Group items tagged

Last summer, Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny narrowly survived an assassination attempt, widely believed to have been organized by Russia's security services, through a Novichok nerve-agent poisoning. Now, without concerted action, he may die from medical neglect in a Russian penal colony where the authorities locked him up following a mockery of a trial. The botched nerve-agent attack, since exposed, was supposed to have been accomplished with deniability. If Navlany now dies in prison, the blame will lie unequivocally with the Kremlin.

It's not hard to see why Russian authorities are now sparing no effort to make Navalny -- and his backers -- believe that political opposition is futile and to make them pay a very high price for their activism. Navalny's support was once said to extend no further than the intelligentsia of Moscow and St. Petersburg, but he eventually built a following across the country. Indeed, it was while he was visiting supporters in distant Siberia that the Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB's main successor, apparently tried to kill him.

Russian authorities' imprisonment of Navalny has only boosted his profile. Now from his prison cell, he is highlighting the Kremlin's refusal to give him independent medical care he can trust for what appears to be a combination of an undiagnosed respiratory illness and serious back pain. His three-week hunger strike has brought him to what his doctors say from afar could be the brink of death. One of the doctors said that test results he received from Navalny's family showed sharply elevated levels of potassium, which could lead to cardiac arrest, and signs of kidney failure.

Alexei Navalny will remain in jail through at least Feb. 15, as a Moscow regional court rejected the Russian opposition leader's appeal of his detention. Navalny was arrested shortly after returning home from Germany, where he was treated for a near-fatal poisoning – an attack he blames on President Vladimir Putin's government.

Navalny's detention provoked widespread protests in Russia, which in turn have resulted in thousands of arrests. Navalny and his supporters have been able to spread their calls for demonstrations through TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, despite regulators' attempts to stifle that information. More protests are planned for this weekend.

As The Moscow Times reports, "Two days before his probation in a 2014 fraud case expired on Dec. 30, Russia's prison service threatened to convert Navalny's suspended sentence to a real prison term for failing to appear before probation officers while he was in Berlin."

Russian security forces detained opposition leader Alexei Navalny on his return to the country, heightening a confrontation between the Kremlin and its most vocal critic after he recovered in Germany from a near-fatal poisoning attack last summer.

His followers, who had congregated at a different airport west of Moscow, were barred from entering the arrival area by dozens of security officials, many in riot gear, who swarmed the area.

Russia’s federal prison service said in a statement that Mr. Navalny, who has been on the agency’s “wanted list” since Dec. 29, was detained for repeated violations of his probation. Further measures would be determined by a court, the agency said. Until then, Mr. Navalny would remain in custody, officials said.

The European Union will hold a video call on Monday with allies of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, joined by envoys from Britain, the United States, Canada and Ukraine, after Russia expelled diplomats from EU states last week

“Russia is progressively disconnecting itself from Europe and looking at democratic values as an existential threat,”

the West still needs Russia as an energy supplier and as a regional power in diplomacy, such as upholding the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran, and tackling climate change.

Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has arrived in a penal colony to the east of Moscow to serve his prison term, Russia’s RIA news agency said on Sunday citing a public commission that defends the rights of Russian prisoners.

sentenced to over two and a half years in jail for parole violations he said were trumped up

Navalny’s family and lawyers had not been officially informed about his whereabouts since Thursday when they learned he had been moved from a Moscow jail.

Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny was nearly killed with a rare nerve agent before he recovered from a coma and went on to trick one of his apparent assassins into confessing to the details of the plot on tape.

Russia, under strongman Vladimir Putin's watch, has become a rogue regime apparently responsible, despite its loud denials, for a growing list of egregious crimes.

assassinations of political targets at home and abroad -- some with banned chemical weapons -- to Russia's ongoing invasion of neighboring Ukraine and a hacking campaign of unprecedented scope against the United States, and it's clear that Putin has become bolder and more dangerous than ever.

MOSCOW—Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny urged supporters to take to the streets as he was ordered to be held in pretrial custody for 30 days, while Russia’s foreign ministry warned Western countries not to interfere in a case that is already worsening tensions with the U.S. and Europe.

He was remanded in custody until Feb. 15, and now faces a court decision that could turn a suspended sentence he received for an embezzlement case in 2014 into a real prison term. Authorities say he violated the terms of his parole while he was abroad recovering from August’s attack.

In short videos from the courtroom distributed among supporters, Mr. Navalny, 44 years old, said his detention showed that Mr. Putin fears his opposition movement, which will seek to make gains in a parliamentary election in September. He also called on supporters to hold public protests in a show of force.

Navalny had previously survived an assassination attempt by poisoning from the Russian government which it denies, and then recovered in a safe foreign country, so why would he go back to Russia?

Though necessary at that moment, our escape delivered something that dictators crave. They want to be feared, and nothing cements that more than running from them.

When news of Navalny's poisoning and evacuation from Russia broke, it drew support and empathy for his campaign of exposing Putin's misgovernance. Inadvertently, however, it also further instilled the fear of Putin into those who oppose him.

Russia said Friday that it is prepared to cut ties with the European Union if the bloc slaps economic sanctions on the Kremlin in retaliation for the detention of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

In the event that we again see sanctions imposed in some sectors that create risks for our economy, including in the most sensitive spheres," he said.

