CHICAGO (WLS) — A group rallied in downtown Chicago Saturday afternoon in support of Ukraine to mark two years since Russia’s invasion of the country.
“The war in Ukraine is still going on and its bloody and its horrible, so America can help Ukraine,” said Anastasia Voronovsky with Russian Americans for Democracy in Russia.
The rally, consisting of a coalition of Russian activists and people with ties to Ukraine, started at the Wrigley building on Michigan Avenue.
Dozens of demonstrators in the group then walked to the Consulate General of Ukraine.
Those at the rally said it’s important to support Ukraine and stop Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Putin is representative of all the Russian population. He represents just a small part. Unfortunately, right now he’s in power, but we need to defeat him,” said Elena Kaspirovich with Voice of Russia Chicago.
They called on the U.S. to continue to provide aid to the country as lawmakers struggle to pass a $60 billion military aid bill that’s blocked in the House of Representatives.
“Russia is a security threat to the world and if you don’t stop Putin in Ukraine, he’ll start another war in Eastern Europe and he will split NATO,” said demonstrator Roman Lifalov.
Right now, Putin’s army is making some gains as Ukraine’s military struggles with diminishing weapons stockpiles.
This comes as Ukrainian President Zelenskyy welcomed world leaders to Kyiv Saturday morning, including the prime ministers from Belgium and Canada, and the European Commission president.
People rallied across Europe also rallied Saturday in support of Ukraine, including in London, Berlin, and Stockholm.
Supporters at Chicago’s rally said they hope Europe will step up even more to help Ukraine hold on until more aid from the U.S. arrives.
BOMB blast detectives found suspected British parts in Russian drones fired at Ukraine.
Last night an MP called it a “deeply worrying development”.
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Bomb blast detectives found suspected British parts in Russian drones fired at UkraineCredit: Peter Jordan
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Earlier investigations suggested the engines were reverse-engineered in Iran from a British partsCredit: Peter Jordan
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Sun man Jerome Starkey and expert Andriy Kulchytskyi on a lab tripCredit: Peter Jordan
Ex-colonel Andriy Kulchytskyi, at the Kyiv Scientific Research Institute of Forensic Expertise, showed us a motor of an Iranian Shahed-M drone engraved with English writing.
He said he suspected some of the engines used to power the drone were made in England — but the manufacturer would not have known they could end up in a war zone.
Andriy said: “We thought the Shahed 131 engines were British, at the very beginning, but we haven’t made it official. England is a good friend.”
Earlier investigations have suggested the engines were reverse-engineered in Iran from a British part.
Former Armed Forces Minister Mark Francois said: “That these engines came from Britain is still unconfirmed but, if true, that’s a deeply worrying development.
“We have to assume our own intelligence agencies are investigating this, with a view to intervening rapidly, if required.”
Irish parts, US and Swiss computer chips, Sony optics on a spy drone and antennas made in Canada have also been found by the Kyiv lab.
Ukraine wipes out dozens MORE of Putin’s troops and Russian soldier fails to take out looming drone in explosive footage
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.
The joint plea comes as U.S. Republicans continue to hold out on a fresh funding agreement for the war-torn country, and as European capitals mull their options to constrain Moscow amid signs of fatigue two years on.
“This war is the biggest test of our generation,” the pair write. “A wholly unprovoked invasion. A blatant threat to our collective security. The clearest example of one country trying to extinguish the independence of another.
“Other adversaries are watching how we respond. Will we stand with Ukraine? Will we stand up to Putin’s naked aggression? The consequences of failure will not just be felt in Ukraine — they will remake the world as we know it.”
Cameron, a former British prime minister-turned-foreign-secretary, got short shrift earlier this month when he traveled to Washington to try to drum up support for Ukraine. U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, an ally of Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, told the U.K.’s top diplomat to “kiss my ass.”
But Cameron and Sikorski, who serves as foreign affairs point-man in Donald Tusk’s administration, quote 1996 American comedy film Jerry Maguire as they urge the U.S. and allies to “show me the money.”
“Britain and the EU have committed more funding to Ukraine, and we believe it is in the interest of America — and all of our allies — to do the same,” they write.
This year will be one of “recovery and preparation on both sides, like 1916 and 1941-42 in the last world wars,” said Marc Thys, who retired as Belgium’s deputy defense chief last year with the rank of lieutenant general.
