Pedro González
Journalist
With the death of the last great adversary of the Russian tsar, Vladimir Putin, it is very unlikely that, in the event of a new candidate to take over the baton from Alexei Navalni, any of the world’s major insurance companies would want to take over his policy without an astronomical and unaffordable premium.
Experience shows that there is no riskier profession or activity than to stand out as an opponent of the regime of the former Soviet KGB agent.
The list is long: Anna Politkovskaya (2006), Alexander Litvinenko (2006), Boris Berezovsksy (2013), Boris Nemtsov (2015), Sergei Skipral (2016)… One could include Evgeni Prigozhin, founder and owner of the Wagner Group, the mercenary corps that allegedly rebelled against Putin in 2023.
Of all of them, the most influential and toughest to crack down on was undoubtedly the lawyer Alexei Navalni, who became the opposition leader capable of bringing hundreds of thousands of demonstrators onto the streets of Russia’s major cities. He was thus the biggest threat to the master of the Kremlin.
Navalni had survived in 2020 the poisoning he had suffered with the substance known as Novichok, thanks to a series of unforeseen coincidences, which allowed him to be finally transferred from Siberia to a German hospital where German doctors saved his life.
When Putin was asked about his alleged guilt, the Russian president, with his usual sarcasm, responded by disqualifying the questioner: “What nonsense! If we had wanted to kill him there would have been no problem in completing the job.”
Judging by the chain of subsequent actions, the work of liquidating Navalny has been arduous before it was completed. From the successive sham trials and increasingly heavy cumulative sentences, to the prison transfers and progressively harsher conditions, which have ended with the final bankruptcy of the unyielding advocate of a “great, peaceful and free Russia”.
Because of his imprisonment and his at least exotic alleged crimes, Navalni was already ruled out as a candidate for the next presidential elections.
He had left in his place a successor, Boris Nadezhin, whose party, Citizens’ Initiative, had been able to collect 200,000 signatures, 100,000 more than those needed to be proclaimed candidate. But, lo and behold, the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) first rejected 95,000 and then invalidated another 9,202, that is to say, it has also put him out of the electoral race.
Consequently, Vladimir Putin will only be competing against three comparsas with which he wants to make up for the Stalinist drift of his regime. They will be Nijolai Jaritonov, of the Communist Party; Leonid Slutski, leader of the ultranationalists, and the emerging but for the moment inoffensive Vladislav Davankov, who leads the formation called New People. The result was therefore a foregone conclusion, with which Putin will serve another term of office, at the end of which he will be 78 years old in 2030.
Before the elections, Putin has also severely tightened the repressive laws of his regime, creating new crimes or aggravating the penalties for opposing his designs. Now, in addition to sentences of long and very harsh stays in prisons and jails, convicts will have their property confiscated if they spread false news about the army.
Putin’s new law will confiscate money, securities and property used to finance activities that threaten Russia’s security, a statement that includes everything from not being enthusiastic enough in applauding the leader, to crossing a glance with an attractive foreign tourist.
In such conditions, will anyone dare to take the baton from Navalni? It is very difficult to find people with names and surnames. Those who are against the Russian aggression against Ukraine, especially the young people who aspire not to be forcibly taken to that war, only dare to mutter the names of Ilya Ponomarev and Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
At the moment, they seem more a wish than a possibility with a glimmer of reality. Both are in exile and reside in the United Kingdom, where the long arm of Putin’s agents have shown that they have little trouble gaining access to and attempting to liquidate their targets.
Like Stalin, Vladimir Putin is not only the powerful master of Russia, but has been eliminating anyone who dares to even cast a shadow over him and question his wishes.
Since the so-called “man of steel” no one has accumulated such immense power in both the defunct Soviet Union and today’s Russian Federation.
Unnder such conditions, the outcome of the war in Ukraine may be the only major variable that alters both Russia’s situation and that of its autocratic president.
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