Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Tag: Alexei Navalny
-
Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Alexei Navalny, continues fight against Putin | 60 Minutes
Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Alexei Navalny, continues fight against Putin | 60 Minutes – CBS News
-
Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Alexei Navalny, undeterred in anti-Putin mission, despite Russian arrest warrant
The death of Alexei Navalny in a Russian prison in the Arctic this February sparked an outcry around the world. He was compared to Nelson Mandela as a prisoner of conscience. While behind bars, he completed a memoir, documenting his three-year battle to survive the unspeakable prison conditions.
This is our third story on Navalny – the first in 2017 when he stood up to Vladimir Putin by running against him for president of Russia. When he was arrested in 2021, Navalny’s popularity as the most prominent leader of the Putin opposition was growing.
Alexei Navalny speaking in Russian (English translation): Putin is a thief and the head of the entire corrupt system!
He was defiant, brave for taking on the all-powerful Vladimir Putin out in the open, denouncing him as a gangster. He refused to back down and paid the ultimate price: three years in Russian prisons and then this year, death at age 47.
His wife Yulia, once her husband’s silent partner, is now the leader of his opposition movement. She says Alexei’s memoir, “Patriot,” represents his final act of defiance.
Yulia Navalnaya: It was his life. It was his every-minute job to fight with Putin’s regime.
Lesley Stahl: And now he’s fighting from the grave.
Yulia Navalnaya: I would prefer he would fight not from the grave. And of course, it’s very tough to– for me to say like this. But we can say so.
60 Minutes
Over the summer, a Russian court issued an arrest warrant for her.
Lesley Stahl: It’s a dangerous place to be.
Yulia Navalnaya: I don’t care at all.
Lesley Stahl: You’re not afraid?
Yulia Navalnaya: No, not really. Why should I be infra– afraid?
Lesley Stahl: They could kidnap you. They could try to poison you.
Yulia Navalnaya: They could. But I don’t want to live my life and to spend my life everyday thinking about if they kidnap me today or tomorrow, if they are going to poison me today or tomorrow. I’m not thinking about poisoning–
Lesley Stahl: You know who you sound like? You sound like Alexei. (laugh) He would say the same thing.
Yulia Navalnaya: Of course! I’ve been living with him more than 25 years.
In that time, Alexei, trained as a lawyer, became Russia’s most famous anti-corruption activist and investigator, posting his findings online about bribes and kickbacks and evidence of the wealth Putin and his cronies had — as Navalny said — stolen from the Russian people.
Lesley Stahl (in 2017): I mean, you’re goading them.
Alexei Navalny (in 2017): These are people who are trying to steal my country and I’m strongly disagree with it. I’m not going to be, you know, a kind of speechless person right now. I’m not going to keep silent.
He called Putin “a madman” who was “sucking the blood out of Russia,” and more insults as he built a pro-democracy movement, opening offices all across Russia.
It was a time when other Putin opponents were dying in suspicious suicides, a car bombing, dissident Boris Nemtsov was shot out in the open near the Kremlin. And Navalny himself was subjected to multiple arrests and beatings, an attack with green dye laced with a caustic chemical, and in 2020, an assassination attempt that he recounts in the beginning of his book.
He writes that shortly before he boarded a plane in Siberia, he was poisoned with a Soviet-era, military-grade nerve agent.
He collapsed, moaning in agony, as his body began to shut down. While he was in a coma at a Russian hospital, Yulia waged a campaign to pressure Putin to release Alexei so he could fly to Germany for treatment.
We met them in Berlin about two months after the attack.
Lesley Stahl (in 2020): You have said you think that Mr. Putin’s responsible.
Alexei Navalny (in 2020): I don’t think. I’m sure that he is responsible.
He spent five months recovering in Germany — that’s when he started writing the memoir. Then, in January of 2021, the Navalnys returned to Russia.
When they landed, they were met by Russian police.
He was arrested, said goodbye to his wife, and was led away.
Lesley Stahl: This is a question you’re going to be asked over and over and over, but it’s, it’s almost the essential question: Why did you decide to go back, the two of you? You knew the danger for sure. And do you regret it now?
Yulia Navalnaya: You ask me about our decision like we were sitting together and discussing if he needs to go back, or he doesn’t need to go back. It, it didn’t work like this. From the first day of when I realized that he could recover after this poisoning, I knew that he would go back as soon as possible.
Lesley Stahl: So, it wasn’t even a debate.
Yulia Navalnaya: No.
Lesley Stahl: It was just “when do we go back?” as opposed to if.
Yulia Navalnaya: We never had any debates and of course, I would love to live all my life with my husband. But at that moment, I knew that there is just one decision which he could take. And it was his decision. And I knew how important it was for him. And I knew that he wouldn’t be happy to live in exile.
His arrest sparked protests across Russia. But far from disappearing in prison, Navalny managed to maintain a presence on social media. How – we’ve been asked not to say – but it enabled him to keep up his attacks on Putin.
Meanwhile, his team of investigators released drone footage of what they said was Putin’s billion dollar palace on the Black Sea. it was viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube.
Lesley Stahl: It must’ve driven Putin insane that he, he locked him up and he’s still getting the anti-Putin message out.
Yulia Navalnaya: That’s why he con— his conditions were worse way— from month to month.
Those conditions, Navalny wrote in his diaries, included “sleep deprivation,” “punitive solitary confinement,” almost no medical care. And when none of that broke him, he was sent repeatedly to “a concrete black hole” called the “punishment cell,” where he would remain for up to 15 days at a time.
Lesley Stahl: Here’s how he described it: he said it was a doghouse and this is the place where prisoners were sent to be tortured, and raped, and sometimes murdered. I wondered how you read those passages. I was thinking of you when I read it and thought, ‘What is she feeling? What is– how are you reading this?’
Yulia Navalnaya: It’s very tough moment to think about all this torturing place and torturing conditions, and about him, how he was laughing at these people, even while he was there.
60 Minutes
Navalny thought of his life in prison as his work, surviving and staying positive, his job.
“I know one thing for sure…” he wrote: “…that I’m among the happiest 1 percent of people on the planet—those who absolutely adore their work… I have enormous support from the people. And I met a woman with whom I share not only love but … [who] is just as opposed as I am to what is going on. Maybe we won’t succeed … But we have to try.”
Lesley Stahl: He wrote much of this book while he was in prison. He was under constant surveillance, cameras on him all the time and he managed to get the pages out.
Yulia Navalnaya: Alexei was very smart– smart, very inventive. (LAUGH)
Lesley Stahl: Let me read you what he says in the book, okay, about this–
Yulia Navalnaya: Okay.
Lesley Stahl: He says, “I had to devise a whole clandestine operation to bamboozle the guards, involving the substitution of identical notebooks.” And after that, “[we went to court] where I was able physically to pass items to someone.”
Yulia Navalnaya: It was very difficult. That’s why we have diaries from the first year, much less from the second year, and not from the third year because it wasn’t possible.
These are some of the diaries he smuggled out when he went to court, which was often, as he was tried and convicted several times on various pretexts. After each verdict, he was moved to a different prison with harsher conditions.
Last December, he was transferred to this penal colony north of the Arctic Circle.
This would be his final court appearance. He looked healthy and in good spirits, sharing a laugh with court officials. The very next day, Feb. 16, 2024, he was dead. Russian officials announced later that the cause was, quote, “not criminal in nature” and due to “combined diseases.”
Lesley Stahl: It was at the time that, that the negotiations over a prisoner swap were underway and Alexei might be one of the prisoners who was to be released.
Yulia Navalnaya: Putin realized that Alexei is so big that he’s– he could be the new leader of Russia. He could encourage people to stand against Putin. And all the things just brought Putin to this understanding that it’s not possible to let Navalny be, be free.
Lesley Stahl: You posted a message shortly after his death. You said, bravely I thought, “[Vladimir] Putin killed my husband. By killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart, and half of my soul.”
Yulia Navalnaya: That’s true. I can say now the same, nothing has changed.
Lesley Stahl: Here’s something else you said. You posted this on X: “Please do not forget… Vladimir Putin is a murderer and a war criminal. His place is in prison, and not somewhere in The Hague in a cozy cell with a TV, but in Russia in the same… two-by-three-meter cell in which he killed Alexei.”
Yulia Navalnaya: For me, it’s very important. I think that for Vladimir Putin, he needs to be in Russian con– prison to feel everything, what not just my husband, but all the prisoners in Russia.
60 Minutes
His political network inside Russia has been crushed. Yulia and their two children have been forced to live in exile. Many of his old team now operate out of here in Vilnius, Lithuania, and three of his lawyers are on trial in Russia.
And Yulia is constantly on the road, lobbying Western leaders to stand up to Putin.
Lesley Stahl: So, the question is inevitable. Painful but inevitable. Has Putin won? Has he shut down the opposition to such an extent that it’s over?
Yulia Navalnaya: But it’s not finished. We continue our fight. He still has millions of supporters, we can see it by how many people go still every day to his grave, how many flowers on his grave.
Produced by Richard Bonin. Associate producer, Mirella Brussani. Broadcast associate, Aria Een. Edited by Matthew Lev.
-
Two Russian journalists jailed on ‘extremism’ charges for alleged work for Navalny group
LONDON – Two Russian journalists were arrested by their government on “extremism” charges and ordered by courts there on Saturday to remain in custody pending investigation and trial on accusations of working for a group founded by the late Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny.
Konstantin Gabov and Sergey Karelin both denied the charges for which they will be detained for a minimum of two months before any trials begin. Each faces a minimum of two years in prison and a maximum of six years for alleged “participation in an extremist organization,” according to Russian courts.
