Another Russian Murder

RIP Alexey Navalny

Demonstration after death of Navalny in Bremen, Germany; courtesy of Wikimedia Commons; under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

I did not know Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption fighter Alexey Navalny personally. I have followed his work for years because it was part of my job. Navalny’s death was announced on Friday morning, and his body, as of this writing still has not been returned to his family.

Navalny’s mother, Luydmilla, received an official notice of his death that day. Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service did not specify a cause of death, but later declared him dead due to a “detached blood clot.”

Meanwhile, Alexander Polupan, a practicing emergency room doctor who was part of the team that resuscitated Navalny after he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok by a group of FSB agents in August 2020, pointed out to The Insider that diagnosing pulmonary embolism (the medical term for Navalny’s official cause of death) on the spot would have been impossible. He noted that the fact of this diagnosis appearing so quickly and being circulated by propaganda outlets so eagerly “raises questions.”

Russian authorities have been busy arresting those attending vigils in Navalny’s memory, Roskomnadzor (Russia’s censorship agency) has been busy deleting articles with Navalny tags, and world leaders, including President Biden, have squarely and without doubt pointed to Putin as being ultimately responsible for Navalny’s death.

The work of his Anti-Corruption Foundation (Фонд борьбы с коррупцией or ФБК) unveiled untold riches linked to high-level Russian officials, including Russia’s Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika and Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, in 2015, an investigation of former president and deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, which the Russian censors forced Forbes to delete in 2022, and a documentary about Medvedev’s corruption in 2017.

In 2021, Navalny’s organization investigated Putin’s “palace” in a viral video released after Navalny was poisoned by FSB agents who placed the nerve agent, Novichok, in his underwear.

The video described a lavish estate on the Black Sea, claiming the “new Versailles,” that was 39 times the size of Monaco, was being financed by Putin’s cronies, according to a Politico report in early 2021.

As well as exposing a complex financing scheme involving Russian state companies, the video said the area around the palace was marked as a no-fly zone, access from the coast was restricted, and the estate placed under the control of the Federal Protective Service (FSO), the security agency tasked with the president’s safety. 

The list of luxury properties belonging to Putin, his family members, and his closest oligarch buddies is long and distinguished, and Navalny’s crew did an excellent job uncovering and publicizing these assets.

Navalny was definitely a thorn in Putin’s side, and no one should be surprised that Russia finally murdered the man—conveniently just in time for this year’s presidential election. No, there’s been no official “trial,” but overwhelming evidence shows that Navalny was murdered in a Russian prison—much like another attorney (Sergey Magnitsky), who uncovered massive Russian corruption and was murdered in Russia’s Butyrka prison in 2009 when he was just 37 years old, leading to the eventual passage of the Magnitsky Act, Global Magnitsky, and Magnitsky-like authorities in the EU and the UK, authorizing sanctions on those who are involved in massive human rights violations and corruption.

An FSB officer, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, admitted in a telephone call with Navalny himself after the latter’s poisoning attempt the botched operation that landed Navalny in a German hospital.

Russia has a history of murdering those who oppose Putin. Alexander Litvinenko, the Skripals, Boris Nemtsov, numerous journalists - Anna Politkovskaya, Andrei Pivovarov, Eduard Markevich, Leonid Shevchenko, Oksana Teslo, Yelena Shestakova, Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova, Konstantin Popov, Victor Afanasenko, Akhmednabi Akhmednabiyev, Maksim Borodin, and Zoya Konovalova, editor-in-chief of the Internet group of the state-controlled Kuban broadcast company, who was found dead alongside her ex-husband just last month, with preliminary reports suggesting poisoning.

This is just an abbreviated list. During the past two years, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there seem to have been a lot of defenestrations, poisonings, shootings, and hangings of Russian businessmen—many from the energy sector, but also journalists and those who publicly opposed Putin, like his former “friend” Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose plane magically exploded near Moscow last year after he tried to stage a pathetic alleged “coup in June that “suddenly” stopped when Prigozhin’s troops turned around before reaching Moscow.

