 |
 |
|
|
Showing posts with label Vladimir Putin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vladimir Putin. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 25, 2021
I like Russians. I play chess with them every day. But they have a problem that needs to be fixed. Putin is a stupid fucking asshole and he needs to be killed.
Friday, April 23, 2021
Thanks Putin, you stupid fucking asshole.
|
|
|
|
Saturday, April 10, 2021
Vladimir Putin, the dictator of Russia, is a stupid fucking asshole and he needs to be killed.
The Washington Post
Putin is slowly murdering Alexei Navalny.
Opinion by the Editorial Board
April 9, 2021
RUSSIAN PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin’s regime is slowly but very intentionally murdering his leading political opponent, Alexei Navalny. Mr. Navalny, whom the Russian secret police unsuccessfully sought to kill last summer with a banned chemical weapon, is now being held in a prison camp known for its harsh conditions about 60 miles from Moscow. Since his arrival there in late February, he has been systematically deprived of sleep through hourly wakings and denied proper medical treatment for serious ailments, including herniated and bulging disks in his back and a respiratory ailment Mr. Navalny believes may be tuberculosis. Since last week, Mr. Navalny has been on a hunger strike to protest his treatment; his lawyers say his weight is down 30 pounds and is falling by two pounds a day.
Why can we assume that Mr. Putin intends to kill Mr. Navalny? First, because he already tried — a fact thoroughly documented by Mr. Navalny and a group of private investigators during his five-month convalescence in Germany. Second, because the dissident now poses an even greater threat to the regime than he did before the poisoning. His courageous return to the country in January and immediate arrest on trumped-up charges triggered some of the largest protest demonstrations Russia has seen in Mr. Putin’s two decades of rule.
We also know that the Kremlin has done this before. In 2009, Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who had uncovered a massive fraud perpetrated by a group of senior government officials, died in prison following gross mistreatment like that Mr. Navalny is enduring. The Western businessman who employed him, William Browder, has spent the past decade seeking justice in the case, including by inducing the United States and other Western governments to enact laws providing for the sanction of all those involved in Mr. Magnitsky’s case as well as in other human rights violations. Mr. Browder calls what is happening to Mr. Navalny a “slow-motion assassination”; Amnesty International says the regime is creating “a situation of a slow death and seeking to hide what is happening.”
Mr. Navalny’s supporters are taking great risks to focus attention on his case. On Tuesday, nine of his supporters, including several doctors, traveled to his prison camp to demand that he receive proper medical treatment; they were arrested and later sentenced to a week in prison. Meanwhile, more than 350,000 Russians have pledged to take part in public demonstrations for Mr. Navalny, even though they risk arrest or assault by security forces. Organizers say the protests will be scheduled when half a million have signed up.
The United States and other Western governments have taken some steps to support Mr. Navalny, including sanctions against officials and entities involved in his poisoning and imprisonment. But if his life is to be saved, much stronger action is needed. Mr. Browder argues that the right targets are the 35 oligarchs whom Mr. Navalny himself has identified as the holders and protectors of Mr. Putin’s massive private fortune. Start freezing assets and applying visa bans to those tycoons and their families, he advises, and keep going until Mr. Navalny is released. That sounds like a strategy that has a chance of working; if it doesn’t, it will be a head start on what must be the consequences if the Kremlin’s creeping murder plot goes forward.
Putin is slowly murdering Alexei Navalny.
Opinion by the Editorial Board
April 9, 2021
RUSSIAN PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin’s regime is slowly but very intentionally murdering his leading political opponent, Alexei Navalny. Mr. Navalny, whom the Russian secret police unsuccessfully sought to kill last summer with a banned chemical weapon, is now being held in a prison camp known for its harsh conditions about 60 miles from Moscow. Since his arrival there in late February, he has been systematically deprived of sleep through hourly wakings and denied proper medical treatment for serious ailments, including herniated and bulging disks in his back and a respiratory ailment Mr. Navalny believes may be tuberculosis. Since last week, Mr. Navalny has been on a hunger strike to protest his treatment; his lawyers say his weight is down 30 pounds and is falling by two pounds a day.
Why can we assume that Mr. Putin intends to kill Mr. Navalny? First, because he already tried — a fact thoroughly documented by Mr. Navalny and a group of private investigators during his five-month convalescence in Germany. Second, because the dissident now poses an even greater threat to the regime than he did before the poisoning. His courageous return to the country in January and immediate arrest on trumped-up charges triggered some of the largest protest demonstrations Russia has seen in Mr. Putin’s two decades of rule.