They are just the latest journalists arrested amid a Russian government crackdown on dissent and independent media that intensified after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago. The Russian government passed laws criminalizing what it deems false information about the military, or statements seen as discrediting the military, effectively outlawing any criticism of the war in Ukraine or speech that deviates from the official narrative.
A journalist for the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, Sergei Mingazov, was detained on charges of spreading false information about the Russian military, his lawyer said Friday.
Gabov and Karelin are accused of preparing materials for a YouTube channel run by Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption, which has been outlawed by Russian authorities. Navalny died in an Arctic penal colony in February.
Gabov, who was detained in Moscow, is a freelance producer who has worked for multiple organizations, including Reuters, the court press service said. Reuters did not immediately comment on the ruling by the court.
Karelin, who has dual citizenship with Israel, was detained Friday night in Russia’s northern Murmansk region.
Karelin, 41, has worked for a number of outlets, including for The Associated Press. He was a cameraman for German media outlet Deutsche Welle until the Kremlin banned the outlet from operating in Russia in February 2022.
“The Associated Press is very concerned by the detention of Russian video journalist Sergey Karelin,” the AP said in a statement. “We are seeking additional information.”
Russia’s crackdown on dissent is aimed at opposition figures, journalists, activists, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and ordinary Russians critical of the Kremlin. A number of journalists have been jailed in relation to their coverage of Navalny, including Antonina Favorskaya, who remains in pre-trial detention at least until May 28 following a hearing last month.
Favorskaya was detained and accused by Russian authorities of taking part in an “extremist organization” by posting on the social media platforms of Navalny’s Foundation. She covered Navalny’s court hearings for years and filmed the last video of Navalny before he died in the penal colony.
Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s spokeswoman, said that Favorskaya did not publish anything on the Foundation’s platforms and suggested that Russian authorities have targeted her because she was doing her job as a journalist.
Evan Gershkovich, a 32-year-old American reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is awaiting trial on espionage charges at Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison. Both Gershkovich and his employer have vehemently denied the charges.
Gershkovich was detained in March 2023 while on a reporting trip and has spent over a year in jail; authorities have not detailed what, if any, evidence they have to support the espionage charges.
The U.S. government has declared Gershkovich wrongfully detained, with officials accusing Moscow of using the journalist as a pawn for political ends.
The Russian government has also cracked down on opposition figures. One prominent activist, Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Elise Morton, Associated Press
Source link -
Commenting on Navalny’s death for first time, Putin says he supported prisoner swap for his foe
Russian President Vladimir Putin said early Monday that he supported an idea to release opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a prisoner exchange just days before the man who was his biggest foe died.
In his first comments to address Navalny’s death, Putin said of the dissident’s demise: “It happens. There is nothing you can do about it. It’s life.”
The remarks were unusual in that he repeatedly referenced Navalny by his name for the first time in years — and that they came at a late-night news conference as results poured in from a presidential election that is certain to extend his rule.
Early returns showed him leading with over 87% of the votes in a race with no competition, after years of ruthlessly suppressing the opposition and crippling independent media.
Navalny’s allies last month also said that talks with Russian and Western officials about a prisoner swap involving Navalny were underway. The politician’s longtime associate Maria Pevchikh said the talks were in their final stages just days before the Kremlin critic’s sudden and unexplained death in an Arctic penal colony.
She accused Putin of “getting rid of” Navalny in order not to exchange him, but offered no evidence to back her claims, and they could not be independently confirmed.
Putin said Monday, also without offering any evidence, that several days before Navalny’s death, “certain colleagues, not from the (presidential) administration” told him about “an idea to exchange Navalny for certain people held in penitentiary facilities in western countries.” He said he supported the idea.
“Believe it or not, but the person talking to me didn’t even finish their sentence when I said: ‘I agree,’” Putin said in response to a question from a journalist about Navalny’s death. He added that his one condition was that Navalny wouldn’t return to Russia.
“But unfortunately, whatever happened, happened,” Putin said.
Navalny, 47, Russia’s best-known opposition politician, died last month while serving a 19-year sentence on extremism charges that he rejected as politically motivated. His allies, family members and Western officials blamed the death on the Kremlin, accusations it has rejected.
The politician’s associates said officials listed “natural causes” on paperwork Navalny’s mother was shown when she was trying to retrieve his body.
Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow of his own accord after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin. He was immediately arrested. The Kremlin has vehemently denied it was behind the poisoning.
Pevchikh claimed that there was a plan to swap Navalny and two U.S. citizens held in Russia for Vadim Krasikov. He was serving a life sentence in Germany for the 2019 killing in Berlin of Zelimkhan “Tornike” Khangoshvili, a 40-year-old Georgian citizen of Chechen descent. German judges said Krasikov acted on the orders of Russian authorities.
She didn’t identify the U.S. citizens that were supposedly part of the deal. There are several in custody in Russia, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, arrested on espionage charges, and Paul Whelan, a corporate security executive from Michigan, convicted of espionage and serving a long prison sentence. They and the U.S. government dispute the charges against them.
German officials have refused to comment when asked if there had been any effort by Russia to swap Krasikov.
Putin had earlier said that the Kremlin was open to negotiations on Gershkovich. He pointed to a man imprisoned in a “U.S.-allied country” for “liquidating a bandit” who had allegedly killed Russian soldiers during separatist fighting in Chechnya. Putin didn’t mention names but appeared to refer to Krasikov.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Dasha Litvinova, Associated Press
Source link -
Russians crowd polling stations in apparent protest as Putin is set to extend his rule
Russians crowded outside polling stations at midday Sunday on the last day of a three-day presidential election, apparently heeding an opposition call to protest against President Vladimir Putin.
Putin is poised to extend his nearly quarter century of rule for six more years after a relentless crackdown on dissent.
The election was taking place amid attacks within Russia by Ukrainian missiles and drones, which have killed several people. Polls opened Friday in a tightly controlled environment where there are no real alternatives to Putin, little public criticism of him or his war in Ukraine.
Putin’s fiercest political foe, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic prison last month, and other critics are either in jail or in exile. There are no significant independent observers monitoring the election.
Navalny’s associates urged those unhappy with Putin or the war to protest by coming to the polls at noon on Sunday, a strategy endorsed by Navalny shortly before his death. Navalny’s team described it as a success, pointing to pictures and videos of people crowding near polling stations in cities across Russia around noon.
The 71-year-old Russian leader only faces three token rivals from Kremlin-friendly parties who have refrained from any criticism of his 24-year rule or his full-scale invasion of Ukraine that was launched on Feb. 24, 2022.
Putin has boasted of Russian battlefield successes in the period leading up to the vote, but a major Ukrainian drone attack across Russia on Sunday once again was a reminder of challenges faced by the Kremlin.
The Russian Defense Ministry reported that it took down more than 40 Ukrainian drones overnight and on Sunday, including four near the Russian capital.
The local governor of Russia’s Belgorod region said that Ukrainian shelling on Sunday killed a man and a 16-year-old girl, and wounded at least 12 other people. The governor also said two people died during attacks the previous day.
Putin previously described the attacks as an attempt by Ukraine to frighten residents and derail Russia’s presidential election, saying they “won’t be left unpunished.”
Voting is taking place at polling stations across the vast country’s 11 time zones, in illegally annexed regions of Ukraine, and online.
Stanislav Andreychuk, co-chair of the Golos independent election watchdog, said that pressure on voters from law enforcement had reached unprecedented levels.
Russians, he said in a social media post, were searched at polling stations, their ballots checked before they were cast, and police demanded a ballot box was opened to remove a ballot.
“It’s the first time in my life that I’ve seen such absurdities and I’ve been observing elections for 20 years,” Andreychuk wrote on the messaging app Telegram, referring to the actions of law enforcement.
A video, shared on social media, also appeared to show an armed man in camouflage gear going into booths, harassing Russians as they voted.
Some people told The Associated Press that they were happy to vote for Putin.
Dmitry Sergienko, who cast his ballot in Moscow, said, “I am happy with everything and want everything to continue as it is now.”
Olga Dymova, who also backed Putin, said, “I am sure that our country will only move forward towards success.”
Apparently heeding the opposition’s call to protest, lines outside several polling stations both inside and outside Russia appeared to swell around noon.
Some Russians waiting to vote in Moscow and St. Petersburg told the AP that they were taking part in the protest, but it wasn’t possible to confirm whether all of those pictured in line were doing so.
Joining a line at a polling station around noon in Moscow, a woman who said her name was Yulia told the AP that she was voting for the first time.
“Even if my vote doesn’t change anything, my conscience will be clear…for the future that I want to see for our country,” she said.
Another Moscow voter, who also identified himself only by his first name, Vadim, said he hoped for change, but added that “unfortunately, it’s unlikely.”
Ivan Zhdanov, the head of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said that the opposition’s call to protest had been successful.
“The action has shown that there’s another Russia, there are people who stand against Putin.”
Huge lines formed around noon outside Russian diplomatic missions in London, Berlin, Paris, Milan, Belgrade and other cities with large Russian communities, many of whom left Russia after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, joined the line at the Russian Embassy in Berlin as some in the crowd applauded and chanted her name.
Protesters in Berlin displayed a figure of Putin bathing in a bath of blood with the Ukrainian flag on the side, alongside shredded ballots in ballot boxes.
Russian state television and officials said the lines abroad showed strong turnout. The Russian Embassy in Germany posted a video of the queue in Berlin on X, formerly Twitter, with the caption, “together we are strong — Vote for Russia!”
In Tallinn, where hundreds stood in a line snaking around the Estonian capital’s cobbled streets leading to the Russian Embassy, 23-year-old Tatiana said she came to take part in the protest at noon.
“If we have some option to protest I think it’s important to utilize any opportunity,” she said, only giving her first name, citing personal security reasons.