"We don't want to isolate ourselves from global life, but we have to be ready for that. If you want peace then prepare for war,"

Russia's financial monitoring agency said on Friday it had added jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny's network of regional campaign offices to a list of organisations involved in "terrorism and extremism".

A Moscow court is also considering whether to declare Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) "extremis

jail activists and freeze bank accounts.

On March 10, Twitter users in Russia suddenly experienced a sharp slowdown in the service.

Russian authorities wanted Twitter to remove more than 3,000 “illegal” posts, which human rights groups saw as an effort to stifle dissent.

When Twitter did not comply, the government was ready. It deployed a new technology so it could do the job itself.

The Russian government said on Wednesday that it was slowing access to Twitter, accusing the social network of failing to remove illegal content and signaling that the Kremlin is escalating its offensive against American internet companies that have long provided a haven for freedom of expression.

With the aim of protecting Russian citizens and forcing the internet service to follow the law on the territory of the Russian Federation, centralized reactive measures have been taken against Twitter starting March 10, 2021

In a statement, Twitter said it was aware of reports that its platform was “being intentionally slowed down broadly and indiscriminately in Russia due to apparent content removal concerns.”

Russian president’s supporters praise Mikhail Mishustin as technocrat and self-made man

Russian opposition figures have raised questions about how Vladimir Putin’s surprise choice for new prime minister has acquired properties worth millions of dollars.

Mishustin’s appointment is part of a sweeping reorganisation of Russian government that will help enable Putin to maintain power after his expected exit from the presidency in 2024 under term limits. Analysts said Mishustin may play a role as a “caretaker” figure but was unlikely to be Putin’s long-term successor.

In 2011, when it was announced that Mr. Putin would return to the Kremlin as president, tens of thousands took to the streets in protest. In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and fomented war in the Donbas, we held huge antiwar rallies. And in 2021 we took to the streets once more throughout the country when Russia’s main opposition figure, Aleksei Navalny, was arrested after his return to Moscow.

I want to believe we did everything in our power to rein in Mr. Putin. But it’s not true. Though we protested, organized, lobbied, spread information and built honest lives in the shadow of a corrupt regime, we must accept the truth: We failed. We failed to prevent a catastrophe and we failed to change the country for the better. And now we must bear that failure.

Those who stayed have lost much of what remained of their freedom. After Mastercard and Visa suspended operations in Russia, many can’t even pay for a VPN service to get independent media.

When a CNN reporter asked if Trump had a response to the heroic Navalny’s death, the Trump campaign pointed her to a Truth Social post that wasn’t about Navalny or Putin. It was about how awful America was.

“America is no longer respected,” Trump posted, “because we have an incompetent president who is weak and doesn’t understand what the World is thinking.”

At an Axios conference in Miami, Jared Kushner — who was festooned with $2 billion in Saudi investments after he left the White House — called Mohammed bin Salman a “visionary leader.” Asked about the crown prince’s complicity in Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, Kushner replied with exasperation, “Are we really still doing this?”

Just because the operation was thinly veiled, however, does not mean that the Russian trolling — creating provocative online posts about immigration, religion and race to try to sway voters — lacked high-level support.

since the first reports surfaced in 2014 about the existence of a troll farm called the Internet Research Agency, there have been questions about its Kremlin ties.

The United States indictment is among the clearest documents yet in stating outright that Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a businessman grown fabulously wealthy off government contracts, controls the agency despite denials from him and the Kremlin. He has long been linked to President Vladimir V. Putin

A Belarusian escort with close ties to a powerful Russian oligarch said from behind bars in Bangkok on Monday that she had more than 16 hours of audio recordings that could help shed light on Russian meddling in United States elections.

The escort, Anastasia Vashukevich, said she would hand over the recordings if the United States granted her asylum. She faces criminal charges and deportation to Belarus after coming under suspicion of working in Thailand without a visa at a sex-training seminar in the city of Pattaya.

“If America gives me protection, I will tell everything I know,” Ms. Vashukevich said on Monday. “I am afraid to go back to Russia. Some strange things can happen.”

A sudden large surge in cases would likely break Russia’s rickety medical system and undermine Mr. Putin’s already declining but still robust approval ratings, especially as state-controlled media has bombarded the public for months with gushing reports about how the president is improving health care across the country.

Mr. Putin’s approval rating, according to a recent survey by the Levada Center, a respected Russian polling organization, fell from 69 percent in February to 63 percent in March, near to what it was in 2014 before a surge in the president’s popularity after Russia’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.

Russia on Friday reported 601 new infections, down from 771 new cases reported on Thursday, bringing the total number to 4,419. This is a fourfold increase over the past week but still far fewer than the more than 245,000 cases reported in the United States and nearly 118,000 in Spain and 115,000 in Italy.

MOSCOW — An extraordinary wave of antigovernment protests swept across Russia on Monday, as thousands of demonstrators gathered in more than 100 cities to denounce corruption and political stagnation despite official attempts to stifle the expression of outrage.

“They are just kids. They know nothing. They need to graduate from school first.”

all for protesting against the election victory declared by President Alexander Lukashenko

He crossed the border into Ukraine illegally,

which involved not only swimming in freezing temperatures and through dense reed, but stumbling over sheet ice and crawling through thick sludge.