Russian President Vladimir Putin represents a continuing major threat to the entire democratic world, but most notably to Ukraine and Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
Putin personifies virtually everything democrats across the world repudiate, including cronyism, kleptocracy, violence, exclusiveness and deceit.
A list of his admirers — former US president Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), Brazilian President Jair Bolsonario, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko — reinforces this perception.
The return to bases in Russia after weeks of so-called “defensive exercises” near Ukraine’s border by more than 100,000 Russian soldiers was welcomed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The real reason for the stand-down was no doubt something else, perhaps the likelihood that construction of the almost completed Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany would be terminated if an invasion occurred.
NATO, history’s most successful defensive alliance of 30 independent countries, has called a summit for the middle of next month, where Ukraine should be admitted as the 31st member, mostly because of its well-known principle that an attack on one member is deemed an attack on all.
Conflict in eastern Ukraine broke out in 2014, after Moscow’s seizure of Crimea.
Russian-backed troops captured large areas of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, and declared them “peoples’ republics.”
The ceasefire in the area was last year repeatedly breached in what Ukraine said were deliberate contraventions.
About 14,000 people have since 2014 perished in the war.
Alexei Navalny, 44, Russia’s best-known democracy and anti-corruption crusader, several months ago struggled for his life in a Novichok poison-induced coma in a Siberian hospital, but Putin refused to utter his name.
Navalny threatens Putin because he stands for a peaceful, democratic Russia, and is principled, selfless, courageous and charismatic, thereby rendering him “one who must not be named” by Putin.
Robert Horvath, an Australian historian, said that Navalny a decade ago first exposed the methods used by corrupt Kremlin officials “to embezzle billions of dollars from state-controlled corporations.”
He later coined the phrase “party of crooks and thieves” to describe Putin’s political party, United Russia, which proved a mayor factor in the collapse of the party’s vote in the 2011 Russian parliamentary elections and mass protests afterwards.
Navalny and his Foundation for the Fight against Corruption have over a decade kept a YouTube spotlight on assets of kleptocrats.
A two-hour video on “Putin’s Palace,” released in January on Navalny’s return from treatment in Germany, was viewed more than 100 million times.
In 2013, Navalny, released from jail to compete in Moscow’s mayoral election, won 27 percent of the vote, despite a smear campaign in the Kremlin-aligned media.
He has used his national network of democracy advocates to promote a sophisticated strategy of “intelligent voting,” encouraging votes for candidates who had the best chance of defeating the ruling party.
The world should recognize Navalny as the embodiment of the possibility of a peaceful, democratic Russia that is a partner, not an adversary, of the West, Horvath said.
Navalny is a living refutation of the argument that Putin’s aggression on the international stage is nothing but a rational defence of Russia’s national interests.
On returning to Moscow in January, Navalny was charged with breaching parole from an embezzlement charge invented by the Kremlin in 2014.
His sentence was two-and-a-half years in a notorious penal colony. There, he soon began a three-week hunger strike.
Four UN rapporteurs said that he is in “grave danger” and must be transported abroad.
Maria Pevchikh, who runs part of his foundation, last month wrote in the Guardian that he is dying when millions of Russians need him alive “to deliver them” from Putin.
“Have you ever watched a person being killed?” she wrote. “You are watching it right now ... as Vladimir Putin and his corrupt regime slowly but steadily murder a prisoner.”
“Sometimes, saving a person means more than saving one life,” she wrote. “Saving Navalny means saving the hope of millions of Russians. The hopes of an entire generation of young people who were born when Putin was in power and already have children of their own. It is our responsibility to give each other a chance of a world without Vladimir Putin. And Navalny, free and healthy, has the best shot in delivering that.”
David Kilgour is a former Canadian lawmaker who served as Canadian secretary of state for Asia-Pacific from 2002 to 2003.
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