Boris Nadezhdin, a liberal politician who tried to join the race on an anti-war platform but was barred from running by election officials, voiced hope that many Russians cast their ballots against Putin.
“I believe that the Russian people today have a chance to show their real attitude to what is happening by voting not for Putin, but for some other candidates or in some other way, which is exactly what I did,” he said after voting in Dolgoprudny, just outside Moscow.
The OVD-Info group that monitors political arrests said that more than 75 people were arrested in 17 cities across Russia on Sunday.
Despite tight controls, several dozen cases of vandalism at polling stations were reported.
A woman was arrested in St. Petersburg after she threw a firebomb at a polling station entrance, and several others were detained across the country for throwing green antiseptic or ink into ballot boxes.
Dmitry Medvedev, a deputy head of the Russian Security Council chaired by Putin, called for toughening the punishment for those who vandalize polling stations, arguing they should face treason charges for attempting to derail the vote amid the fighting in Ukraine.
Some Russian media also posted images of spoiled ballots posted by voters, with “killer and thief” inscribed on one, and “waiting for you in The Hague” written on another, in a reference to an arrest warrant issued for Putin on war crimes charges related to his alleged responsibility for the abductions of children from Ukraine.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Associated Press
Source link -
Russians crowd polling stations in apparent protest as Putin is set to extend his rule
Russians crowded outside polling stations at midday Sunday on the last day of a three-day presidential election, apparently heeding an opposition call to protest against President Vladimir Putin, who is poised to extend his rule of nearly a quarter century for six more years after a relentless crackdown on dissent.
The election that began Friday has taken place in a tightly controlled environment where there are no real alternatives to Putin, no public criticism of him or his war in Ukraine. Putin’s fiercest political foe, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic prison last month, and other critics are either in jail or in exile.
Navalny’s associates have urged those unhappy with Putin or the war to protest by coming to the polls at noon on Sunday, a strategy endorsed by Navalny shortly before his death. Team Navalny described it as a success, releasing pictures and videos of people crowding near polling stations in cities across Russia around noon.
The 71-year-old Russian leader faces three token rivals from Kremlin-friendly parties who have refrained from any criticism of his 24-year rule or his full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago. Putin has boasted of Russian battlefield successes in the run-up to the vote, but a massive Ukrainian drone attack across Russia early Sunday sent a reminder of challenges faced by Moscow.
The Russian Defense Ministry reported downing 35 Ukrainian drones overnight, including four near the Russian capital. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said there were no casualties or damage.
Russia’s wartime economy has proven resilient, expanding despite bruising Western sanctions. The Russian defense industry has served as a key growth engine, working around the clock to churn out missiles, tanks and ammunition.
Voting is taking place at polling stations across the vast country’s 11 time zones, in illegally annexed regions of Ukraine, and online. More than 60% of eligible voters had cast ballots as of early Sunday.
Dmitry Sergienko, who cast his ballot in Moscow, said he voted for Putin: “I am happy with everything and want everything to continue as it is now.”
Olga Dymova, who also backed Putin, said, “I am sure that our country will only move forward towards success.”
Another Moscow voter, who identified himself only by his first name, Vadim, said he hopes for change, but added that “unfortunately, it’s unlikely.”
Navalny’s associates broadcast footage with comments by those who turned up at the polls at noon to protest Putin, their faces blurred to protect their identities.
“The action has achieved its goals,” Ivan Zhdanov, the head of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said in a YouTube broadcast. “The action has shown that there is another Russia, there are people who stand against Putin.”
Another Navalny ally, Leonid Volkov, said that the protest was meant to help unify and encourage those who oppose Putin.
It wasn’t possible to confirm if the voters shown lining up at polling stations in videos and photos released by Navalny’s associates and some Russian media had responded to the protest call, or merely reflected strong turnout.
Huge lines also formed around noon outside Russian diplomatic missions in Berlin, Paris, Milan and other cities with large Russian communities. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, joined the line at the Russian Embassy in Berlin as some in the crowd applauded and chanted her name.
In Tallinn, where hundreds stood in a line snaking around the city’s cobbled streets leading to the Russian Embassy, 23-year-old Tatiana said she came to take part in the protest at noon. “If we have some option to protest I think it’s important to utilize any opportunity,” she said, only giving her first name citing personal security reasons.
Boris Nadezhdin, a liberal politician who tried to join the race on an anti-war platform but was barred from running by election officials, voiced hope that many Russians cast their ballots against Putin.
“I believe that the Russian people today have a chance to show their real attitude to what is happening by voting not for Putin, but for some other candidates or in some other way, which is exactly what I did,” he said after voting in Dolgorpudny, just outside Moscow.
The OVD-Info group that monitors political arrests said that more than 65 people were arrested in 16 cities across Russia on Sunday.
Despite tight controls, several dozen cases of vandalism at polling stations were reported.
A woman was arrested in St. Petersburg after she threw a firebomb at a polling station entrance, and several others were detained across the country for throwing green antiseptic or ink into ballot boxes.
Dmitry Medvedev, a deputy head of the Russian Security Council chaired by Putin, called for toughening the punishment for those who vandalize polling stations, arguing they should face treason charges for attempting to derail the vote amid the fighting in Ukraine.
Some Russian media also posted images of spoiled ballots posted by voters, with “killer and thief” inscribed on one, and “waiting for you in The Hague” written on another, in a reference to an arrest warrant issued for Putin on war crimes charges related to his alleged responsibility for the abductions of children from Ukraine.
Ahead of the election, Putin cast his war in Ukraine, now in its third year, as a life-or-death battle against the West seeking to break up Russia.
Russian troops have recently made slow advances relying on their edge in firepower, while Ukraine has fought back by intensifying cross-border attacks and launching drone strikes deep inside Russia.
The Ukrainian shelling of the city of Belgorod near the border killed a 16-year-old girl on Sunday and injured her father, according to the local governor, who also reported two deaths from Ukrainian attacks the previous day.
Putin described the attacks as an attempt by Ukraine to frighten residents and derail Russia’s presidential election, saying they “won’t be left unpunished.”
Western leaders have derided the election as a travesty of democracy.
Beyond the lack of options for voters, the possibilities for independent monitoring are very limited. No significant international observers were present. Only registered, Kremlin-approved candidates, or state-backed advisory bodies, can assign observers to polling stations, decreasing the likelihood of independent watchdogs.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Associated Press
Source link -
Russians are voting in an election that holds little suspense after Putin crushed dissent
Russia began three days of voting Friday in a presidential election that is all but certain to extend President Vladimir Putin’s rule by six more years after he stifled dissent.
The election takes place against the backdrop of a ruthless crackdown that has crippled independent media and prominent rights groups and given Putin full control of the political system.
It also comes as Moscow’s war in Ukraine enters its third year. Russia has the advantage on the battlefield, where it is making small, if slow, gains. Ukraine, meanwhile, has made Moscow look vulnerable behind the front line: Long-range drone attacks have struck deep inside Russia, while high-tech drones have put its Black Sea fleet on the defensive.
Russian regions bordering Ukraine have reported several attempts by Ukrainian fighters to take towns this week. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday that “it is beyond any doubt that they are related one way or another to attempts to cast a shadow on the elections, try to destabilize the situation.
Voters are casting their ballots Friday through Sunday at polling stations across the vast country’s 11 time zones, as well as in illegally annexed regions of Ukraine. Russians also can vote online, the first time the option has been used in a presidential contest.
Officials said that voting was proceeding in an orderly fashion. But at one Moscow polling station, a woman dumped green liquid on a ballot box, according to news reports.
The election holds little suspense since Putin, 71, is running for his fifth term virtually unchallenged. His political opponents are either in jail or in exile; the fiercest of them, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic penal colony last month. The three other candidates on the ballot are low-profile politicians from token opposition parties that toe the Kremlin’s line.
Observers have little to no expectation that the election will be free and fair.
European Council President Charles Michel mordantly commented Friday on the election’s preordained nature. “Would like to congratulate Vladimir Putin on his landslide victory in the elections starting today. No opposition. No freedom. No choice,” he wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Beyond the fact that voters have been presented with few options, the possibilities for independent monitoring are very limited.
No significant international observer missions were present. The Organization for Security and Cooperation Europe’s monitors were not invited, and only registered candidates or state-backed advisory bodies can assign observers to polling stations, decreasing the likelihood of independent watchdogs. With balloting over three days in nearly 100,000 polling stations in the country, any true oversight is difficult anyway.
“The elections in Russia as a whole are a sham. The Kremlin controls who’s on the ballot. The Kremlin controls how they can campaign. To say nothing of being able to control every aspect of the voting and the vote-counting process,” said Sam Greene, director for Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington.
Ukraine and the West have also condemned Russia for holding the vote in Ukrainian regions that Moscow’s forces have seized and occupied.
In many ways, Ukraine is at the heart of this election, political analysts and opposition figures say. They say Putin wants to use his all-but-assured electoral victory as evidence that the war and his handling of it enjoys widespread support. The opposition, meanwhile, hopes to use the vote to demonstrate their discontent with both the war and the Kremlin.
The Kremlin banned two politicians from the ballot who sought to run on an anti-war agenda and attracted genuine — albeit not overwhelming — support, thus depriving the voters of any choice on the “main issue of Russia’s political agenda,” said political analyst Abbas Gallyamov, who used to work as Putin’s speechwriter.
Russia’s scattered opposition has urged those unhappy with Putin or the war to show up at the polls at noon on Sunday, the final day of voting, in protest. The strategy was endorsed by Navalny not long before his death.