We also know that the Kremlin has done this before. In 2009, Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who had uncovered a massive fraud perpetrated by a group of senior government officials, died in prison following gross mistreatment like that Mr. Navalny is enduring. The Western businessman who employed him, William Browder, has spent the past decade seeking justice in the case, including by inducing the United States and other Western governments to enact laws providing for the sanction of all those involved in Mr. Magnitsky’s case as well as in other human rights violations. Mr. Browder calls what is happening to Mr. Navalny a “slow-motion assassination”; Amnesty International says the regime is creating “a situation of a slow death and seeking to hide what is happening.”
Mr. Navalny’s supporters are taking great risks to focus attention on his case. On Tuesday, nine of his supporters, including several doctors, traveled to his prison camp to demand that he receive proper medical treatment; they were arrested and later sentenced to a week in prison. Meanwhile, more than 350,000 Russians have pledged to take part in public demonstrations for Mr. Navalny, even though they risk arrest or assault by security forces. Organizers say the protests will be scheduled when half a million have signed up.
The United States and other Western governments have taken some steps to support Mr. Navalny, including sanctions against officials and entities involved in his poisoning and imprisonment. But if his life is to be saved, much stronger action is needed. Mr. Browder argues that the right targets are the 35 oligarchs whom Mr. Navalny himself has identified as the holders and protectors of Mr. Putin’s massive private fortune. Start freezing assets and applying visa bans to those tycoons and their families, he advises, and keep going until Mr. Navalny is released. That sounds like a strategy that has a chance of working; if it doesn’t, it will be a head start on what must be the consequences if the Kremlin’s creeping murder plot goes forward.
Monday, March 29, 2021
Russia
 March 29, 2021 |
 | By Claire Moses |
Good morning. Our Moscow bureau chief, Anton Troianovski, talks to us about Aleksei Navalny’s political machine in Russia. |
|
Navalny vs. Putin |
Aleksei Navalny, the fiercest political opponent of Vladimir Putin, is in prison. He returned to Russia in January after recovering from a near-deadly poisoning in Siberia. After the police arrested him on charges that were widely seen as politically motivated, a wave of pro-Navalny protests swept the country. |
For today’s newsletter, Anton Troianovski, The Times’s Moscow bureau chief, catches us up on what’s going on in Russia. Our exchange has been edited for length. |
Claire: Let’s start with the basics. Who is Aleksei Navalny, and why were there protests in Russia recently? |
Anton: Navalny is Putin’s most prominent and best organized domestic critic. When Navalny tried to run for president in 2018, the Kremlin didn’t let him. But he opened offices nationwide and campaigned for people to boycott the election. And it’s that kind of organizing that really matters. He and his team produce YouTube videos that get millions of views. He can mobilize people. The question, now that Navalny is in prison, is whether he can continue to do that. |
What’s the basis of Navalny’s opposition? |
He says that Putin is a thief, that his party is corrupt and that regular Russians are suffering every day because of that: bad roads, crumbling hospitals. For Navalny, it’s all about fighting corruption and about creating a more fair and free society. |
What’s the current situation? |
Navalny is in prison, and his lawyers are saying his health is in decline. This past year also saw the advent of a new phase: The arrests and repression surrounding the Navalny protests were the most severe that Russia has seen under Putin. |
When Putin took power in 2000, Russia was essentially a democracy. Putin has been trying to stifle dissent more and more aggressively, but he is far from stamping it out. Young people, for instance, now tend to get their news from the internet, rather than from state TV. They are opposing Putin in extraordinary numbers — only 31 percent want to see him remain president, according to one recent poll. |
This month the Russian government said it was slowing access to Twitter. Why does that matter? |
Putin built his image and his power by controlling TV — that has always been his biggest weapon — but the internet remains essentially free in Russia. This is an experiment to see what Putin can do to squash those remaining freedoms that Russians have. |
Tell us about elections in Russia. |
Elections are not free and fair in Russia. For example, the ruling party gets almost infinite access to TV airwaves, and the opposition gets almost none. But they’re not 100 percent rigged, either. And that’s the loophole that the Navalny people — and other Putin opponents — are trying to use. There have been opposition candidates on the ballot, because this illusion of democracy matters to Putin. The whole concept that Putin presents is that he is the president because the majority of Russians want him to be. |
What’s next? |
Navalny’s team has promised to organize another nationwide protest once 500,000 people sign up for it; they haven’t given a date. After that, the next big moment could be around the parliamentary elections in September. That’s when Putin opponents of all stripes will really try to organize opposition to the Kremlin. The opposition is going to find ways to keep the pressure on, and the Kremlin will find means of fighting back even harder. |
Tuesday, February 2, 2021
Russia needs to get rid of Vladimir Putin.