Looking ahead
To assess prospects for the year ahead, POLITICO asked analysts, serving officers and military experts to give their view on the course of the war.
Nobody could provide a precise roadmap for 2024, but all agreed that three fundamentals will determine the trajectory of the coming months. First, this spring is about managing expectations as Ukraine won’t have the gear or the personnel to launch a significant counteroffensive; second, Russia, with the help of its allies, has secured artillery superiority and, together with relentless ground attacks, is pounding Ukrainian positions; and third, without Western air defense and long-range missiles as well as artillery shells, Kyiv will struggle to mount a credible, sustained defense.
“The year will be difficult, no one can predict from which direction Russia will go or whether we will advance this year,” said Taras Chmut, a Ukrainian military analyst and sergeant with the Naval Forces Marine Corps Reserve.
It’s clear, however, that Ukraine is on the back foot.
After many weeks of bloody fighting, Russia finally took the fortress city of Avdiivka this month. Without pausing for a breather, its military proceeded to launch attacks on other key Ukrainian strongpoints and logistical hubs: Robotyne in the region of Zaporizhzia, Kupiansk in Kharkiv, and Chasiv Yar in Donetsk region.
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Joshua Posaner, Veronika Melkozerova, Stuart Lau, Paul McLeary and Henry Donovan
Ksenia Karelina, an American with dual Russian citizenship has been arrested in Russia and charged with espionage and treason. Karelina’s detainment comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin cracks down on dissent in the wake of opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s death. CBS News foreign correspondent Imtiaz Tyab has more.
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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,” writesReason‘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.
“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,” reportsNational 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
“The enormous contrast between [Alexei] Navalny’s civic courage and the corruption of [Vladimir] Putin’s regime will remain,” writesThe 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.
On Feb. 17 at 9 a.m., we encountered significantly long security lines at Denver International Airport’s west side, leading to delays and frustrations for hundreds if not thousands of passengers. Lines snaked through common areas, adding to the inconvenience. Certainly not an upgraded experience.
While millions of dollars were supposedly invested in security upgrades, the recent experience suggests further improvements are needed. Are there staffing limitations contributing to the issue?
I urge the airport authorities and Denver City Council to investigate the root cause of these long lines. The city spent millions of dollars and obviously didn’t improve the security process. This makes our airport look like a third-rate facility. If the City of Denver can’t run the airport, hire professionals to do the job.
I am filled with gladness at the hiring of Troy Renck as a sports columnist and especially happy with the departure of Mark Kiszla, who was, in my opinion, a journalistic hack, a peddler of negativity, and a troll who unnecessarily attacked and demeaned the character and personality of Denver sports personalities. Most recently, his remarks about Broncos coach Sean Payton were odious, and he was unkind to quarterback Russell Wilson before he ever stepped on the field. This represents a move toward more balanced and positive reporting by The Post and I hope it continues.
Republicans in the U.S. House have abandoned the freedom fighters in Ukraine. When Ronald Reagan built the strongest military force in the world and stoutly supported freedom, Ukraine and other states were able to throw off Russian domination. Vladimir Putin is determined to rebuild that “evil empire,” and today’s Republican appeasers are happy to open the door for him.
Ukraine will not be the last country Putin enslaves. We can stop him now by supplying ammunition, or we can retreat and imperil our future.
Ray Harlan, Denver
Ronald Reagan would turn in his grave if he knew Donald Trump’s puppet, House Speaker Mike Johnson, is sitting on Ukraine aid. If Trump’s buddy, Putin, succeeds in ensnaring the Ukrainian people, who is next? We need to help Ukraine for their sake and for our own sake.
If Johnson continues to deny more weapons for Ukraine’s self-defense, then the next best thing is the Lend-Lease process we used in WWII, with the hope that someday Ukraine could pay us back.
I am so glad to hear the Rockies are going to stream their games this year at the low price of $99.99 for the entire season. That’s less than a dollar a loss!
The U.S. is expected to announce Friday new sanctions on Russia over the death of Alexey Navalny. Meanwhile, the mother of the Russian opposition leader is demanding Russian President Vladimir Putin to turn over her son’s body. CBS News contributor Samantha Vinograd, who formerly served as the DHS secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention, has more.