“We need to use election day to show that we exist and there are many of us, we are actual, living, real people and we are against Putin. … What to do next is up to you. You can vote for any candidate except Putin. You could ruin your ballot,” his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, said.
How well this strategy will work remains unclear.
Golos, Russia’s renowned independent election observer group, said in a report this week that authorities were “doing everything so that the people don’t notice the very fact of the election happening.”
The watchdog described the campaign ahead of the vote as “practically unnoticeable” and “the most vapid” since 2000, when Golos was founded and started monitoring elections in Russia.
Putin’s campaigning was cloaked in presidential activities, and other candidates were “demonstrably passive,” the report said.
State media dedicated less airtime to the election than in 2018, when Putin was last elected, according to Golos. Instead of promoting the vote to ensure a desired turnout, authorities appear to be betting on pressuring voters they can control — for instance, Russians who work in state-run companies or institutions — to show up at the polls, the group said.
The watchdog itself has also been swept up in the crackdown: Its co-chair, Grigory Melkonyants, is in jail awaiting trial on charges widely seen as an attempt to pressure the group ahead of the election.
“The current elections will not be able to reflect the real mood of the people,” Golos said in the report. “The distance between citizens and decision-making about the fate of the country has become greater than ever.”
___
Follow AP’s coverage of Russia’s election: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-election
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Dasha Litvinova, Associated Press
Source link -
Trump keeps making incendiary statements. His campaign says that won’t change.
By JILL COLVIN and BILL BARROW (Associated Press)
GREENSBORO, N.C. — He’s argued his four criminal indictments and mug shot bolstered his support among Black voters who see him as a victim of discrimination just like them.
He’s compared himself to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison imprisoned by Vladimir Putin, and suggested that he is a political dissident, too.
And in nearly every public appearance, he repeats falsehoods about the election he lost.
Candidates on the verge of winning their parties’ nominations generally massage their messaging and moderate positions that may energize hardcore primary voters but are less appealing to a broader audience. In political terms, they “pivot.”
Not Donald Trump. The former president is instead doubling down on often-incendiary rhetoric that offends wide swaths of voters, seeming to be doing little to rein in his most irascible and oftentimes self-defeating instincts. That’s even as some of his most loyal allies have suggested he shift his focus and tone down rhetoric that risks offending independent voters and people outside his base.
“Donald Trump is Donald Trump. That’s not going to change,” said senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita. “Our job is not to remake Donald Trump.”
LaCivita and other top campaign officials instead say their role is to provide the organization “to amplify and to force project” Trump’s message.
The campaign, he said, had already assumed a general election posture before voting began, running ads attacking President Joe Biden before the Iowa caucuses. So while Trump is now talking less about his last remaining GOP rival, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, his campaign is focused on building out a general election infrastructure as it turns its focus from early voting states to November battlegrounds.
That includes efforts to take over the Republican National Committee, with plans to consolidate the party’s and campaign’s fundraising, political operations, communications and research operations. LaCivita is in line to become the RNC’s chief operating officer while retaining his role on the campaign.
“The campaign’s pivot,” LaCivita said, “is just a realization that we’ve already secured what we need to win. That manifests itself in not only the messaging but the mechanics.” He said to expect “more of the same” after Trump clinches the nomination, which is expected later this month.
Trump’s hardest edges, no matter how familiar to Americans nine years after he first ran for president, produce welcome fodder for Biden’s reelection team, which wants to motivate disaffected Democrats and independent voters by warning about a second Trump term.
Trump’s speeches at rallies can stretch for two hours as he meanders between policy proposals, personal stories and jokes, attacks on his opponents and complaints that he is being persecuted by the courts, and dire warnings about the country’s future. Trump often adds asides that were not in his prepared remarks. But some of his most divisive comments are part of his script.
He has bragged about nominating three Supreme Court justices who voted to end a national right to abortion, even as he urges Republicans not to be too extreme on an issue Democrats have credited for several victories. In promising to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, he has talked about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing Adolf Hitler. And he once described his enemies as “vermin,” language opponents deride as authoritarian.
At one rally this past weekend, Trump went so far as to cast Biden’s handling of the border as “a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America.”
“Donald Trump is still Donald Trump — the same extreme, dangerous candidate voters rejected in 2020, and they’ll reject him again this November regardless of the team he has around him,” said Biden spokesman Kevin Munoz.
Trump’s advisers have at times encouraged him to speak less about grievance and retribution and more about his vision for a second term. But after three campaigns for the White House and four years in office, Trump is set in his ways. Former aides learned long ago that trying to pressure Trump to rein in his impulses often only led him to dig in deeper. And his campaign team seems to respect and trust the former president’s political instincts, pointing to his sweep of the GOP primaries so far.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said Trump would not change. Americans “deserve a president who will not sugarcoat what’s happening in the world,” he said.
Interviews with Republicans, including Trump supporters and those still backing Haley’s beleaguered bid, reflect concerns that Trump risks fumbling a clear opportunity against Biden, who faces low approval ratings and widespread voter questions about his age and readiness for a second term.
“At some point (Trump) needs to take the spotlight off himself,” said Tom Davis, a former Virginia congressman who backs Haley. Davis noted improving economic indicators but said Biden remains burdened by concerns about inflation and “has been bad on the border” and “terrible on the deficit.”
Even Trump voters seem to recognize the problem: According to AP VoteCast data, about half of Republicans in conservative South Carolina — including about a quarter of Trump’s own supporters — are concerned he is too extreme to win the general election. While Trump dominates among conservative voters, those voters represented just 37% of the electorate in the November 2020 presidential election.
Trump held rallies Saturday in North Carolina and Virginia, two states that hold primaries on Super Tuesday but are also potential swing states in November’s general election.
Both states highlight Trump’s potential problems in November: He dominates among conservatives, especially in rural and small-town America, but struggles with more moderate voters in more urban settings.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat who was re-elected in 2020 even as Trump won his state, said he welcomes the contrast between Trump and Biden.
“Do you want a president who wakes up every morning thinking about the American people?” he asked in an interview. “Or do you want a president who wakes up every morning thinking about himself?”
Biden won Virginia in 2020. A year later, Virginians elected Republican Glenn Youngkin as governor. Youngkin emphasized education and economic policy, and attracted urban and suburban moderates who rejected Trump. Some of the states’ suburban and exurban congressional districts have become more favorable to Democrats in the Trump era.
Notably, Youngkin has not endorsed Trump. He declined an interview request through aides.
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally who sometimes speaks to the former president, compared 2024 to 1980, when Republican Ronald Reagan won a landslide over Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, who was saddled with inflation, high unemployment and international conflict. Reagan, dubbed “the happy warrior,” won 44 states and a new Republican Senate with “a positive vision,” Gingrich said, that was about more than Carter’s record.
“When you have the kind of numbers Biden has, what people need is about 70% positive, 30% anti-Biden,” Gingrich said, insisting Trump could usher in a Republican wave like when he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Just as possible, however, is a repeat of 2018, when Republicans lost the House majority, or 2020, when Trump lost and Democrats reclaimed Senate control, or 2022, when Republicans lost winnable Senate races and failed to flip the chamber.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham suggests Trump and his campaign should “just keep doing what they’re doing.”
But Graham himself has pivoted. After he ran for president in 2016, Graham vowed that “if we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.” Now, he is a Trump confidant.
“Everybody that wants to give him advice, he beat like a drum,” Graham said at Trump’s South Carolina victory party.
___
Colvin reported from New York.
Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.
The Associated Press
Source link -
Hearse drivers refuse to take Alexei Navalny’s body to Moscow funeral, Putin critic’s team say
MOSCOW — Attempts to hire a hearse to take the body of Alexei Navalny to his funeral have been thwarted by unknown people, the Russian opposition leader’s team said Thursday.
Spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh claimed that drivers had been “called by unknown people and threatened not to take Alexei’s body anywhere.”
Yarmysh said she had been told that “no hearse agrees to take the body there.”
Navalny’s team also encountered difficulty hiring a venue for his funeral, which will be held at 2 p.m. local time (6 a.m. ET) Friday at the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God in Moscow’s Maryino district, where the opposition leader lived. He will then be buried at Borisov Cemetery.
Many venues claimed that they were busy, or refused the booking once Navalny’s named was mentioned, while one venue explicitly said they were forbidden from working with Navalny’s team, Yarmysh said Tuesday.
The team had initially planned a public farewell and funeral for the late Russian opposition leader for Thursday, but were told there were “no available cemetery workers who can dig a grave,” said Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, on Wednesday.
Navalnaya blames Putin for husband’s death
Navalny died on February 16 in the penal colony in Siberia where he was serving a 19-year sentence after being found guilty of creating an extremist community, financing extremist activists and various other crimes in August. He was already serving sentences of 11-and-a-half years in a maximum security facility on fraud and other charges he had always denied and claimed were politically motivated.
The Russian prison service said Navalny “felt unwell after a walk” in his Siberian penal colony and “almost immediately” lost consciousness.
Navalny was Russia’s highest-profile opposition leader and spent years criticizing Putin, who has been in power for nearly a quarter of a century, at great personal risk. His death came weeks before the country’s presidential elections scheduled to begin nationwide on March 15, which is widely seen by the international community as little more than a formality that will secure Putin a fifth term in power.
RELATED: ‘Putin is responsible’: Biden delivers remarks on the death of Alexei Navalny
Navalny’s death was met with grief and anger across the world as well as inside Russia, where the smallest acts of political dissent carry huge risks.
He returned to Russia in 2021 from Germany, where he had been treated after being poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent. On arrival Navalny was swiftly arrested – on charges he dismissed as politically motivated – and spent the rest of his life in prison.
His wife, Yulia Navalnaya, has blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for her husband’s death.