So why would it surprise anyone that a man who had dedicated his life to exposing and opposing Putin was killed in a Russian prison?

To be sure, Navalny’s views did not always sit well with me. Past remarks were tinged with racist ultranationalism, especially about Muslims in the Caucasus, Georgians, and Central Asian migrants in Russia, although he later apologized for his statements. He also supported Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and called Georgians “rodents” and attended a number of nationalist marches.

But one does not have to agree with his views on certain issues to acknowledge the spectacular work he and his organization did to expose corruption at the highest levels of Russia’s government, the fact that he returned to Russia after he recovered from the FSB’s assassination attempt and used his poisoning and his subsequent arrest to expose just how morally corrupt Putin’s Russia is, and his stubborn and admirable lack of fear of the Putin regime.

Fact of the matter is his views—current or former—don’t matter. What matters is that he was murdered by a savage regime for exposing corruption in his country. Agreement with his views, whether he held them recently or not, is irrelevant.

What cannot be denied is that he fought until the very end, and he was murdered for it.

So what will the West do in response? I’ve heard a “Navalny Act” being discussed among anticorruption activists, to target those in power who abuse those who peacefully oppose them. Frank Vogl, the co-founder of Transparency International writes that Navalny’s death has implications worldwide, highlighting that autocrats fear the truth.

The jails of Egypt, Azerbaijan, Belarus and assorted other countries are full of journalists and activists who have had the courage to try and expose the grand corruption of national leaders.

Just as Western governments, and many parts of the media, largely ignored the plight of Navalny over the last couple of years as his confinement in Russia became increasingly oppressive, so the multitude of other political anti-corruption leaders in prisons in many countries are mostly ignored.

The fight for Ukraine’s independence today is at the center of what U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has warned is a “clash of civilizations between a rule of law civilization, and an autocratic, kleptocratic civilization.”

So something needs to be done. But what?

A “Navalny Act” would get stuck in Congress, much like aid to Ukraine is stuck right now. Maybe an amendment to the Magnitsky Act adding the targeting of political opponents to the list of sanctionable activities? Maybe imposing secondary sanctions on any financial institution or other entity that transacts with those designated under the new legislation—be it an amended Magnitsky Act or a new Navalny Act. The threat of secondary sanctions is a potent one, as demonstrated by Executive Order 14114 and financial institutions’ reactions to it.

Maybe doubling down on enforcement against any Russian oligarchs or their facilitators who are using the US financial system to hide or move assets? The Justice Department during the past two years has been actively pursuing indictments and arresting those who facilitate sanctioned Russian oligarchs’ access to our financial system, including Natalia Bardakova and Olga Shriki a New Jersey resident and naturalized US citizen who were charged with helping Oleg Deripaska evade US sanctions, and former Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the FBI Counterintelligence Division in New York, Charles McGonigal, who a few months ago was sentenced to 50 months in prison and ordered to pay a $40,000 fine for conspiring to commit money laundering in connection with his 2021 agreement to provide services to Deripaska.

Yes, more of that, please!

Sanctioning random Russian prison officials is not enough. Designating judges and FSB agents responsible for his poisoning was insufficient. If the West doesn’t do something quickly not just to hold Russia accountable for Navalny’s death, but also other violations of international law and global standards, like the invasion of Ukraine and the illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory, those still in Russian custody, like human rights campaigner Vladimir Kara-Murza and journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, will perish because of our failure to hold Putin accountable.

Do not underestimate Putin. Do not think for a moment that he will stop with Navalny. Fighting corruption in Russia is intrinsically linked to holding that entire rotten band of kleptocrats accountable there and abroad and inextricably connected to our national security, given Russian disinformation, bribery, and destabilization efforts.

Navalny wasn’t afraid. We shouldn’t be either.