A man in jail wants to kill an emperor. In front of the court, Alexei Navalny has announced this Monday a campaign against Vladimir Putin and his war. The 47-year-old opposition leader is already serving a sentence for a total of 11 and a half years for fraud and contempt. He now faces a series of charges related to alleged “extremist” activities. He is exposed to several decades in prison.
Journalists have not been allowed into the room, but a video signal has shown a Navalny worn out by the bad life of the prison of a dictatorial regime where it is hardly remembered that an opposition figure has ever been acquitted in A judgment. He stood up and spoke loudly for three minutes, unsuccessfully demanding access to the courtroom for his elderly parents. Navalny’s father, Anatoly, left the prison compound saying: “They have no shame, they have no conscience, they have no honor.”
The opposition leader has questioned the authority of the Moscow judge to try him in a prison far from the capital, where he has spent long periods in solitary confinement. Navalny is jailed in Melejovo, some 230 kilometers east of Moscow. The prison is designed to ‘break’ the inmate. But Navalny refuses to be silenced: his Instagram and Twitter accounts continue to question Putin.
The next presidential elections in Russia are scheduled for 2024. In his first judicial hearing as an “extremist”, Navalny wanted to change the news agenda for the day by announcing the launch of a project within which it is planned to “carry out an electoral campaign to put the people against the war and against [Vladimir] Putin”. Through his team, he called for marketing and IT specialists, sociologists, political scientists, donors and volunteers to sign up. “We will carry out an electoral campaign against the war. And against Putin. Only that. A long, stubborn, exhausting but fundamentally important campaign in which we will turn the people against the war,” the opposition leader has advanced.
The Russian regime continues to present Navalny’s legal problems as something far removed from its intervention, although at the same time it has taken care to outlaw his political movement despite the fact that the government and the media always downplayed it, saying that he had no support. All the members of that supposedly harmless dissidence are in jail, exiled or banned from any public office.
Taking advantage of his appearance, Navalny has claimed that Putin is a talentless military leader who has “madly and stupidly” led Russia to a dead end with his massive attack on Ukraine in February 2022.
Navalny’s allies have denounced that the cases against him are actually political setups. After being arrested in 2021 at Moscow’s own airport while returning from recovering in Germany after being poisoned, he was given a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence for allegedly violating the terms of his probation in an old politically motivated case. Navalny’s alleged parole violation occurred as he lay incapacitated in Berlin hospital recovering from Novichok poisoning, which he and Western officials blame on the Kremlin. The trial has served to redouble his challenge to power: “We will put all our forces in the fight against the machinery of war, corruption and stupidity.”
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