“Putin killed my husband,” she said during a speech at the European Parliament on Wednesday. “On his orders, Alexei was tortured for three years,” she added, a reference to the time Navalny spent in prison.
“He was starved in a tiny stone cell, cut off from the outside world and denied visits, phone calls. And then even letters. And then they killed him. Even after that, they abused his body,” she said, as Navalny’s team alleges the body was held in order to pressure the family into agreeing to hold a private funeral.
The Kremlin has rejected any allegations of involvement in Navalny’s death.
Navalnaya also said she was concerned that police will crack down on mourners at the funeral on Friday.
RELATED: US imposes new sanctions on Russia in response to Navalny death 2 years after Ukraine invasion
More than 400 people were detained at makeshift memorials for Navalny across 32 Russian cities, according to human rights monitoring group OVD-Info.
(The-CNN-Wire & 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.)
CNNWire
Source link -
Navalny’s family is laying the opposition leader to rest after his death in prison
Relatives and supporters of Alexei Navalny are bidding farewell to the opposition leader at a funeral Friday in southeastern Moscow, following a battle with authorities over the release of his body after his still-unexplained death in an Arctic penal colony.
His supporters say several churches in Moscow refused to hold the service before Navalny’s team got permission from one in the capital’s Maryino district, where he once lived before his 2020 poisoning, treatment in Germany and subsequent arrest on his return to Russia.
The Church of the Icon of the Mother of God Soothe My Sorrows, which agreed to hold the service, did not mention it on its social media page. Authorities lined the road from from a nearby subway station to the church with crowd-control barriers, and riot police deployed in big numbers early Friday.
A hearse set out with Navalny’s body toward the church, his team said.
Burial was to follow in the nearby Borisovskoye Cemetery, where police also showed up in force.
Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, spent eight days trying to get authorities to release the body following his Feb. 16 death at Penal Colony No. 3 in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.
Authorities originally said they couldn’t turn over the body because they needed to conduct post-mortem tests. Navalnaya, 69, made a video appeal to President Vladimir Putin to release the body so she could bury her son with dignity.
Once it was released, at least one funeral director said he had been “forbidden” to work with Navalny’s supporters, the spokeswoman for Navalny’s team, Kira Yarmysh, said on social media. They also were unable to find a hearse for the funeral.
“Unknown people are calling up people and threatening them not to take Alexei’s body anywhere,” Yarmysh said Thursday.
Russian authorities still haven’t announced the cause of death for Navalny, 47, who crusaded against official corruption and organized big protests as Putin’s fiercest political foe. Many Western leaders blamed the death on the Russian leader, which the Kremlin angrily rejected.
It was not immediately clear who among Navalny’s family or allies would attend the funeral, with many of his associates in exile abroad due to fear of prosecution in Russia. Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption and his regional offices were designated as “extremist organizations” by the Russian government in 2021.
The politician’s team said the funeral would be streamed live on Navalny’s YouTube channel.
His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, accused Putin and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin of trying to block a public funeral.
“We don’t want any special treatment — just to give people the opportunity to say farewell to Alexei in a normal way,” Yulia Navalnaya wrote on X. In a speech to European lawmakern Wednesday in Strasbourg, France, she also expressed fears that police might interfere with the gathering or would “arrest those who have come to say goodbye to my husband.”
Moscow authorities refused permission for a separate memorial event for Navalny and slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov on Friday, citing COVID-19 restrictions, politician Yekaterina Duntsova said Thursday. Nemtsov, a 55-year-old former deputy prime minister, was shot to death as he walked on a bridge adjacent to the Kremlin on the night of Feb. 27, 2015.
Yarmysh also urged Navalny’s supporters around the world to lay flowers in his honor Friday.
“Everyone who knew Alexei says what a cheerful, courageous and honest person he was,” Yarmysh said Thursday. “But the greater truth is that even if you never met Alexei, you knew what he was like, too. You shared his investigations, you went to rallies with him, you read his posts from prison. His example showed many people what to do when even when things were scary and difficult.”
Ivan Zhdanov, director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said that his funeral had initially been planned for Thursday — the day of Putin’s annual state-of-the-nation address — but no venue agreed to hold it then.
In an interview with the independent Russian news site Meduza, Zhdanov said authorities had pressured Navalny’s relatives to “have a quiet family funeral.”
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Katie Marie Davies, Associated Press
Source link -
Funeral of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny to be held on Friday, his spokesperson says
MOSCOW – The funeral of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died earlier this month in a remote Arctic penal colony, will take place on Friday in Moscow after several locations declined to host the service, his spokesperson said.
His funeral will be held at a church in Moscow’s southeast Maryino district on Friday afternoon, Kira Yarmysh said Wednesday. The burial is to be at a nearby cemetery.
Navalny died in mid-February in one of Russia’s harshest penal facilities. Russian authorities said the cause of his death at age 47 is still unknown, and the results of any investigation are likely to be questioned abroad. Many Western leaders have already said they hold Russian President Vladimir Putin responsible for his death.
Yarmysh spoke of the difficulties his team encountered in trying to find a site for a “farewell event” for Navalny.
Writing on X, formerly known as Twitter, she said most venues said they were fully booked, with some “refusing when we mention the surname ‘Navalny,” and one disclosing that “funeral agencies were forbidden to work with us.”
Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said the funeral was initially planned for Thursday –- the day of Putin’s annual address to Russia’s Federal Assembly -– but no venue would agree to hold it then.
“The real reason is clear. The Kremlin understands that nobody will need Putin and his message on the day we say farewell to Alexei,” Zhdanov wrote on Telegram.
Shortly after the announcement of the funeral plans, Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, addressed European lawmakers in Strasbourg.
Speaking at the European Parliament, she confirmed that her husband would be buried on Friday and expressed fears that the police might interfere.
“I’m not sure yet whether it will be peaceful or whether police will arrest those who have come to say goodbye to my husband,” she said.
At some points appearing tearful amid applause from lawmakers but largely resolute, Navalnaya said her husband’s death “showed everyone that Putin is capable of anything, and that you cannot negotiate with him.”
She appealed to the European Parliament to be “innovative” in its approach to the Russian president and those close to him.
“You cannot hurt Putin with another resolution or another set of sanctions,” she said, urging lawmakers instead to “apply the methods of fighting organized crime, not political competition.”
She asked the parliament to investigate “financial machinations” and “mafia associates” in their countries and “discreet lawyers and financiers who are helping Putin and his friends to hide money.”
In introducing Navalnaya, the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, paid tribute to Navalny.
“For many in Russia and outside, he represented hope. Hope in better days. Hope in a free Russia. Hope in the future,” she said.
Navalnaya and Navalny were married for more than 20 years, and she was at his side as he helped lead the biggest protests in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Associated Press
Source link -
Widow of Navalny accuses Putin of mocking Christianity for refusing to return her husband’s body
The widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny accused President Vladimir Putin of mocking Christianity by trying to force his mother to agree to a secret funeral after his death in a penal colony.
Yulia Navalnaya said in a video released Saturday that Navalny’s mother, who wants her son’s body returned to her, is being “literally tortured” by authorities who had threatened to bury Navalny in the Arctic prison. They suggested to his mother that she does not have much time to make a decision because the body is decomposing, Navalnaya said.
“Give us the body of my husband,” Navalnaya said. “You tortured him alive, and now you keep torturing him dead. You mock the remains of the dead.”
Navalny, 47, Russia’s most well-known opposition politician, unexpectedly died on Feb. 16 in the penal colony, prompting hundreds of Russians across the country to stream to impromptu memorials with flowers and candles.
Authorities have detained scores of people as they seek to suppress any major outpouring of sympathy for Putin’s fiercest foe before the presidential election he is almost certain to win. Russians on social media say officials do not want to return Navalny’s body to his family because they fear a public show of support for him.
Navalnaya accused Putin, an Orthodox Christian, of killing Navalny.
“No true Christian could ever do what Putin is now doing with the body of Alexei,” she said, asking, “What will you do with his corpse? How low will you sink to mock the man you murdered?”
Putin is often pictured at church, dunking himself in ice water to celebrate the Epiphany and visiting holy sites in Russia. He has promoted what he has called “traditional values” without which, he once said, “society degrades.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected allegations that Putin was involved in Navalny’s death, calling them “absolutely unfounded, insolent accusations about the head of the Russian state.”
Musician Nadya Tolokonnikova, who became widely known after spending nearly two years in prison for taking part in a 2012 protest with her band Pussy Riot inside Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, released a video in which she also accused Putin of hypocrisy.
“We were imprisoned for allegedly trampling on traditional values. But no one tramples on traditional Russian values more than you, Putin, your officials and your priests who pray for all the murder that you do, year after year, day after day,” Tolokonnikova, who lives abroad, said. “Putin, have a conscience, give his mother the body of her son.”
Tolokonnikova was one of several cultural icons who have released videos calling on Russian authorities to return Navalny’s body to his family so that they can give him a funeral. Navalny’s mother and lawyers have been trying to retrieve his body since late last week.
Lyudmila Navalnaya said Thursday that investigators allowed her to see her son’s body in the morgue in the Arctic city of Salekhard. She has filed a lawsuit at a court in Salekhard contesting officials’ refusal to release the body. A closed-door hearing has been scheduled for March 4.
Navalny’s spokesman, Kira Yarmysh, said on X, formerly Twitter, that Lyudmila Navalnaya was shown a medical certificate stating that her son died of “natural causes.”
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Associated Press
Source link -
A form of Navalny
Taking crazy pills: Former President Donald Trump said last evening that the civil fraud verdict that will force him to pony up $355 million for inflating his net worth to banks is actually “a form of Navalny” and “a form of communism or fascism.”
