Jailed Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny has been declared missing by his lawyers and allies just days after Vladimir Putin announced he would run for a fifth presidential term next year.
Mr Navalny, 47, who is serving a 19-year-term on charges of extremism, was due to appear in court on Monday via videolink but did not show up, his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said.
His lawyers said they have not been able to contact him since last Tuesday and that his whereabouts are now unknown.
The Russian opposition figure has been behind bars since January 2021, when he returned from Germany having recovered from a nerve agent poisoning attempt that he blamed on the Kremlin.
I still don’t understand why he committed suicide-by-Putin.
Did he really have more influence as a martyr in prison than a free man in exile?
I think there were two choices: stay out of Russia and be dodging Putin assassination attempts the rest of his life, or return to Russia and hope his arrest and treatment spark real change/protest/revolt in Russia.
He gambled on the latter and it did not work out in his favor.
We’re talking about him aren’t we? If he were a free man in exile, what are the odds you’d be reading his name this morning?
He could be feeding quotes to the news every single day and the western media would eat it like cereal. I believe he would have way more impact if he didn’t gave up.
Decent? I know I’ve heard about him before he decided to go to Russia to be arrested and slowly killed.
If he were a free man in exile, what are the odds you’d be reading his name this morning?
Prolly about as often as we hear Snowden.
Puticide has become a real epidemic in Russia. There are calls for the government to do more to combat it but there has been little response even though data suggests a steady increase since Putin took office.
I wish more Russians would have gone to bat for him. Russia needs regime change.
Russia has spent the last 500 years bouncing around between malevolent autocrats. Hell, Kruschev was one of the more “sane” heads of state for which he was rewarded by being forced into “retirement.”
The only way there will be a regime change is if the current regime is burned to the ground and then there’s no guarantee that what comes next will be better. I’m not even sure what will happen when Putin finally kicks the bucket which will likely open a massive power vacuum.
There’s a need for change but it would be naive to think that the path to it would be painless. It won’t.
I mean they burned the aristocracy to the ground and then ended up with Lenin then Stalin et al… I’m not super hopeful for them.
In b4 the red lemmings find this comment
Anyone that thinks the Marxists were worse than the Tsars is just ignorant.
Anyone that thinks Putin is worse than (at least a couple of) the Marxists is ignorant.
Give them another eighty years and they’ll have figured out this “liberty” thing.
My most tankie opinion: Gorbachev wasn’t really that bad by comparison.
Gorbachev was a realist who saw the start of the USSR crumbling and falling behind, and acted. He’s cursed for the reforms and presiding over the collapse, but rolling tanks into Eastern Europe circa 1989 wasnt going to have the same effect as Hungary in ‘56. The empire was dying, and he sought to protect what was most important - historic Russia and the Muscovy rule.
If there was a chance for a regime change there wouldn’t be elections
Russia needs a revolution!
People don’t want to end up in gulags, go figure. Intimidation works.
To a point.
Navalny was just as bad as Putin.
I don’t particularly care who Russians elect, but I would rather they have real elections.
I really want to believe a rag-tag team of supporters broke him out of prison, and are planning a massive election effort to get him in and Putin out. I know it’s fantasy, but don’t tread on my dreams.
While his treatment is appalling, Navalny isn’t that far from Putin on the spectrum and things wouldn’t be that different if the roles were reversed.
You’d be surprised how much changes from sole rotation of personnel.
Mind you, people wouldn’t be calling Putin a tyrant if he left after his second term. Yet he didn’t, that mofo rigged the system in his favour during that presidency, and… well, you know the rest.
Rotation is unimaginably more important than actual personas.
Incremental change is often the best we can hope for in this world.
They should look under the window of his cell
If you want ice scraped off the pavement in russia, just write Навальный [Naval’nyy] on it.
Can confirm, surprisingly effective.
Icy roads is a huge issue that often gets ignored or insufficiently addressed in Russia.
Ah so “missing” is a new term for gulag
I mean, the Kremlin tried to kill him with novochok a couple years ago. Maybe this time they just finished the job.
May he rest in peace.
“missing”
haha oh wow
They find him and it’ll obviously be a suicide like Gary Webb’s. Two shots to his head Two weeks before he exposed the CIA for smuggling Cocaine into the country in court. So yeah, he was probably ordering it off the Darknet to make it happen.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Jailed Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny has been declared missing by his lawyers and allies just days after Vladimir Putin announced he would run for a fifth presidential term next year.
He has since been handed three prison terms and spent months in isolation in a penal colony in the Vladimir region east of Moscow for alleged minor infractions.
Mr Navalny’s aide, Lyubov Sobol, said last week that she feared the relocation to a special security penal colony was linked to the start of Putin’s presidential election campaign.
Bill Browder, a US financier who was formerly the largest foreign investor in Russia before being banned from re-entering the country by Putin, said the news of Mr Navalny’s disappearance was “alarming and disturbing”.
The Russian autocrat announced his widely expected decision to run after a stage-managed Kremlin awards ceremony, where war veterans pleaded with him to seek re-election.
Igor Girkin, an ultranationalist who had recently been critical of Putin and who had stated his intention to run for the presidency before being arrested, also had his pre-trial detention extended by six months on Thursday.
The original article contains 742 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
