Friday, February 16, 2024

Alexei Navalny Passed Away!

Alexi Navalny died in prison. A Russian critic of Vladimir Putin survived being poisoned and nearly shot to death. The prison system broke him. They tortured him to death. 

Tucker Carlson did his interview with the Russian Federation president. He also hinted at interviewing Edward Snowden and Tara Reade, two Americans who sided with Russia.

The far right agitator waited two hours to meet the president. The president is extremely cautious about interviews and engaging with people. He survived assassination attempts and a coup attempt. He is running for another six year term and there is little challenge against it.

Here's Carlson's interview. Watch this if you want to but I advise not to take him seriously.

The Russian government led by Vladimir Putin is notorious for scrubbing critics. One critic was tortured to death. On top of that, his death will spark more international pressure on Russia.

The Russian Federation is currently engaging in a war in Eastern Ukraine in an attempt to seize control of five oblasts and the forced removal of its president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The U.S. and NATO are offering weapons to Ukraine. The U.S. is stalled due to the Republicans in the House of Representatives refusing to aid more military aid. 

It's part of their revenge tour. When Donald J. Trump illegally tried to withhold funding in an attempt to exploit information about Hunter and Joe Biden, he was impeached.

The Republicans refused to hold him accountable for that and Jan. 6. The Jan. 6 incident put their lives in danger and yet they failed to impeach him for that too.

Russia invaded Ukraine in Feb. 2022. During that time, Trump was praising Putin and saying that this will be a moment where he could be in charge. He boldly stated that had he won, Putin wouldn't invade.

Putin has been known to take out critics. I mean the mysterious plane crash of Wagner Group mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. Many oligarchs had mysteriously died from falls and car accidents. Others were sent to prisons in Siberia.

Don't think Navalny's death with be in vein!

Alexi Navalny was an example. The Russian has died in prison, the country's prison service said Friday, following a yearslong struggle against official corruption and President Vladimir Putin's government that saw him survive several poisoning attempts. 

He was 47. Navalny leaves behind his wife, Yulia, daughter, Daria, and son, Zahar.

Navalny was poisoned with a military nerve agent while on a business trip in Russia in 2020 — an attempt on his life that he blamed directly on Putin — and spent his final years behind bars as the Russian leader reshaped the country to rally behind his war in Ukraine. Navalny's death comes as the Kremlin is preparing to orchestrate another election victory for Putin in March.

Navalny was serving a combined 30 ½-year jail sentence when he died. He went missing in Russia's penal system in December, eventually turning up at a high-security penal colony in a remote town above the Arctic Circle.

Russia's Federal Prison Service said in a statement that Navalny had died after feeling unwell following a walk Friday.

“On February 16, 2024, in penal colony No. 3, convict A.A. Navalny felt unwell after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness,” the prison service for the Yamalo-Nenets region, where Navalny was moved, said in a statement on its website.

“The facility’s medical workers immediately arrived at the scene and an emergency medical team was called in. All necessary resuscitation measures have been carried out, but they did not yield positive results. Emergency medics confirmed the death of the convict,” the statement added.

There was no immediate information about what exactly caused Navalny's death, with the region's investigative committee saying it has launched a "procedural investigation."

Navalny's allies have long raised concerns about his health and poor conditions in jail, where they said he had to spend many days in crammed "punishment cells" for the most minor of conduct violations.

Putin has been informed, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed, according to the Russian state news agency Tass.

The Kremlin has always denied poisoning Navalny, and throughout his life has tried to downplay his importance in Russian public life, often refusing to use his name.

Untouchable.

A spokesperson for the opposition leader said on X that they did not have any confirmation or information about his death. "Russian authorities publish a confession that they killed Alexey Navalny in prison," said Leonid Volkov, a close ally of many years, in a post on X. "We do not have any way to confirm it or to prove this isn’t true."

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled former oligarch-turned-opposition-figure also said on X: "If this is true, then, regardless of the formal cause [of death], the responsibility for [Navalny's] premature death is borne by Vladimir Putin, who first authorized the poisoning of Alexei and then put him in prison."

Navalny's death leaves Russia’s opposition, wounded by years of harassment and prosecution, without a clear leader. All of Putin’s most high-profile critics are now either dead, jailed or in exile. 

Navalny was, undoubtedly, the biggest thorn in the Kremlin’s side. 

For more than a decade, he led nationwide protests against the authorities, ran for office to challenge members of the Russian establishment and set up a network of campaign offices across the country that have since been dismantled.

Born in 1976 in the tiny town of Bytyn, near Moscow, Navalny was educated as a lawyer and economist, but entered politics in 2008, starting his anti-corruption fund, FBK,  three years later. 

He was known for his oratory skills, as well as his use of the online space to promote the results of his investigations and spread his ideal of what he called the “wonderful Russia of tomorrow.” His digital savvy made him particularly popular among Russia’s more democratically minded teenagers and youth. 

Navalny rose to prominence as Russia’s most outspoken Kremlin critic after leading a series of anti-corruption investigations into members of the Russian elite. 

His 2017 exposure of the lavish lifestyle of Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and prime minister, led to mass protests. And an investigation into a luxurious “secret palace” on Russia’s Black Sea coast, purportedly owned by Putin, resulted in a wave of indignation across Russia in 2021. 

Navalny tried to run against Putin in the 2018 presidential election, but was barred from entering the race because of a 2014 embezzlement conviction, which he categorically denied as fabricated to keep him out of politics. Russian officials made a point of not referring to Navalny by name to avoid raising his profile in public. 

While on a business trip in Russia in August 2020, Navalny was poisoned with a military nerve agent in an attempt on his life that he blamed directly on Putin.

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