Last Friday, Kremlin critic and anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny was sentenced to an additional 19 years in prison on charges of "extremism." As part of his punishment, Navalny, who was initially jailed in January 2021 for failing to check in with his Russian parole officer while convalescing in Germany following a chemical nerve agent assassination attempt carried out by agents of Vladimir Putin's FSB, will be held captive under a "special regime" that will significantly diminish his opportunities to communicate with the outside world.
But shortly after the sentence was read, Navalny was able to publish a message through his lawyers: "The number of years does not matter. I understand perfectly well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence, where life is measured by the term of my life or the term of life of this regime."
While Navalny's official crimes have included "embezzlement," "creating an illegal NGO," "inciting children to violence," and "the rehabilitation of Nazism," his only real offense was to expose the lavish lifestyles of Russia's ruling elite, including that of Vladimir Putin himself.
For all their patriotic talk, Putin's closest associates often still send their families to live in the supposedly decadent West. This past May, Navalny's team revealed that the children of Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov are U.S. citizens, having been born in New York on trips paid for by the money their father made by repeatedly declaring America to be a bastion of "Satanism."
It is also notable that, for all of the Putin regime's demands for "security guarantees" and its complaints about "NATO expansion," over the past year and a half Russia has moved massive amounts of its military assets southward, away from the country's actual borders with the supposed Western threat.
Russia has done this despite NATO having upped its troop presence in Eastern Europe. Judging from their behavior, Vladimir Putin and those closest to him appear to believe that the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division poses a lesser threat to the integrity of the Russian state than does the work of one investigative blogger.
As Navalny's team continues to point out, however, the corrupt Russian generals who send their children to live in London simultaneously send the children of the Russian masses to kill—and to die—in Ukraine. While no reliable ranking of the world's wealthiest defense ministers exists, Russia's Sergey Shoigu is surely near the top of the list. He, along with everyone else close to power in Russia, stand to lose everything if the Putin regime collapses. For as long as doing so permits them to remain in power in the Kremlin, they will continue to kill Ukrainians—and Russians.
