Alexey Navalny Sentenced to 19 Years in Prison For Putin’s Invented Crimes
In Russia, opposition figures keep disappearing, getting convicted, or pretentiously aligning themselves with Putin’s Kremlin in order to avoid cooked-up prosecutions. Democracy is not Russian; Putin does not pretend otherwise. He has amassed near absolute power in Russia, albeit with some great success, but his brutality towards dissent unmasks the façade he puts on during the Russia-Africa Summit in St. Petersburg and other PR stunts shown on RT and Sputnik. Russia’s isolation by its closest trading partners in Europe against the backdrop of the botched Ukraine invasion has forced it to seek partners and allies in places where it does not normally do so.
Alexey Navalny, a nobody in Russia who is not even a leftist by Western standards, is an outspoken opponent of Putin who barely makes a dent at the ballot boxes. Why did Putin crack down so harshly on someone who barely scratched his power grip on the Russian Federation?
Simple: the West’s fear of Russia’s nuclear arsenal and weapon technological advancement are the only two deterrents Russia holds against the West. Takeaway the former, NATO would have invaded or gotten involved directly with Russia to protect their interests in Ukraine and permanently disarm Russia. Navalny’s honeymoon days of opposing the Kremlin were seen as an irrelevant noisemaking attempt by the Kremlin until recently, when the poisoning incident went mainstream. To the West, blaming Russia’s Putin is a default tactic; Navalny, in the quest for attention, rubbed shoulders with the West to attack his birth country. That was the red line for Putin; Navalny was no longer irrelevant; he’d crossed the line and thus needed to be dealt with.
After receiving treatment in Germany over a poisoning case that was so politically charged that one could hardly conclude if the whole incident was a conspiracy. Navalny, despite the provocation he had caused the Kremlin, still decided to go back to Russia, ignoring Putin’s capriciousness and insatiable lust for power. Upon his return to Russia from Germany, Navalny, expecting to capitalise on the fame the West gave him through the poisoning circus, was pinned down right at the airport. The West has only one goal: to bring down Russia and uphold its unipolar hegemony.
Putin had enough of Navalny’s chess game with the West; in the usual Putin style, he invented all kinds of crimes just to make sure Navalny was behind bars for as long as possible. The initial offence for which he (Navalny) was arrested would have only given him two years in prison. Putin was not happy with this, so he went all Mikhail Khodorkovsky style, introducing more fiction to make sure Navalny stays behind bars for as long as possible.
Navalny’s playful demeanour in court and his cheerfulness in the face of such serious charges tell a thousand stories. He knew that justice did not exist in that courtroom; his sentencing had already been passed on by the Kremlin’s boss Vlad, and nothing he did there could have changed his fate. He greeted the court session with derision, smirking and sometimes even laughing at the charlatanry. Putin is not a democrat, a tolerant person, or a fair individual; that much is clear, but one thing is certain: he definitely loves Russia and will do anything to keep Russia relevant.
Writer: – Ikechukwu Orji –