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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.
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.
U.S. President Joe Biden said “Ukrainian soldiers had to ration ammunition due to dwindling supplies as a result of congressional inaction, resulting in Russia’s first notable gains in months.” Biden called on lawmakers to approve $60 billion in aid to Ukraine that has been held up in the U.S. Congress.
The fall of Avdiivka is Russia’s biggest gain since capturing the city of Bakhmut in May 2023, and comes almost two years to the day since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s newly appointed military chief, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, said in a statement that he decided to withdraw forces from the embattled city to “avoid encirclement [by Russian troops] and preserve the lives and health of servicemen.”
Moscow said that some Ukrainian troops were still holed up in an industrial plant in the Avdiivka area, according to media reports. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu told the Kremlin that Russian forces were working to clear final pockets of resistance at the Avdiivka Coke and Chemical Plant, officials said in a statement.
Outnumbered Ukrainian defenders had battled a Russian assault around Avdiivka for four months in one of the most intense battles of the war. Zelenskyy said Russian forces had been suffering seven casualties for every Ukrainian death in Avdiivka, but even that death rate wasn’t stopping the attacks.
“Russia has only one specific advantage, complete devaluation of human life,” Zelenskyy said.
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.
Police in St. Petersburg detain people after laying flowers at the Memorial to Victims of Political Repression to honor Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Saturday, Feb. 17, 2024.
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.
A tribute to Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny at the Memorial to Victims of Political Repression in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Feb. 16, 2024.
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.”
PUTIN has resorted to recruiting Neo-Nazis and football hooligans to form his own private army – the ruthless Española group.
By gathering die-hard football fans across Russia, the group’s leader Orlov Stanislav – dubbed “The Spaniard” – has created a military unit that has fought in some of the most intense battles of the Ukraine war.
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The Española group was formed after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022Credit: AFP
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The group consists of football fans from different teams across RussiaCredit: ESPAÑOLA’S TELEGRAM CHANNEL
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The Spaniard, a well-known CSKA fan claimed he fought in the second Chechen WarCredit: East2West
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The group has fought in the most intense battles of the warCredit: AFP
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It is estimated to have around 1,000 members todayCredit: East2West
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The Española group are recruited through Telegram and then trained in sites near MoscowCredit: AFP
Ukraine‘s Defence Intelligence confirmed last month that Putin’s United Russia had officially granted the group the status of private military company (PMC).
The unit recruits football thugs, particularly those closer to the Nazi ideology, as well as civilians from poor parts of Russia and occupied territories.
As it gained popularity following the invasion of Ukraine, the battalion ended up fighting in major battles, including in Mariupol, Bakhmut, Soledar, and Vuhledar, according to Lucas Webber, co-founder of the Militant Wire research network.
With “hundreds” of fighters, the volunteer brigade “operates with some degree of independence” from the Russian Armed Forces, he said.
He told The Sun: “Española plays an important role in its outreach to Russia’s ultra/hooligan communities and in drawing recruits and support from these population segments for the war in Ukraine.
“Española appeals to a unique subset of Russia’s far-right militarist ecosystem and is distinct from the neo-Nazi Rusich organisation and the hard-line Orthodox Russian Imperialist Movement.
“Española is a volunteer brigade that operates with some degree of independence from the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.
“The group has historical ties to the Donetsk People’s Republic forces and has hundreds of fighters.
“Its propaganda describes how it is multifaceted and has artillery, anti-aircraft weapons, sniper teams, drone operators, and more.”
While various rogue mercenary groups have emerged since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Española has gradually started to form since the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The group – previously associated with the militant group Vostok Battalion – was operating mainly in the Russian-held region of Donetsk.
The group’s leader is Stanislav Orlov, 43, is a prominent figure among CSKA fans.
A radical member of the team’s ultras Red-Blue Warriors, Orlov claims to have joined the Russian army in 1999 and fought in the Second Chechen War.
He is said to have fought Donbas in 2014 alongside other ultras and earned his nickname “The Spaniard” thanks to his language skills as he was able to recruit foreign mercenaries.
Following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Orlov created the Española group as Putin was desperately trying to boost ranks in the frontline – with even ex-international footballer Andrey Solomatin, 47, signing up.
