Navalny

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After Navalny’s death, a Fox host ignores Trump’s pro-Putin past | Media Matters for America

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2 24 anRIP

Political leaders in the U.S. and around the world are expressing outrage at the death of Alexei Navalny, the 47-year old top Kremlin critic widely regarded as a Russian political prisoner who died just one day after appearing on camera from an Arctic Circle jail, reportedly “looking well and laughing during a court hearing.”

“Navalny was serving a 19-year jail term on charges widely considered politically motivated,” the BBC reports. “He was moved to one of Russia’s toughest penal colonies late last year.”

“Within minutes of Navalny’s death being announced by the prison service, the international community hailed the courage of Vladimir Putin’s biggest domestic adversary,” BBC added.

World leaders and political experts are placing the blame for Navalny’s death on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Putin killed Navalny,” declared former U.S Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Friday morning, speaking from Munich.

“I don’t know what to say. I’m gonna try to be analytic but I want you to know Alexei Navalny was my friend. I was with his wife last night. I’m here in Munich talking to her. His daughter Dasha goes to school at Stanford,” said McFaul, a professor of political science and the Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University.

“So this is a pretty emotional time for me. Putin killed Navalny, let’s be crystal clear about that.”

“I don’t care about any investigation,” he continued, saying Putin had Navalny arrested and had him in solitary confinement and “put him in a cell … and today he is dead. Putin killed Navalny. And why did he? Because Putin is weak. You don’t kill people if you’re strong. Putin killed because Navalny was the one opposition leader in Russia that Putin feared the most.”

“So this is a really tragic day for me and it should be a tragic day for anybody who cares about democracy,” McFaul added. “Navalny, in my view, was … in the category of brave, courageous leaders that – you know, remember, he went back to Russia, he didn’t have to go back. He went back for his country because he was a Patriot that believed that his country could be different.”

//russian-opposition-candidate-quickly-banned

actually safer there?

kremlin-critic-alexei-navalny-in-remote-prison-camp

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921

apple and ggle pull navalny vote aggregator caved

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https://theconversation.com/how-alexei-navalny-revolutionized-opposition-politics-in-russia-before-his-apparent-poisoning-144830

german doctors offered to treat, russians made excuse to delay plane, in coma on plane?!

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/this-passage-from-a-russian-dissident-reads-as-an-haunting-warning-for-the-united-states-in-2020/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-alexei-navalny-revolutionized-opposition-politics-in-russia-before-his-apparent-poisoning

no lnx vid

the harrowing videos of Alexei Navalny, a blogger who has captured popular frustration in Russia, screaming in agony on Aug. 20, 2020 before being removed unconscious from a plane to a waiting ambulance, demonstrate the Kremlin’s increasing reliance on coercion to control dissent.

This attack is not the first Navalny has endured. In 2017, he was doused with a green antibiotic that compromised his vision. In 2019, while in jail for organizing protests, he suspected he had been poisoned. Navalny has also been wrongly convicted on charges of financial wrong-doing three times. Although he was released to prevent him from becoming a national martyr, his brother and co-defendant, Oleg, served three-and-a-half years in jail.

Throughout this period, the Kremlin worked to discredit Navalny without making him a martyr.

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My book “Elections, Protest, and Authoritarian Regime Stability: Russia 2008-2020,” reveals the nature of Navalny’s threat to the Kremlin – one strong enough to make the claims that he has been poisoned credible.

Focus on corruption

When he came onto the national stage 2010, Navalny brought a new type of opposition to Russian politics. He is in tune with popular concerns and able to find common ground across nationalist and liberal activists. He calls for removing President Vladimir Putin through elections, while articulating a new vision for Russia.

Navalny’s importance is not about popularity. The Kremlin’s arrests and disinformation campaigns have raised enough suspicions among voters that polling shows he would not win a national election, even in the unlikely event of a fair fight.

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Instead, Navalny’s challenge to Putin’s regime rests on his innovative ideas and organizing strategies that have made him a force in Russian politics.

He began as a lawyer, challenging the large Russian energy companies by buying stock and thus gaining the right to attend shareholders’ meetings. He used his access to defy corporate leadership and release documents to demonstrate malfeasance.

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He established The Anti-Corruption Foundation – now labeled a “Foreign Agent” by the Kremlin – which collected citizens’ reports of corrupt practices. His RosYama project, literally “Russian Hole,” allows citizens to go online to report potholes – a widespread, chronic problem in Russia – and track the government response.

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Navalny amplified his anti-corruption fight in 2011, when he labeled Putin’s political party, United Russia, the “Party of Crooks and Thieves”. When these efforts contributed to mass protest against electoral fraud, Navalny was at the fore. Addressing an unprecedented crowd in 2011, he said, “I see enough people here to take the Kremlin and [Government House] right now but we are peaceful people and won’t do that just yet.”

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He joined the movement’s Coordination Council and forged ties across the diverse opposition with the goal of reforming Putinism.

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His canny use of social media has given thousands of Russians – both old and, especially, young – new insight and ways to protest against their government.

New model of opposition

Navalny drew on the resources of these protests – activists, themes, online fundraising strategies and new coalitions – to build an opposition strategy that links elections and a variety of forms of protest. He brought together an impressive team of young activists who challenge the regime at every step of the election process, from party formation to candidate registration and vote counting.

Volunteers go door-to-door or accompany candidates to meet voters on their daily commutes or in apartment courtyards. They build temporary structures, called “cubes,” on busy streets, where they educate voters about policy. Campaign leaders urge activists to share online messages offline with those who do not use the internet.