New York Times
Russian Activist Navalny Sentenced to More Than 2 Years in Prison
A Moscow court found that President Vladimir Putin’s loudest critic violated his parole. “You cannot lock up the whole country,” Aleksei Navalny told the court after large protests in support of him recently.
By Anton Troianovski
February 2, 2021
MOSCOW — A Russian court sentenced Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, to more than two years in prison on Tuesday, a decision likely to send him for a lengthy term in a far-flung penal colony for the first time.
Tuesday’s sentencing represented a pivotal moment for President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia. Mr. Navalny, one of the main challengers of the Kremlin, has inspired some of the biggest street protests of the Putin era and repeatedly embarrassed the president and his close allies with investigative reports about corruption that were viewed many millions of times on YouTube.
The authorities previously tried to contain him with short jail terms of a few weeks to avoid making Mr. Navalny into a political martyr. In August, Western officials say, Russian agents tried to assassinate Mr. Navalny by poisoning him. Now, the decision to send him to prison removes his direct voice from Russia’s political landscape, but it could energize his supporters and further rally Russian opposition to Mr. Putin around the figure of Mr. Navalny.
Mr. Navalny, 44, may seek to appeal the ruling, which held that he repeatedly violated parole by failing to report properly to the authorities in person — in some cases while he was in Germany recovering from being poisoned, and in others because he did so on the wrong day of the week. But the Russian authorities have signaled that they will not be swayed by public pressure to release Mr. Navalny. They have put several of his top allies under house arrest, and on Sunday they deployed a huge police force in cities across Russia to quell protests over the past couple of weeks calling for his freedom
“Hundreds of thousands cannot be locked up,” Mr. Navalny said during the hearing before he was sentenced. “I really hope that more and more people will recognize this. And when they recognize this — and that moment will come — all of this will fall apart, because you cannot lock up the whole country.”
In anticipation of more protests on Tuesday, a heavy presence of riot police officers in body armor, camouflage and black helmets cordoned off the Moscow neighborhood surrounding the courthouse. Officers stood in front of entrances to the nearest subway station and checked people’s documents, and parking lots around the station were filled with police vans carrying reinforcements. The police detained at least 237 people, according to the activist group OVD-Info.
The court ruled in favor of the prosecution’s accusation that Mr. Navalny had violated parole on a three-and-a-half-year suspended prison sentence that he received in 2014. He and his brother were convicted of stealing about $500,000 from two companies, a conviction that the European Court of Human Rights called “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable.”
The judge, Natalia Repnikova, accepted the prosecution’s request to convert Mr. Navalny’s suspended sentence to a real prison term. About nine months’ house arrest served by Mr. Navalny related to the case will be subtracted from the sentence, meaning that he was effectively sentenced to just over two-and-a-half years in prison.
Under the terms of his earlier sentence, the authorities say Mr. Navalny was supposed to check in with the prison authorities at least twice a month. But prosecutors charge that he repeatedly failed to do so last year, including after being released from a Berlin hospital in September while recovering from an assassination attempt by poisoning.
“Despite the preventive and explanatory measures taken with Navalny, he repeatedly failed to appear at the inspection for registration for unacceptable reasons,” Ms. Repnikova, said in her ruling, accepting the prosecution’s contention that Mr. Navalny did not fulfill the terms of his parole.
The ruling brought swift international condemnation. The Council of Europe, a human-rights body that counts Russia as a member, said it “defies all credibility and contravenes Russia’s international human rights obligations.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States was “deeply concerned” and called for Mr. Navalny’s “immediate and unconditional release.” President Emmanuel Macron of France said imprisoning Mr. Navalny was “unacceptable” because “political disagreement is never a crime.”
Toward the end of the hearing, Mr. Navalny delivered a fiery speech to the courtroom in which he blamed Mr. Putin for trying to lock him away. He said the Russian president was angry that Mr. Navalny had survived after being poisoned with the military-grade nerve agent Novichok in August, in what he and Western officials have described as a state assassination attempt.