Webber said one of the most visible members of the group is former MMA fighter and Zenit hooligan Mikhail “Pitbull” Turkanov.
Turkanov – who has tattoos of the swastika – has been wounded in combat and has received awards from the Russian military.
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Orlov was a hardcore member of the CSKA ultras Red-Blue WarriorsCredit: East2West
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The recruits come from Dynamo, Lokomotiv, Spartak, Zenit and other hooligansCredit: AFP
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Stanislav Orlov also known as the Spaniard has been fighting in Donbas since 2014Credit: East2West
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Mikhail “Pitbull” Turkanov is also a member of the private army unitCredit: You Tube/FIGHT NIGHTS GLOBAL TV
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Other members are hooligans from Moscow-based football teamsCredit: AFP
Dr Stephen Hall Lecturer in Russian and Post-Soviet Politics at the University of Bath estimates the elite army unit has roughly 1,000 members and has been actively supported by Russia throughout the war.
He told The Sun: “Orlov probably has close links to someone in the Ministry of Defence.
“He’s been fighting since 2014 in the Donbas and he’s been there for a long time.
“He certainly has a past of being a football thug and he created the Española mercenary group in February 2022 just after the war began – so clearly someone had been preparing.
“They’ve relied heavily on football thugs across the Moscow-based football teams such as Dynamo, Lokomotiv and Spartak.
“They seem to be well prepared, well trained and well equipped by the Russian army.
“The Russian Army has given them a lot of support as they are the ones fighting against Azov the group that Russian state propaganda has stated they’re Nazis and the ones behind the Ukrainian regime.”
Dr Hall notes the “shady” group does not have a strong social media presence – unlike Wagner- but explains how they use Telegram to target recruits.
He added: “It’s quite a shady group whereas in Wagner they very ran their social media campaign Espanola doesn’t have a social media footprint.
“That always leads to the question of who is behind them, and who is protecting them and I say the Ministry of Defence.”
They seem to be well prepared, well trained and well equipped by the Russian army
Dr Stephen Hall
Telegram is widely used across Russia and is “a more effective way of getting the people you want to join,” he adds.
The potential candidates are interviewed through the platform and if successful they are taken for training in Moscow and St Petersburg.
Volunteers are offered a salary of £1,900 a month for at least six months at the frontline, according to Ukrainian intelligence.
Russia is also using “insurance payments” to lure civilians into battle – that can vary from £8,700 to £43,500 depending on the severity of the injury.
But Ukraine’s intelligence notes that for most civilians the first battle is a “one-way ticket” as they are used as cannon fodder.
The dead and those seriously injured are registered as “missing” so Russia avoids paying the families.
Russian ultras: The ‘Battle of Marseille’
The notorious Battle of Marseille happened during England’s opening match for Euro 2016.
The massive brawl erupted when Russian football fans attacked England supporters leaving many of them with serious injuries following a 1-1 draw.
14 England fans were left in hospital – including two with life-threatening injuries.
Dad-of-three Stewart Gray was left fighting for his life after being ambushed by hooligans.
His brother Duncan described the scenes as “like a war zone, the worst violence I have ever seen.”
Dr Hall told The Sun: “This is the “beauty” of East European football.
“As we know from 2016 when Russian and English football fans met one another in Marseille – it was definitely eye-opening what Russian fans were doing
“They had these football wars and battles so they were versed in that.”
Lucas Webber added: “Española both leverages its online propaganda apparatus and real-world domestic networks.
“It runs several channels on Telegram and VK. Its propaganda campaign also involves community initiatives and humanitarian work inside occupied regions in Ukraine to boost its profile and grow its ranks.
“One example is the founding of a youth football team in occupied Ukraine.
“This was apparent during the Wagner Group’s mutiny, for instance.”
“In its propaganda, Española presents a patriotic message of soccer ultras overcoming previous divisions to unite over a nationalistic cause.
“The group has sometimes voiced criticisms of the Russian government and military establishment.”
The Española group is one of a long list of units operating in Ukraine.
Apart from Wagner which was hit by the death of its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin last summer, other smaller paramilitary forces include Ptok, by energy giant Gazprom, Redut, the Patriot, the Orthodox Brotherhood, ENOT.
They all operate around the world and recruit all types of soldiers – seemingly with Russia’s support.
