Enemy of the State
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| Alexey Navalny appears on screen via videolink in a Moscow courtroom on Thursday. |
"Maintaining the work of Navalny's network of headquarters in its current form is impossible.""It would immediately … lead to criminal sentences for those who work in the headquarters, who collaborate with them and for those who help them."Leonid Volkov, Navalny ally"I want to tell the dear court that your king is naked.""Your naked, thieving king wants to continue to rule until the end ... Another ten years will come, a stolen decade will come.""I've been asking for one little bit of apple for four days [in his prison diet], but the question hasn't been resolved yet. But porridge – as much as you want.""I looked in the mirror, looked at myself. I'm just an awful skeleton. Last time I weighed 72 kilos I was probably in the seventh grade.""[I ate] four tablespoons of porridge a day, today five, tomorrow I will eat six [after calling off his hunger strike].""I would like to say that your king is naked, and more than one little boy is shouting about it -- it is now millions of people who are already shouting about it. It is quite obvious. Twenty years of incompetent rule have come to this: there is a crown sliding from his ears.""Your naked king wants to rule until the end, he doesn't care about the country, he is clung to power and wants to rule indefinitely.""You are all traitors. You and the naked king are implementing a plan to seize Russia, and the Russians should be turned into slaves. Their wealth will be taken away from them, they will be deprived of any prospects, you have implemented that plan."Alexei Navalny, prison video link to Babushkinsky District Court, Moscow
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| In this photo taken from a video provided by the Babuskinsky District Court on Thursday, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny appears by video link during a hearing on charges of defamation in Moscow. (Babuskinsky District Court Press Service/AP) |
Instituting a hunger strike to highlight the lack of medical care and a decent diet while in prison, Alexei Navalny lost a considerable amount of weight, alarming his allies over his deteriorating health. His doctors and medical tests indicated the potential of renal failure and heart problems as a result of detecting dangerous levels of potassium in his blood. Prison authorities claimed his health was just fine, he was just playing up being ill to elicit attention and sympathy. Yet his health was at such a state that he was transferred to a prison with a hospital and finally given some medical attention. That was when he lifted his hunger strike.
He had laughed that if Novichok failed to take his life, a deficiency of potassium wouldn't kill him. The attempt to poison him did not, in the end, succeed, but it certainly came close. He was in a coma for days, being treated at a Berlin hospital where the poison was identified by a laboratory as the same chemical used by Kremlin agents in London to poison another critic of Vladimir Putin. The nerve agent is one developed by a Russian military laboratory and only available through the military. How some ordinary mischief-maker intent on silencing Mr. Navalny procured some for that purpose is anyone's guess, since the Kremlin and the King have denied any involvement.
And there was the gaunt, skeletal Navalny by video link, addressing the court that ruled against his appeal of a fine for 'defaming' a Second World War veteran. New criminal charges have been levelled against Mr. Navalny, apart from which his network of regional campaign offices the authorities are intent on banning as "extremist" in nature, as in "terrorist", having been shuttered under threat. Appearing before the court, he unbuttoned his prison uniform revealing underneath a T-shirt and the abysmally thin torso of the chief terrorist.
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| Navalny's wife, Yulia Navalnaya, attended the court session in person at Moscow's Babushkinsky district court. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images) |
He spoke directly to his wife who was in court, telling her he missed her. Asking her to stand, so he could see her. Speaking again at the court he described requesting carrots and apples in prison but his request had not been granted. Porridge aplenty, however for the man serving a two-and-a-half year sentence for parole violations on an embezzlement conviction clearly politically motivated to shut up a man who will not be silenced. He failed to appear before a parole officer as scheduled as an unfortunate result of being treated in Russia for a random poisoning.
Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation and his network of regional campaign offices considered "extremist" by the government is receiving legal attention through a separate court. Should it agree with the government's contention that the activists and their network of protest programming is indeed extremist in nature, authorities will have been given the power to jail activist members and freeze bank accounts.
Mr. Navalny's rise to prominence owes everything to his audacious and very public anti-corruption campaign, the production of videos which catalogued the corrupt wealth of senior officials that he has identified as "swindlers and thieves", endearing him mightily to public administrators, the Kremlin, above all President Vladimir Putin who for some strange reason takes umbrage at being identified as Russia's nightmare returned.
The Anti-Corruption Foundation movement's chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, made it clear that the movement
would be "officially disbanded". The staff operating those offices would, in all likelihood, wink-wink, continue to do their work independently "but we will not finance them anymore, we will not set tasks for them, but we know that they by themselves will do a great job". Amazing commitment. By Russians who feel the nation deserves better.
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| Yulia Navalnaya, front left, in court in Moscow on Thursday. |
Labels: Anti-Corruption Foundation, President Vladimir Putin, Russian Critic Alexei Navalny
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, May 01, 2021
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