It is impossible to talk about the war in Ukraine that began two years ago on Friday without talking about the assassination of Alexeï Navalny, since they are two concomitant tragedies which stem from the same desire to crush freedoms.
Vladimir Putin “indiscriminately kills Ukrainians, his youth sent to the butchery and his political prisoners”, wrote the Russian writer in exile Mikhail Shishkin the day after Navalny’s death, which occurred last Friday in a penal colony in Arctic Russia. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaïa, promising to continue her husband’s work from abroad, said nothing else in affirming that the Russian president was working to “kill the future” – with, disturbingly, staggering efficiency.
The tragedy is great, and the murder is emblematic. Emblematic in that Navalny, 47, a formidable and courageous unifier of the democratic opposition, was everything that the 71-year-old dictator, leader of a neo-Tsarist clique, opposed.
And this is how Donald Trump’s MAGA, who had a truly “unhinged” reaction to Navalny’s death, responds as if in an echo to Putin’s MRGA (“Make Russia Great Again”). In fact, the latter has an objective ally in the American Congress: the Trumpist Republican elected officials who are blocking the granting of military aid to kyiv to the tune of 60 billion US dollars promised by Joe Biden.
Two years now since Putin launched his “special operation”, which no one initially imagined would take place for such a long time, especially since the march of Russian troops on kyiv in the first days of the conflict had turned into a fiasco. Two years and a failed counter-offensive later, here is Ukraine running out of ammunition, forced to operate a defensive withdrawal while awaiting the possible arrival of new Western equipment, and its government forced to consider expanding conscription , a socially unpopular measure.
Putin can still bet on the decline of support from Western countries. Transformed into a war economy, Russia survives sanctions thanks to the support of China, Iran, North Korea, India… And takes advantage of the absence of European arms production capacities and shells, while the United States moved its own in support of the commission of Israeli massacres in Gaza.
If the West is reaping today in the worst possible way what it has sown in its relations with Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, the most widespread sophism of primary anti-Americanism is that its historical responsibilities excuse Russian aggression. The main problem is that, ultimately, the resolution of conflicts too often happens in this world, on a small and large scale, through armed confrontation. However, it is the Russian army which, although fragile, is currently best able to hold its positions. Getting bogged down, it is a war which still prevents the international community from considering a negotiated solution with a Putinian regime which, bluff or not, is giving NATO its fair share by demonstrating an increasingly expansionist desire. more assertive against Europeans.
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“To understand any lie, we must understand what distorted truth it is the product of,” wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, another hero of Russian dissidence, in 1964. Navalny will have worked on it with meticulousness – and humor. With his team from the Anti-Corruption Foundation, liquidated in 2021 under legal pressure, he will have carried out investigations of undeniable professional quality into the regime’s kleptocracy.
For the ultranationalist posture that he once held, around fifteen years ago, and for having resigned himself, without applauding it, to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, he also raised eyebrows the Ukrainians. His positions had, however, evolved, the man had put himself in tune with his supporters, less obtuse nationalists than democrats and defenders of human rights. He denounced the invasion of Ukraine and, in the process, felt that Crimea had to be returned to him, which made him even more unbearable and dangerous in Putin’s eyes.
“If they decide to kill me, that [voudra] to say that we are incredibly strong,” he once said. May he be right and his ghost come back to haunt Vladimir Putin. What remains is that this political assassination buries what remained of organized opposition in Russia, a few weeks before a mock presidential election in which Putin will be the only candidate. Never since he came to power in 2000 has freedom of thought been so walled in in Russia.
By attacking the Ukrainian nation, to the point of denying its existence, Moscow opened a Pandora’s box, detonated a bomb in the European order, and tested the democratic pretensions of Western powers. And this is why, given the police state that Russia has become, the Ukrainians face a dam against Putin that, above all, we must prevent from giving way.