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Volunteers earn a salary of £1,900 – pictured volunteer Chernika (Blueberry)Credit: AFP
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Lucas Webber says the unit is equipped with weapons, sniper teams and drone operatorsCredit: Hudson.org
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The group also offers insurance payments for those injured on the battlefieldCredit: AFP
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Ukrainian intelligence suggests that volunteers are used as cannon fodder in battleCredit: AFP
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Dr Stephen Hall estimates the group has about 1,000 membersCredit: Linkedin
“This is Russia’s war against any rules at all,” Zelenskyy said, to applause from the auditorium, adding:” If you do not manage to act now, Putin will make the next years catastrophic for other countries as well.”
Zelenskyy’s appearance in Munich is part on an ongoing campaign to strengthen Kyiv’s ties with its Western allies. Before coming to Munich, he was in Berlin and Paris to sign security agreements, adding to a similar pact with the United Kingdom.
Although Russia has more ammunition, the war is also causing problems, forcing it to plead for help from ramshackle dictatorships. “For the first time in Russian history, Russia bowed to Iran and North Korea for help,” said Zelenskyy.
Despite problems like ammunition shortages and retreats from cities like Avdiivka, Zelenskyy insisted that Ukraine can prevail in the war against Russia, especially if its allies give it more arms and ammunition.
“We can get our land back, and Putin can lose,” he said, adding: “We should not be afraid of Putin‘s defeat and the destruction of his regime. It is his fate to lose — not the fate of the rules-based order to vanish.”
MUNICH – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned allies Saturday that an “artificial deficit” of weapons for his country risks giving Russia breathing space, hours after his military chief said he was withdrawing troops from the eastern city of Avdiivka.
Zelenskyy spoke to the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of security and foreign policy officials. Ukraine is back on the defensive against Russia in the nearly 2-year-old war, hindered by low ammunition supplies and a shortage of personnel.
“Ukrainians have proven that we can force Russia to retreat,” he said. “We can get our land back, and (Russian President Vladimir) Putin can lose, and this has already happened more than once on the battlefield.”
“Our actions are limited only by the sufficiency and length of range of our strength,” he added, pointing to the situation in Avdiivka. Ukrainian commander Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi said early Saturday that he was withdrawing troops from the city, where outnumbered defenders battled a Russian assault for four months, to avoid encirclement and save soldiers’ lives.
“Dear friends, unfortunately keeping Ukraine in the artificial deficit of weapons, particularly in deficit of artillery and long-range capabilities, allows Putin to adapt to the current intensity of the war,” Zelenskyy said. “The self-weakening of democracy over time undermines our joint results.”
The president said that the troop withdrawal was “a correct decision” and emphasized the priority of saving Ukrainian soldiers’ lives. He suggested that Russia has achieved little, adding that it has been attacking Avdiivka “with all the power that they had” since October and lost thousands of soldiers — “that’s what Russia has achieved. It’s a depletion of their army.”
“We’re just waiting for weapons that we’re short of,” he added, pointing to a lack of long-range weapons. “That’s why our weapon today is our soldiers, our people.”
Zelenskyy on Friday went to Berlin and Paris, where he signed long-term bilateral security agreements with Germany and France, following a similar agreement with Britain last month.
Ukraine’s European allies are appealing to the U.S. Congress to approve a package that includes aid for Ukraine, $60 billion that would go largely to U.S. defense entities to manufacture missiles, munitions and other military hardware for the battlefields in Ukraine. The package faces resistance from House Republicans.
Zelenskyy said Saturday that the U.S. “did a lot for us” and thanked Washington for bipartisan support. He said he planned to meet U.S. senators in Munich on Saturday. They “have to understand (that) only in unity we can win (against) Russia,” he said.
Asked whether it would be a good idea to invite former U.S. president and 2024 presidential hopeful Donald Trump to Kyiv, Zelenskyy replied: “I invited publicly, but it depends on his wishes.”
“If … he will come, I’m ready even to go with him to the front line,” he added.
Zelenskyy argued that “among us, there is no one for whom the ongoing war in Europe does not pose a threat.”
“Please do not ask Ukraine when the war will end,” he said. “Ask yourself why is Putin still able to continue it.”
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Moulson reported from Berlin.
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