OPINION:
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“The hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear, projects it onto his opponent, while the coward runs. It’s the same thing, fear, but it’s what you do with it that matters.” — Cus D’Amato
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died Friday at Polar Wolf, an Arctic supermax prison operating as a corrective labor colony whose inmates are confined in solitary 10-by-7 concrete kennels amid subzero temperatures.
Polar Wolf, also known as FKU IK-3, is in Kharp, a remote village buried in the snowy Ural Mountains far from Russia’s political center of Moscow. Mr. Navalny was transferred to the penal colony in December after he disappeared from a prison in the Vladimir Oblast.
Mr. Navalny’s relocation and subsequent death should come as no surprise. The renowned dissident was transferred to the work camp just four months after his prison sentence was extended by 19 years for the Orwellian false charge of “rehabilitating Nazi ideology,” and three of his attorneys were detained on charges of participating in an “extremist group.”
Mr. Navalny’s real crime, however, was that he was a courageous leader admired by millions, and his nemesis, Vladimir Putin, is an insecure coward who rose to power by terrorizing the Russian people with the brutality of the KGB.
Evidencing this is the timing of Mr. Navalny’s extended prison sentence, which occurred last August at the dawn of Russia’s presidential election campaign. Russia’s Central Election Commission also barred Mr. Navalny from running as a candidate in the previous 2018 presidential election.
The New York Times editorial board right-sized Russia’s dictator in July 2013 when it wrote that “though he has long cultivated an image as a strong man, President Vladimir Putin of Russia actually seems weak and insecure, a judgment reinforced every time he manipulates the system to crush a potential political rival.”
The editorial was published after Russian prosecutors indicted Mr. Navalny on trumped-up fraud charges when he ran for mayor of Moscow, a move by Putin allies who were desperate to discredit the opposition leader’s crusade against public corruption.
A lawyer by trade, Mr. Navalny accused Mr. Putin’s United Russia regime of being a party of “swindlers and thieves” and proved his thesis by outing its members for dirty deals. He exposed Mr. Putin for fraudulently obtaining funds to build a $1.35 billion estate 39 times the size of Monaco and outed his political surrogate, Dmitri Medvedev, and his military surrogate, Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, for corruption.
Mr. Navalny’s anti-corruption crusade was so effective that his findings led to protests across the country. During this time, Mr. Putin became more frightened of Mr. Navalny, worrying that he was garnering support in Mother Russia. A 2017 poll conducted by the Levada Center found that 55% of Russians recognized Mr. Navalny, and a 2020 survey found that 20% of Russians supported his opposition activities. Mr. Putin was so fear-stricken by Mr. Navalny’s growing influence that the Russian dictator dared not refer to him by name and used only pronouns when describing the opposition leader.
After unsuccessfully silencing Mr. Navalny on house arrest, Mr. Navalny was attacked outside the offices of his Anti-Corruption Foundation in 2017 when assailants sprayed green dye on his face, causing him to go nearly blind in his right eye. During the 2019 Moscow City Duma election, Mr. Navalny became sick after he was detained. A hospital diagnosed him with a severe “allergy,” but Mr. Navalny’s own doctor suggested his condition was the result of “the damaging effects of undetermined chemicals.”
In 2020, Mr. Navalny campaigned against Russia’s 2020 constitutional referendum, which lured voters to remove Mr. Putin’s constitutional term limits by contemporaneously raising the minimum wage, adding new pension protections, and subjugating international legal obligations to Russian law.
That August, Mr. Navalny became so sick while on a flight to Moscow that the pilot made an emergency landing. Medical personnel said they believed Mr. Navalny had been poisoned. Using telecommunications data, a joint media investigation found that Mr. Navalny had been under surveillance for three years by an FSB unit that specialized in chemical substances. In 2021, another investigation found that the same unit had followed opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza before he was poisoned.
That year, Mr. Navalny made a brave miscalculation by returning to Russia from Germany. Upon landing in Moscow, he was detained and accused of violating his probation by leaving Russia to get medical treatment after being poisoned. His foundation published a scathing report exposing more of Mr. Putin’s corruption, spurring more protests, and a Russian court replaced Mr. Navalny’s 2014 suspended sentence with a prison sentence at a penal colony.
The European Court of Human Rights immediately resolved that Moscow should release Mr. Navalny, but the Kremlin argued that the 2020 constitutional referendum decreed Russian adjudications superseded its international obligations to the European court. In his three years in both prisons, Mr. Navalny was tortured to the extent he lost sensation in his spine, legs and hands.
Mr. Putin transferred his archrival to a harsher penal colony near the Arctic Circle, where he was placed in a concrete kennel cell with a “homeless tramp” who had a contagious respiratory infection. Mr. Navalny, who was already suffering from a lung infection, became sick, and despite cries from the West to allow medical personnel to treat him, Mr. Putin left the dissident in a tiny, freezing cell to die.
On Monday, human rights groups reported that Polar Wolf CCTV cameras were turned off hours before Mr. Navalny died, and that paramedics who recovered his body saw signs of bruising, raising even more questions.
“Alexei Navalny was murdered,” said his spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh. “The whole world knows that the president of Russia personally gave this order just as it knows that Alexei was never afraid of him, never stayed silent, and that he never stopped acting. We must not give up. This is what Alexei urged us to do.”
Rather than face his opponent in a free and fair election this year, Mr. Putin cowered in fear and used others to do his dirty work and murder Mr. Navalny. This should come as no surprise since, upon hearing that Prigozhin’s Wagner Group was heading to Moscow last year, flight logs suggest Mr. Putin cut and run to his estate in Valdai.
Mr. Putin may think he has the Russian people fooled, but they are smart enough to know that his macho demonstrations — staging judo competition victories, riding shirtless on horseback, wrestling bears and taming tranquilized leopards — are the desperate acts of a pathetic weakling overcompensating for his insecurities.
Unlike Mr. Navalny, who is already being immortalized as the hero he was, when Mr. Putin dies, he will be remembered for what he is — a coward hiding behind the stone walls of the Kremlin.
• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is a former Washington prosecutor and presidential appointee of the Trump administration who has reported extensively on Russia. On May 19, he was categorized as No. 467 on a list of 500 Americans who were banned from entering the Russian Federation.
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