When asked about the Russian state’s imprisonment and killing of dissident Alexei Navalny, Trump responded: “It’s happening here.” The indictments are “all because of the fact that I’m in politics,” in his telling.
He made these comments last night during a Fox News town hall. On Truth Social, his own alternative social media platform, Trump said, “the sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country.”
Alexei Navalny, who was reported dead on Friday, served as an opposition leader in a state that disallows opposition and legitimate voting. Navalny garnered a massive following—more than 6 million YouTube followers, for starters, with at least one video viewed 130 million times—by doing legitimately good journalism digging into the kleptocratic, repressive Putin regime. Navalny offered normal Russians legitimate, well-sourced explanations for why they are so poor: their leaders consistently abdicate responsibility, choosing to enrich themselves. Their leaders are content with everyday people living in squalor and dysfunction, as long as they stay comfortable.
Running for office, and cutting through the state’s propaganda, made him so disfavored by the regime that he went into exile. Navalny returned to Russia in 2021 with full awareness that he would be locked up but a devout belief that he ought to continue his work domestically, displaying courage in the face of certain persecution. And sure enough, he was locked up, then sent to an even more remote prison camp called IK-3, in Kharp, which is in the Arctic Circle. His death there was reported last week, but the opposition movement will not die with him. “In killing Aleksei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul,” said his widow, Yulia, “but I have another half left—and it is telling me I have no right to give up.”
Trump, on the other hand, misrepresented his net worth to banks, defrauding lenders (who…still had a responsibility to do due diligence, a fact ignored in much mainstream media reporting of the case). “Trump claimed his apartment in Manhattan’s Trump Tower was 30,000 square feet, nearly three times its actual size,” writes Reason‘s Jacob Sullum. “He valued Mar-a-Lago, his golf resort in Palm Beach, based on the assumption that it could be sold for residential purposes, which the deed precluded.” But “[New York Attorney General Letitia] James was not able to identify any damages to lenders or insurers,” writes Sullum, and “the striking absence of any injury commensurate with the punishment lends credibility to Trump’s reflexive complaint that he is the victim of a partisan vendetta.”
Both things can be true, that Trump attracts politically motivated ire—which attorneys general and judges are wrong to indulge—and that he also did something wrong by inflating his net worth. But he’s a far cry from Navalny—Trump enjoys self-dealing more than fact-finding and truth-telling—and the way this went down, via the court system, where Trump had the right to defend himself, is a far cry from how “justice” gets dispensed in Russia—by Putin, in penal colonies, via murders of anyone whose beliefs threaten the man in charge.
Scenes from New York: Nobody asked for this.
What are we doing as a city?? pic.twitter.com/iaEBWGPMmh
— Cynical (@CynicalNYK) February 18, 2024
QUICK HITS
- “Clinical psychologists with the Department of Veterans Affairs faced retaliation and ostracization at work after they publicly opposed a gender-inclusion policy that allows men to access women’s medical spaces within the VA,” reports National Review.
- RFK Jr.’s “origin story makes this like Odysseus returning to the manor, stringing the bow, this is that iconic moment,” said Bret Weinstein on Joe Rogan’s podcast. If you say so, Bret.
- Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just announced a lawsuit against El Paso’s Annunciation House, an NGO in charge of a shelter network for migrants, for “facilitating illegal entry to the United States, alien harboring, human smuggling, and operating a stash house.” But going after charities that help migrants—whatever you think of the behavior they engaged in to get here—seems like a wrongheaded stunt.
- I do not think this is true or that there’s much evidence for it:
do you want a black pill?
like… a really really black pill?
George Carlin would be pro-censorship if he were alive today b/c he didn’t actually love free speech, he just fucking hated Christians
— PoIiMath (@politicalmath) February 20, 2024
- “The enormous contrast between [Alexei] Navalny’s civic courage and the corruption of [Vladimir] Putin’s regime will remain,” writes The Atlantic‘s Anne Applebaum. “Putin is fighting a bloody, lawless, unnecessary war, in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians have been killed or wounded, for no reason other than to serve his own egotistical vision. He is running a cowardly, micromanaged reelection campaign, one in which all real opponents are eliminated and the only candidate who gets airtime is himself. Instead of facing real questions or challenges, he meets tame propagandists such as Tucker Carlson, to whom he offers nothing more than lengthy, circular, and completely false versions of history.”
- Related: People were arrested for laying flowers in memory of Navalny.
People being arrested in Moscow for laying flowers for Navalny. pic.twitter.com/8YnLpHcB0s
— Eleanor Beardsley (@ElBeardsley) February 17, 2024
NEW: California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office says the state’s budget problem has grown by $15 Billion.
LAO says because of weak revenue collections so far, the state’s deficit could reach $73 Billion. https://t.co/oz83vntalh
— Ashley Zavala (@ZavalaA) February 20, 2024
- We live in the stupidest simulation:
I dunno if he qualifies as a “hero” lol this ain’t exactly Normandy https://t.co/C3fXsLcnkZ
— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) February 21, 2024
Liz Wolfe
Source link -
Navalny’s mother demands Putin release her son’s body
Earlier on Monday, Russian investigators informed her and Navalny’s lawyers that his body would be withheld an additional 14 days so it could be examined. Navalny spokesperson Kira Yarmysh suggested the handover could be delayed until after the upcoming presidential election, scheduled for March 15-17.
Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s widow, accused Putin of orchestrating her husband’s death. In a video address published on Monday she vowed to continue her husband’s fight against the Russian president.
“These are rude accusations of the head of the Russian state,” said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday. “I don’t care how the press secretary of the killer interprets my words,” Yulia Navalnaya responded on X (formerly Twitter).
Her account on the social media channel was later inaccessible for about an hour on Tuesday afternoon, but X restored it.
Demands for the release of Navalny’s body continue to grow, with over 70,000 Russians sending emails to the Russian Investigative Committee (SKR), calling on it to release the politician’s body to his family.
The SKR, similar to America’s FBI, is a federal agency that handles high-profile cases including corruption, homicide and terrorism, as well as cases involving the political opposition.
Sergey Goryashko
Source link -
Over 300 detained in Russia as country mourns the death of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s fiercest foe
Over 300 people were detained in Russia while paying tribute to opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died at a remote Arctic penal colony, a prominent rights group reported Sunday.
The sudden death of Navalny, 47, was a crushing blow to many Russians, who had pinned their hopes for the future on President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe. Navalny remained vocal in his unrelenting criticism of the Kremlin even after surviving a nerve agent poisoning and receiving multiple prison terms.
The news reverberated across the globe, with many world leaders blaming the death on Putin and his government. In an exchange with reporters shortly after leaving a Saturday church service, President Joe Biden reiterated his stance that Putin was ultimately to blame for Navalny’s death. “The fact of the matter is, Putin is responsible. Whether he ordered it, he’s responsible for the circumstance,” Biden said. “It’s a reflection of who he is. It cannot be tolerated.”
Other politicians took a more cautious stance. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said Sunday that he wouldn’t “jump to conclusions” over Navalny’s death. “If the death is under suspicion, we must first carry out an investigation to find out what the citizen (Navalny) died of,” Lula said in a press conference after returning from an African Union summit in Ethiopia on Sunday.
Meanwhile, Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, published a picture of the couple on Instagram Sunday in her first social media post since her husband’s death. The caption read simply: “I love you.”
Hundreds of people in dozens of Russian cities streamed to ad-hoc memorials and monuments to victims of political repression with flowers and candles on Friday and Saturday to pay tribute to the politician. In 39 cities, police detained 366 people by Sunday evening, according to the OVD-Info rights group that tracks political arrests and provides legal aid. Earlier in the weekend, the group reported 401 detentions in two days, but later updated the number and said that their count “may change both up and down over the next few days” as information is being verified.
More than 200 arrests were made in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, the group said. By Sunday evening, court officials in St. Petersburg reported rulings ordering 85 of those detained to serve from one to 12 days in jail.
Among those detained there was Grigory Mikhnov-Voitenko, a priest of the Apostolic Orthodox Church — a religious group independent of the Russian Orthodox Church — who announced plans on social media to hold a memorial service for Navalny and was arrested on Saturday morning outside his home. He was charged with organizing a rally and placed in a holding cell in a police precinct, but was later hospitalized with a stroke, OVD-Info reported.
Memorial events also took place in cities across the world.
In Berlin, members of the Russian activist group Pussy Riot held a demonstration outside of the Russian Embassy, holding banners that read “murderers” in English and Russian.
The group, which included Pussy Riot members Nadya Tolokonnikova and Lusya Shtein, as well as longtime Navalny ally Lyubov Sobol and former Russian state media journalist Marina Ovsyannikova, planned to march with the banner to the city’s Brandenburg Gate but were ultimately stopped by police.
Tolokonnikova told The Associated Press after the demonstration that such actions are meant to show “that we exist.”
“We show ourselves to each other and support each other, and show with this action that Russia still has a future, and the idea of a ‘beautiful Russia of the future’ hasn’t died,” she said, using a term Navalny has famously coined. “Right now (some are) saying that hope died together with Navalny. But it seems to me that with (the death of) Navalny it wasn’t the hope that died, but rather responsibility was born,” Tolokonnikova added.
Dozens of people in Romania’s capital of Bucharest also gathered outside the Russian Embassy on Sunday to pay tribute to the opposition leader.
Many lit candles and placed flowers next to a memorial portrait of Navalny, while several people brandished placards that read: “You don’t win free elections by murdering the opposition.” In Finland, a group of Russian residents gathered signatures for a petition proposing a name change for a park adjacent to the Russian Embassy in the capital, Helsinki, to Navalny Park in honor of the deceased opposition figure.
