The opposition to Putin has lost an influential voice. Matthew Partridge reports
The death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, which was announced last Friday, has silenced a “man who was arguably the most influential remaining critic” of Vladimir Putin and the Russian leader’s authoritarian state, say Ann Simmons and Matthew Luxmoore in The Wall Street Journal. Navalny was poisoned in 2020, then treated in Berlin and re covered. He returned to Russia, only to be thrown into prison on charges he said were trumped up to silence him. Even then he continued to “publish political tracts from prison, predicting Putin’s demise and railing against the war”, resulting in his apparent murder.
The world reacts
Navalny’s death in one of Russia’s Arctic colonies, “notorious for their grim conditions”, resulted in a wave of international condemnation that lay the blame for his death directly on Putin, says Pjotr Sauer in The Observer. The Kremlin, though, will shrug its shoulders. Putin long ago “stopped seeking the approval of the West”, which has made him a pariah, and he has “cultivated new allies and courted the global south” instead, receiving a grand welcome in places such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
The news is unlikely to spoil relations with fellow autocrats such as China’s Xi Jinping either, says Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. They share Putin’s “hatred of pro-democracy activists”. What’s really worrying, though, is that Putin “continues to have friendly relations with the leaders of some of the world’s most powerful democracies”. Indeed, it is “entirely possible that the world’s three largest democracies will all elect admirers of Putin as their leaders this year”, with Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto, India’s Narendra Modi and Donald Trump in the US all “standing aside” from the condemnation of Put