New electoral technologies

When he fell ill, Navalny was campaigning on behalf of a new generation of local candidates.

By demonstrating that Russian elections are little more than performances of the state’s capacity to manufacture votes, the Navalny team reveals the lack of choice and accountability in the system.

In summer 2019, this strategy led to significant protests after the regime barred almost all of the opposition candidates in Moscow’s municipal elections. When the government cracked down on pro-democracy demonstrators, Navalny’s team built a web-based way to identify any candidate who shared its values and urged voters to support that candidate – even if the candidate was in a party that they detested.

Recent work by political scientists Mikhail Turchenko and Grigorii Golosov demonstrate that Navalny’s “Smart Vote” strategy made a real difference in Russias’s 2019 local elections, helping to defeat nearly a third of Putin-aligned candidates in Moscow. Navalny’s team was gearing up to do the same thing in the September 2020 vote.

Social media innovation

Navalny’s creative use of new media is not limited to pothole repairs and voting apps. Beginning in 2006, he wrote a popular blog on the Live Journal social networking service. When the Kremlin shut down his blog in 2012, he reinvented his social media presence.

The Anti-Corruption Foundation produced a short film, “Don’t Call Him Dimon,” that lampooned former President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev by showing his vast sneaker collection and flying a drone over his duck pond. Like ducks, sneakers became symbols of the opposition. The expose revealed the myth of Medvedev as an honest leader.

The exposes have continued on Navalny’s YouTube channel. His broadcasts have probed Russian intervention in U.S. elections, the Kremlin’s failure to provide COVID-19 relief and rigged Russian elections. These stories challenge the narrative presented in Russian state media, combating the regime’s systematic disinformation campaign.

Navalny narrates this video about the corruption of former Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev. There are English subtitles.]

Inspiring a new generation

Navalny’s efforts have captured the imagination of young Russians and demonstrated the effects of generational change. Following “Don’t Call Him Dimon,” tens of thousands of young people took to the streets, shocking a country that believed Putin’s opposition was played out. Months later, they flocked to join Navalny’s presidential campaign organization.

Navalny knew the dangers of being the face of opposition to the Putin regime. The day before he fell ill, he joked with young supporters that his death would do more harm to the Kremlin than his activism.

It’s clear that Russians – who have taken to Twitter to urge him to hold on – don’t want to test that hypothesis

.The Conversation

Regina Smyth, Professor, Indiana University.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/a-critic-of-the-russian-government-sought-asylum-in-the-us-and-was-treated-shamefully-under-trump/

Gregory Duralev has been seeking asylum in the United States since 2016 after exposing corruption in Russia’s economy. It’s no exaggeration to say that this could be a matter of life or death, when critics of the Russian government continue to die “mysteriously.” But Politico’s Natasha Bertrand reports Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has sought to deport Duralev to exactly that—and even as he’s been allowed to legally remain in the U.S. while his asylum claim plays out.

“Duralev has no criminal record in the U.S. or Russia,” Bertrand reported. “Nor do Russia and the United States have a formal extradition treaty. But he was arrested, deemed a flight risk and denied bond, he says, because of a Red Notice issued by Russia and shared with POLITICO. Experts who have reviewed the document say it was so incomplete and riddled with inaccuracies that it was nearly incomprehensible.”

The *Atlantic* in 2018 described Interpol-issued Red Notices as “the closest instrument to an international arrest warrant in use today,” though it “cannot compel any member country to arrest an individual who is the subject of a Red Notice, according to its guidelines.” Per the Justice Department, the Atlantic said, “the United States does not consider a Red Notice alone to be a sufficient basis for the arrest of a subject because it does not meet the requirements for arrest under the 4th Amendment to the Constitution.”

But during the Trump administration, Kremlin-demanded Red Notices “are being met with increasing deference by the Department of Homeland Security,” the Atlantic continued.

Duralev could now be its next victim. He was detained by ICE when he was arriving for a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) appointment that he assumed was part of his asylum process. It wasn’t. ICE under the Trump administration has in fact detained many other immigrants in this same “bait and switch” deceit, with a Maryland judge earlier this year issuing an injunction blocking mass deportation agents from sweeping up immigrants who were detained when they arrived for what they also assumed were immigration interviews.

Duralev was detained for 18 months, at one point “placed in protective custody and told to know his ‘place’” after complaining about his treatment, Politico continued. He tried asking both the immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals to let him fight his case in freedom, but that was denied due to the faulty Red Notice. “The fact that immigration judges are relying on Russian Red Notices to penalize Russians who have fallen out with the state makes no legal sense,” Bill Browder, another activist previously targeted by the Kremlin, told Politico. “It shouldn’t happen. It’s illegal and it’s unjust.”

But that’s ICE, and the Trump administration. Federal immigration officials have also resumed wide-scale sweepsin the middle of a pandemic, detaining more than 2,000 people in July and August to keep filling up inhumane and dangerous detention facilities that advocates have said should instead be emptied due to the novel coronavirus. ICE has in fact actively made the crisis in these facilities worse, by shifting detained people from facility to facility instead of just releasing them.

Politico reports that while Duralev was finally released in February, he could still face deportation. “In the meantime, from his home in California, Duralev is now pursuing a civil lawsuit against DHS for ‘fabricating charges’ against him—accusing him of illegal visa overstay, despite USCIS allowing him to remain in the U.S. pending an asylum decision. He has also sent a complaint to the DHS inspector general, which has yet to be answered.” Duralev told Politico that “DHS has acted no better than the Russian authorities.”

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