The news of Navalny’s death came a month before a presidential election in Russia that is widely expected to give Putin another six years in power.
Questions about the cause of death lingered, and it remained unclear when the authorities would release Navalny’s body. More than 29,000 people have submitted requests to the Russian government asking for the politician’s remains to be handed over to his relatives, OVD-Info said Sunday.
Navalny’s team said Saturday that the politician was “murdered” and accused the authorities of deliberately stalling the release of the body. Navalny’s mother and lawyers received contradictory information from various institutions they visited in their quest to retrieve the body.
“Everything there is covered with cameras in the colony. Every step he took was filmed from all angles all these years. Each employee has a video recorder. In two days, there has been not a single video leaked or published. There is no room for uncertainty here,” Navalny’s closest ally and strategist Leonid Volkov said Sunday.
A note handed to Navalny’s mother stated that he died at 2:17 p.m. Friday, according to Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s spokeswoman. Prison officials told his mother when she arrived at the penal colony Saturday that her son had perished from “sudden death syndrome,” Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service reported that Navalny felt sick after a walk Friday and became unconscious at the penal colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow. An ambulance arrived, but he couldn’t be revived, the service said, adding that the cause of death is still “being established.”
Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin. He has received three prison terms since his arrest, on a number of charges he has rejected as politically motivated.
After the last verdict that handed him a 19-year term, Navalny said he understood he was “serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime.”
Hours after Navalny’s death was reported, his widow made a dramatic appearance at the Munich Security Conference.
Navalnaya said she was unsure if she could believe the news from official Russian sources, “but if this is true, I want Putin and everyone around Putin, Putin’s friends, his government to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family and to my husband.” ___ Associated Press writers Katie Marie Davies in Manchester, England; Aamer Madhani, in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware; Stephen McGrath in Bucharest, Romania; and Jari Tanner, in Helsinki, Finland, contributed to this report.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Dasha Litvinova, Associated Press
Source link -
Navalny’s body found bruised in Arctic morgue
The bruised body of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, has been found in a hospital morgue in the Arctic, two days after he died in a nearby prison.
A paramedic told Russian opposition media that there were bruises on Navalny’s head and chest when his body was brought into the Salekhard District Clinical Hospital.
“Such injuries, described by those that saw them, appear from seizures,” the unnamed paramedic told the exiled Novaya Gazeta newspaper.
“The person convulses, they try to restrain him, and bruises appear. They also said that he also had a bruise on his chest. That is, they still tried to resuscitate him, and he died, most likely, from cardiac arrest.”
Russian prison officials said that Navalny died on Friday after falling ill during a short walk at IK-3, a notoriously brutal prison in the Russian Arctic.
Navalny’s mother failed to find his body at the morgue in Salekhard on Saturday and his colleagues at the Anti-Corruption Foundation accused the Russian authorities of a cover-up.
Western leaders have accused Putin of murdering Navalny – Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Reporters said no autopsy had yet been performed. They also said that two unscheduled flights from Moscow had landed on Saturday at Salekhard, possibly with autopsy specialists.
“The first jet landed at about six in the evening. It was met by cars of the Investigative Committee. And the second one arrived an hour and a half later,” Novaya Gazeta quoted an unnamed source as saying.
Russia observers said that state autopsy specialists may have been flown in from Moscow so that they can deliver a death certificate that pleases the Kremlin.
They also said that it was unusual to send the body of a dead prisoner from IK-3 to the hospital morgue, as Navalny’s had been, rather than the municipal one.
Navalny was Vladimir Putin’s most serious opponent. Western leaders have accused the Kremlin of murdering him. He was facing three decades in prison on various charges and had been transferred to IK-3 shortly before Christmas.
David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, said on Sunday that Putin should face war crimes charges for the death of Navalny.
“I’d like to see Putin in front of that special tribunal, held to account for all of his crimes, not just in Ukraine, but as we are seeing just in the last 48 hours in Russia as well,” he told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg programme on Sunday.
The sudden death of Navalny shocked liberal-minded Russians and triggered rare protests in Russia where demonstrations against the Kremlin are banned.
OVD-Info, a Russian activist group that monitors the Russian police, said that 400 people had been detained across Russia, mainly for laying flowers for Navalny at memorials to Soviet repression.
Reports from across Russia said that the plain-clothes security services, often wearing surgical masks, were following people who had laid flowers. Different police forces appeared to respond differently, with some blocking access to memorial sites and others tearing them down.
These were the biggest nationwide protests in Russia against the authorities since September 2022, when Putin ordered a mobilisation to recruit soldiers for his war in Ukraine.
Analysts said that the timing of Navalny’s death is important for the Kremlin which wants to use a presidential election next month to showcase support for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago.
Ben Noble and Nikolai Petrov, both Fellows on the Russia Programme at Chatham House, said that the death of Navalny had undermined Russia’s beleaguered, fragmented and exiled opposition.
“There is no obvious figure to take up the role that Navalny crafted for himself, of Vladimir Putin’s main opponent. There will be no Navalny 2.0 in the short-term, at least,” they said.
On Sunday Navalny’s wife, Yulia, posted a new picture of the two of them together on social media, writing “I love you”.
The post on Instagram showed a picture of the two together, their heads touching as they watched a performance of some kind.
Yulia Navalny posted this picture of the couple on Instagram Navalny’s death has had deep reverberations.
Donald Trump, who has been accused of withholding funding and weapons from Ukraine via Congress, came under fire on Sunday for his continued silence over Navalny’s death.
“The fact that he won’t acknowledge anything with Navalny – either he sides with Putin and thinks it’s cool that Putin killed one of his political opponents, or he just doesn’t think it’s that big of a deal,” Nikki Haley, his only Republican rival for the presidential nomination, said on ABC’s “This Week”.
“Either one of those is concerning. Either one of those is a problem,” added the Republican candidate, who is trailing far behind Mr Trump in the race for their party’s nomination.
Navalny’s still-unexplained death at 47 in a prison in Russia’s Arctic has drawn powerful condemnations from leaders around the world, starting with Joe Biden, the US president, who has squarely blamed Putin.
But Mr Trump, Mr Biden’s likely opponent in November, has yet to say a word about it at any of several public appearances since Navalny’s death was reported on Friday.
The Trump campaign, asked for comment, has directed reporters to a post on Mr Trump’s Truth Social platform that says: “America is no longer respected because we have an incompetent president who is weak and doesn’t understand what the world is thinking.”
The post does not mention Navalny, Russia or Putin.
The lack of comment comes days after Mr Trump stunned Western allies by saying he would “encourage” Russia to attack members of the Nato military alliance who had not met their financial obligations.
The suggestion cast a pall over a major global security conference in Munich, drawing a warning from Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary-General of Nato, that Mr Trump should not “undermine” the alliance’s security.
-
The GOP Has Crossed an Ominous Threshold on Foreign Policy
The long decline of the Republican Party’s internationalist wing may have reached a tipping point.
Since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016, he has championed an isolationist and nationalist agenda that is dubious of international alliances, scornful of free trade, and hostile to not only illegal but also legal immigration. His four years in the White House marked a shift in the party’s internal balance of power away from the internationalist perspective that had dominated every Republican presidency from Dwight Eisenhower through George W. Bush.
But even so, during Trump’s four years in office, a substantial remnant of traditionally internationalist Republicans in Congress and in the key national-security positions of his own administration resisted his efforts to unravel America’s traditional alliances.
Now though, evidence is rapidly accumulating on multiple fronts that the internal GOP resistance is crumbling to Trump’s determination to steer America away from its traditional role as a global leader.
In Congress, that shift was evident in last week’s widespread Senate and House Republican opposition to continued aid for Ukraine. The same movement is occurring among Republican voters, as a new Chicago Council on Global Affairs study demonstrates.
The study used the council’s annual national surveys of American attitudes about foreign affairs to examine the evolution of thinking within the GOP on key international issues. It divided Republicans into two roughly equal groups: those who said they held a very favorable view of Trump and the slightly larger group that viewed him either only somewhat favorably or unfavorably.
The analysis found that skepticism of international engagement—and in particular resistance to supporting Ukraine in its grueling war against Russia—is growing across the GOP. But it also found that the Republicans most sympathetic to Trump have moved most sharply away from support for an engaged American role. Now a clear majority of those Trump-favorable Republicans reject an active American role in world affairs, the study found.
“Trumpism is the dominant tendency in Republican foreign policy and it’s isolationist, it’s unilateralist, it’s amoral,” Richard Haass, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the director of policy planning at the State Department under George W. Bush, told me a few months ago.
That dynamic has big implications for a second Trump term. The growing tendency of Republican voters and elected officials alike to embrace Trump’s nationalist vision means that a reelected Trump would face much less internal opposition than he did in his first term if he moves to actually extract America from NATO, reduce the presence of U.S. troops in Europe and Asia, coddle Russian President Vladimir Putin, or impose sweeping tariffs on imports.
During Trump’s first term, “the party was not yet prepared to abandon internationalism and therefore opposed him,” Ivo Daalder, the chief executive officer of the Chicago Council, told me. “On Russia sanctions, on NATO, on other issues, he had people in the government who undermined him consistently. That won’t happen in a second term. In a second term, his views are clear: He will only appoint people who agree with them, and he has cowed the entire Republican Party.”
The erosion of GOP resistance to Trump’s approach has been dramatically underscored in just the past few days. Most Senate Republicans last week voted against the $95 billion aid package to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. After that bill passed the Senate anyway, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said that he would not bring it to a vote. All of this unfolded as an array of GOP leaders defended Trump for his remarks at a rally in South Carolina last weekend when he again expressed disdain for NATO and said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to members of the alliance who don’t spend enough on their own defense.
