239 - The Butcher of Sochi

Mourning Alexei Navalny

            The Butcher of Sochi has struck again. We all mourn the wanton killing of Alexei Navalny and the further extinguishing of freedom and humanity in Russia. Ever since Navalny publicized Putin's rampant corruption and the dictator's immense mansion in Sochi, his days have been numbered. Navalny's striking popularity as a beacon of opposition to the return of Soviet tactics and designs hardly helped save his life. The failed poison attempt derailed one attempt to end Navalny's life. Then Navalny defied the odds further and has now succumbed to Putin's NKVD (later the KGB) "take no prisoners" preferences. Can world order provide a salutary response?

            In Iran, the killing of a young woman who refused to wear head covering sparked a revolutionary fervor of many months.  Navalny's death has not yet caused major riots; but the regime preemptively has detained nearly 400 potential protest leaders. It also shut down memorial services. Putin has refused to release his body to his family until the circumstances of his demise can be doctored and disguised. Putin's mafia knows how a major spark like the Navalny's death could upend Putin's harshly despotic rule.

            The murder of Navalny is only the most recent (and most important) of a string of untimely assassinations arranged by Putin. Recall the poisonings of Alexander Litvinenko (polonium in his tea in London in 2006) and Sergei Skirpal and his daughter in Salisbury, UKz (a narrow escape in 2018). Putin used the same military grade Novichok nerve agent chemical weapon on Navalny as his agents deployed against the Skirpals in Britain.  In Navalny's case, they planted it in his underpants.

            After waking in Germany from a medically induced coma, Navalny finally recovered enough to travel. Fatefully, he decided to fly back to Moscow, where Putin's people grabbed him. "I have to go home and fight with my fellow Russians, fight for our homeland," he said.  "There is no other option." Moreover, "If your beliefs are worth something, you must be willing to stand up for them. And if necessary, make some sacrifices.” There was no greater danger to Putin's command of the post-Soviet, post-Ukrainian invasion space. And so Navalny was doomed.

            Yevgeny Prigozhin also challenged Putin's persecution of the war over Ukraine and his refusal to share the spoils of office evenly. As the head of the notorious Wagner Group, with its operative tentacles first in Syria, and Libya; then in the Central African Republic, Mali, and Sudan; and finally in and around several of the stalemated fighting nodes in Donetsk and Luhansk, Prigozhin, Putin's former chef and caterer, became a threat.  Everything came to a head when Prigozhin led a mutiny last year and only (foolishly) called off a march on Moscow after being bribed successfully.  Putin knew, however, that Prigozhin would never enjoy his new wealth. When Prigozin and other Wagner officials were flying from Moscow to St. Petersburg, Putin's men shot their aircraft out of the sky, cutting short yet another rival. The NKVD/KGB always wins, at least inside Russia.

            The Wagner Group has become Putin's Africa Corps, now gathering diamonds and gold in the Central African Republic while pretending to protect President Faustin-Archange Touadéra.  It tried to appropriate gold in Mali amid its weakened protection of Col. Assimi Goita and the military junta that rules Mali. All the while the Africa Corps loses territory and men to the Tuareg and other Islamist warriors who are attacking Mali from the north, with more and more success.

            Another critic of Putin, but from the right not the left, was recently jailed for four years.  Igor Girkin thinks Putin has failed to hammer Ukraine sufficiently.

            There have been many other critics and investigators whose work and voices Putin has found inconvenient: Anna Politkovskaya, a courageous journalist, gunned down in her doorway by paid agents in 2006, was an early victim.  Her colleague Stanislav Markelov, a lawyer representing Chechen victims, was next, killed together with Anastasia Baburova, a journalist for Novaya Gazeta. Then Putin's people, working together with thugs in the pay of Ramzan Kadyrov, the ruler of the Chechnya satrapy, kidnapped Natalya Estemirova, a human rights investigator, in Chechnya and drove her across the regional border into Ingushetia, killing her along the road and dumping her body.

            Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax lawyer, auditor, and exposer of corruption after whom the Magnitsky sanctions (in the European nations and the U.S) are named, was tried and imprisoned in 2009.  He called public attention to $230 million pilfered by officials from the Russian treasury. Refused medicine for his pain and instead beaten and tortured for requesting assistance, Magnitsky, 37, died in his Moscow prison.

            Boris Nemtsov was far better connected and well-known than all of those assassinated, bar Navalny. A physicist, he helped to reform the Russian economy under President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s. The governor of the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, he served as minister of fuel and energy and for two years was vice-premier of Russia. He was a member of the State Duma (legislative assembly) until 2003, by which time he had established the Union of Right Forces, a political party. An implacable critic of Putin from those early days, he spread alarm about embezzlement from the state by Putin and his ilk, especially during the Sochi Olympics, and in 2008 began publishing detailed reports about Putin's corruption and influence peddling.  He opposed the military takeover of eastern Ukraine in 2014, and decried Putin's authoritarianism.  In 2015, on a bridge near the Kremlin, Nemtsov was shot four times in the back, and died. The killers were paid $253,000.

            The Butcher of Sochi still roams free, and remains a danger not only to Russians who fail to fall into line, and to Ukrainians who oppose his invasion, but to anyone anywhere who espouses freedom and human dignity. An assault on Sochi, or wherever he hides, might help stanch the bloodfare in Ukraine and free Russia. But it might also spark a full-scale third world war. I trust that the generals in the Pentagon are weighing their options.

            PS:  Late last week, thanks to Congressional Republican politicking, Ukraine was compelled to retreat from  Avdiivka, a pulverized and probably only modestly strategically valuable town on the edge of Donetsk.  As President Biden commented:  The spineless Republicans took a two-week vacation rather than voting to support Ukraine's need for $60 billion of funding and equipment. Ukraine's President Volodmyr Zelensky reminded the Munich Security Conference "that dictators do not go on vacation.”

            Yesterday, in Munich, Denmark promised to send all of its artillery to Ukraine, now, and challenging others. Sweden reported that twenty of NATO's countries would be contributing 2 percent or more of their budgets to the collective defense of Europe. a strong answer Trump's false rantings.