnitsky sanctions.

Kara-Murza remained a government critic and was arrested in Russia in 2022 and charged with spreading false information about the military. He was later sentenced to 25 years in prison… in a Siberian penal colony.

Alexander Litvinenko –a former spy for the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB, Litvinenko was poisoned in London in 2006 after sipping tea spiked with a lethal radioactive poison known as polonium-210.

Litvinenko had defected to the U.K. and became a prominent critic of Putin… Litvinenko had also crossed Putin by writing two highly critical books, “Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within” and “Lubyanka Criminal Group.” The first accused Russian secret services of staging deadly apartment bombings and other terrorist acts in 1999 to bring Putin to power. He also accused Putin of ordering the assassination of Russian anti-corruption journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006.

Marina Salye –an outspoken St. Petersburg city official, Salye became one of the earliest critics of Putin’s accumulation of wealth in the early 1990s, after he returned from his undercover KGB mission in East Germany and began working as deputy mayor for international relations.

In one of many documented conspiracies, Salye and others accused Putin of scheming to give lucrative export licenses for raw materials, including oil products, timber, aluminum and cotton… to enrich Putin and his cronies while the city’s population continued to starve.

Salye died in 2012 just weeks after urging that Putin be tried for corruption. Gladkov died in 2007 from what some associates suspected was poisoning by mercury intoxication or other exposure to heavy metals.

Sergei Kolesnikov –a Russian businessman who left Russia out of fear for his personal safety, Kolesnikov in 2010 publicly exposed a gargantuan Black Sea palace allegedly commissioned by Putin and built with more than $1 billion in illegally diverted funds.

A business associate of a Putin ally, Kolesnikov wrote that the Sochi palace in an exclusive part of Gelendzhik Bay was paid for through “corruption, bribery and theft,” including secret contributions by Roman Abramovich and other top oligarchs.

Andrey Zykov –a lieutenant colonel and organized crime investigator with Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, Zykov was one of the first government officials to focus on Putin and his alleged ties to organized crime figures and criminal racketeering conspiracies in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. The“Putin’s case,” was shut down and Zykov was forced into retirement.

For Tucker Calrson and other Americans who believe that the Soviet’s gulag prisons went away after the phony collapse, many did, but others still remain, as the UK’s Daily Star documents:

Alexei Navalny died at Vladimir Putin’s nightmarish “end of the world” Arctic Wolf Prison today (February 16), where prisoners slash their own wrists to avoid the “torture” by tear gas, half-naked humiliation, beating, suffocation, forced and prolonged discomfort, handcuffs, and rubber truncheons—all “fun” methods staff reportedly use to torture inmates.

Officially known as the IK-3 prison colony of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region, the hellhole has regularly been referred to as Russia’s direct descendant of Soviet Gulags.

It was noted that Navalny was in the most brutal tier of the penal colony system, dubbed the “exceptional regime” which “is reserved for the most dangerous prisoners. He continued: “It’s impossible to dodge, the line of guards is dense, and everyone is beaten.” He added that this “is not the edge of the world – it’s the edge of all life…His entire block is taken outside half-naked during the morning inspection and blasted with water from a fire hose. You dare ask for medical help?”

And Putin’s team is still going after any opposition. Russia’s main security agency arrested a 33 year old Ballerina this week, a dual citizen of Russia and the United States, alleging she committed high treason for donating funds for aid to Ukraine—a mere $51. [Breitbart News]

In summary, these are the kinds of details Tucker needed before he went to Moscow to interview Putin, where instead of allowing himself to be lectured by Putin on his selective view of Russian history, he could have asked some very embarrassing questions.