Many of the 22 GOP Republicans who voted for the aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan were veteran senators whose views about America’s international role were shaped under the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, or George W. Bush, long before Trump and his “America First” movement loomed so large in conservative politics. It was telling that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who was first elected to the Senate while Reagan was president in 1984, was the aid package’s most ardent GOP supporter.
By contrast, many of the 26 Republican senators who voted no were newer members, elected since Trump became the party’s leading man. Republican Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, one of Trump’s most ardent acolytes, delivered an impassioned speech, in which he portrayed the aid to Ukraine as the latest in a long series of catastrophic missteps by the internationalist forces in both parties that included the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Soon after the bill passed, first-term Republican Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri noted a stark generational contrast in the vote. “Nearly every Republican Senator under the age of 55 voted NO on this America Last bill,” Schmitt posted on social media. “15 out of 17 elected since 2018 voted NO[.] Things are changing just not fast enough.”
Just as revealing of the changing current in the party was the vote against the package by two GOP senators considered pillars of the party’s internationalist wing: Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Marco Rubio of Florida. Both also unequivocally defended Trump against criticism over his remarks at the South Carolina rally. That seemed to encourage Putin to attack NATO countries that have not met the alliance’s guidelines for spending on their own defense.
To many observers, the retreat on Ukraine from Rubio and Graham suggests that even many GOP officials who don’t share Trump’s neo-isolationist views have concluded that they must accommodate his perspective to survive in a party firmly under his thumb. “Lindsey Graham is a poster child for the hold that Donald Trump has over the Republican Party,” Wendy Sherman, the former deputy secretary of state under President Joe Biden, told me.
Republican elected officials still demonstrate flickers of resistance to Trump’s vision. In December, the Senate and the Republican-controlled House quietly included in the massive defense-authorization legislation a provision requiring any president to obtain congressional approval before withdrawing from NATO. The problem with that legislation is that a reelected Trump can undermine NATO without formally leaving it, said Daalder, who served as the U.S. ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama.
“You destroy NATO not by walking out but by just not doing anything,” Daalder told me. “If you go around saying ‘If you get attacked, we’ll send [only] a mine sweeper,’ Congress can’t do anything. Congress can declare war, but it can’t force the commander in chief to go to war.”
Nikki Haley, Trump’s former UN ambassador and his last remaining rival for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, has stoutly defended the traditional Reaganite view that America must provide global leadership to resist authoritarianism. She has denounced Trump’s comments on NATO, and she criticized him Friday for his repeated remarks over the years praising Putin following the reports that Alexei Navalny, the Russian leader’s chief domestic opponent, had died in prison. On Saturday, in a social-media post, she blamed Putin for Navalny’s death and pointedly challenged Trump to say whether he agreed.
Yet Haley has struggled to attract more than about one-third of the GOP electorate against Trump. Her foreign-policy agenda isn’t the principal reason for that ceiling. But Trump’s dominance in the race is evidence that, for most GOP voters, his praise for Putin and hostility to NATO are not disqualifying.
The Chicago Council study released helps explain why. Just since 2017, the share of Republicans most favorable toward Trump who say the U.S. should play an active role in global affairs has fallen in the council’s polling from about 70 percent to 40 percent. Likewise, only 40 percent of Trump Republicans support continued military aid to Ukraine, the study found. Only about that many of the Trump Republicans, the Council found, would support sending U.S. troops to fulfill the NATO treaty obligation to defend the Baltic countries if they were invaded by Russia.
By contrast, among the part of the GOP less favorable to Trump, majorities still support an active U.S. role in global affairs, sending troops to the Baltics if Russia invades, and continued military and economic aid to Ukraine. The “less-Trump” side of the GOP was also much less likely to agree that the U.S. should reduce its commitment to NATO or withdraw entirely.
Conversely, Trump Republicans were much more likely to say that they want the United States to be the dominant world leader, while two-thirds of the non-Trump Republicans wanted the U.S. to share leadership with other countries, the traditional internationalist view.
“Rather than the Biden administration’s heavily alliance-focused approach to U.S. foreign policy,” the report concludes, “Trump Republicans seem to prefer a United States role that is more independent, less cooperative, and more inclined to use military force to deal with the threats they see as the most pressing, such as China, Iran, and migration across the United States-Mexico border.”
The Chicago Council study found that the most significant demographic difference between these two groups was that the portion of the GOP more supportive of robust U.S. engagement with the world was much more likely to hold a four-year college degree. That suggests these foreign-policy concerns could join cultural disputes such as abortion and book bans as some of the issues Democrats use to try to pry away ordinarily Republican-leaning white-collar voters from Trump if he’s the GOP nominee.
Jeremy Rosner, a Democratic political consultant who worked on public outreach for the National Security Council under Bill Clinton, told me it’s highly unlikely that Trump’s specific views on NATO or maintaining the U.S. alliances with Japan or South Korea will become a decisive issue for many voters. More likely, Rosner said, is that Trump’s growingly militant language about NATO and other foreign-policy issues will reinforce voter concerns that a second Trump term would trigger too much chaos and disorder on many fronts.
“People don’t like crazy in foreign policy, and there’s a point at which the willingness to stand up to conventional wisdom or international pressure crosses the line from charmingly bold to frighteningly wacko,” Rosner told me. “To the extent he’s espousing things in the international realm that are way over the line, it will add to that mosaic picture [among voters] that he’s beyond the pale.”
Perhaps aware of that risk, many Republican elected officials supporting Trump have gone to great lengths to downplay the implications of his remarks criticizing NATO or praising Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. Rubio, for instance, insisted last week that he had “zero concern” that Trump would try to withdraw from NATO, because he did not do so as president.
Those assurances contrast with the repeated warnings from former national-security officials in both parties that Trump, having worn down the resistance in his party, is likely to do exactly what he says if reelected, at great risk to global stability. “He doesn’t understand the importance of the [NATO] alliance and how it’s critical to our security as well,” Trump’s former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on CNN last week. “I think it’s realistic that [if] he gets back in office, one of the first things he’ll do is cut off assistance to Ukraine if it isn’t already cut off, and then begin trying to withdraw troops and ultimately withdraw from NATO.”
A return to power for Trump would likely end the dominance of the internationalist wing that has held the upper hand in the GOP since Dwight Eisenhower. The bigger question is whether a second Trump term would also mean the effective end for the American-led system of alliances and international institutions that has underpinned the global order since World War II.
Ronald Brownstein
Source link -
More than 400 detained in Russia as country mourns the death of Alexey Navalny
More than 400 people were detained in Russia while paying tribute to opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who died at a remote Arctic penal colony, a prominent rights group reported.
The sudden death of Navalny, 47, was a crushing blow to many Russians, who had pinned their hopes for the future on President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe. Navalny remained vocal in his unrelenting criticism of the Kremlin even after surviving a nerve agent poisoning and receiving multiple prison terms.
The news reverberated across the globe, and hundreds of people in dozens of Russian cities streamed to ad-hoc memorials and monuments to victims of political repressions with flowers and candles on Friday and Saturday to pay a tribute to the politician. In over a dozen cities, police detained 401 people by Saturday night, according to the OVD-Info rights group that tracks political arrests and provides legal aid.
More than 200 arrests were made in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, the group said. Among those detained there was Grigory Mikhnov-Voitenko, a priest of the Apostolic Orthodox Church — a religious group independent of the Russian Orthodox Church — who announced plans on social media to hold a memorial service for Navalny and was arrested on Saturday morning outside his home. He was charged with organizing a rally and placed in a holding cell in a police precinct, but was later hospitalised with a stroke, OVD-Info reported.
Andrei Bok/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Courts in St. Petersburg have ordered 42 of those detained on Friday to serve from one to six days in jail, while nine others were fined, court officials said late on Saturday. In Moscow, at least six people were ordered to serve 15 days in jail, according to OVD-Info. One person was also jailed in the southern city of Krasnodar and two more in the city of Bryansk, the group said.
The news of Navalny’s death came a month before a presidential election in Russia that is widely expected to give Putin another six years in power. Questions about the cause of death lingered on Sunday, and it remained unclear when the authorities would release his body to his family.
Navalny’s team said Saturday that the politician was “murdered” and accused the authorities of deliberately stalling the release of the body, with Navalny’s mother and lawyers getting contradicting information from various institutions where they went in their quest to retrieve the body. “They’re driving us around in circles and covering their tracks,” Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said on Saturday.
“Everything there is covered with cameras in the colony. Every step he took was filmed from all angles all these years. Each employee has a video recorder. In two days, there has been not a single video leaked or published. There is no room for uncertainty here,” Navalny’s closest ally and strategist Leonid Volkov said Sunday.
A note handed to Navalny’s mother stated that he died at 2:17 p.m. Friday, according to Yarmysh. Prison officials told his mother when she arrived at the penal colony Saturday that her son had perished from “sudden death syndrome,” Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky
Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service reported that Navalny felt sick after a walk Friday and became unconscious at the penal colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow. An ambulance arrived, but he couldn’t be revived, the service said, adding that the cause of death is still “being established.”
Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin. He has received three prison terms since his arrest, on a number of charges he has rejected as politically motivated.
After the last verdict that handed him a 19-year term, Navalny said he understood he was “serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime.”
Hours after Navalny’s death was reported, his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, made a dramatic appearance at the Munich Security Conference.
She said she was unsure if she could believe the news from official Russian sources, “but if this is true, I want Putin and everyone around Putin, Putin’s friends, his government to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family and to my husband.”
-
2/16: CBS News Weekender
2/16: CBS News Weekender – CBS News
Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
-
“Putin is responsible” for imprisoned opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s death, Biden says
“Putin is responsible” for imprisoned opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s death, Biden says – CBS News
Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