Mr. Navalny has accused Russia’s domestic intelligence agency of trying to kill him on orders from Mr. Putin by applying Novichok to the opposition leader’s underwear. The Kremlin has denied involvement in the poisoning.
“His main resentment against me now is that he will go down in history as a poisoner,” Mr. Navalny said of Mr. Putin. “There was Alexander the Liberator and Yaroslav the Wise. Now we’ll have Vladimir the Poisoner of Underpants.”
Mr. Navalny’s associates have said that only street protests can force the Kremlin to change course, and tens of thousands of people have rallied for Mr. Navalny each of the last two weekends in cities across Russia.
Mr. Navalny sparred repeatedly with the prosecutor, Yekaterina Frolova, calling her “an honorable daughter of the regime,” but then adding, “You lie in every word.” He said he was being prosecuted to scare millions of other Russians out of rising up against Mr. Putin.
The choreography of the hearing appeared designed to portray due process being granted to Mr. Navalny. Officials moved the hearing from a courtroom outside Moscow to a bigger one in the city — in order, they said, to allow more journalists to be present.
Two sculpted judicial scales flanked the Russian double-headed eagle above the robed judge, Ms. Repnikova, who peppered the prosecution with pointed questions, probing its arguments. Mr. Navalny was allowed to give his speech, and criticize the judge and prosecutor, with few interruptions. But journalists were barred from filming the proceedings or taking pictures.
The prosecution’s case for sending Mr. Navalny to prison relied heavily on technicalities. A prison service official, Aleksandr Yermolin, read in a soft voice from a stack of papers detailing Mr. Navalny’s alleged parole violations. The prosecution said the violations had begun before Mr. Navalny’s poisoning last August.
Mr. Navalny and his lawyers, in a lengthy back-and-forth with the prosecution, insisted that they had properly notified parole officials of his inability to report in person because of his poisoning. Mr. Navalny noted that even Mr. Putin had publicly referred last year to Mr. Navalny’s being in treatment in Germany.
Mr. Navalny was confined to house arrest for much of 2014 and served repeated jail terms of several weeks at a time. Until now, though, he has never served a lengthy prison sentence.
Analysts say the Kremlin’s calculus has long been that Mr. Navalny could be more of a liability behind bars — as Russia’s most prominent political prisoner — than walking free as an often-controversial opposition activist.
That thinking appears to have changed as the Russian public’s frustration with Mr. Putin has increased, along with Mr. Navalny’s prominence.
After his poisoning, Mr. Navalny was airlifted in a coma to Berlin, where he recovered. He returned to Moscow last month, even though the Russian authorities made it clear that he would face years in prison.
He was jailed upon arrival, after which his team released a report by Mr. Navalny that described a purported secret palace built for Mr. Putin. The report has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube, energized the pro-Navalny protests and underscored the opposition leader’s ability to reach a huge audience on Russia’s mostly free internet.
The Kremlin on Tuesday again sought to minimize the significance of Mr. Navalny’s case, issuing a veiled warning to the European Union’s top foreign policy official, Josep Borrell Fontelles, who plans to visit Moscow this week.
“We hope that there will not be something as silly as tying the future of Russian-European relations to the case of this pretrial detention center inhabitant,” the Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov said, according to the Tass state news agency.
Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.
Anton Troianovski has been a Moscow correspondent for The New York Times since September 2019. He was previously Moscow bureau chief of The Washington Post and spent nine years with The Wall Street Journal in Berlin and New York. @antontroian
Russian Activist Navalny Sentenced to More Than 2 Years in Prison
A Moscow court found that President Vladimir Putin’s loudest critic violated his parole. “You cannot lock up the whole country,” Aleksei Navalny told the court after large protests in support of him recently.
By Anton Troianovski
February 2, 2021
MOSCOW — A Russian court sentenced Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, to more than two years in prison on Tuesday, a decision likely to send him for a lengthy term in a far-flung penal colony for the first time.
Tuesday’s sentencing represented a pivotal moment for President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia. Mr. Navalny, one of the main challengers of the Kremlin, has inspired some of the biggest street protests of the Putin era and repeatedly embarrassed the president and his close allies with investigative reports about corruption that were viewed many millions of times on YouTube.
The authorities previously tried to contain him with short jail terms of a few weeks to avoid making Mr. Navalny into a political martyr. In August, Western officials say, Russian agents tried to assassinate Mr. Navalny by poisoning him. Now, the decision to send him to prison removes his direct voice from Russia’s political landscape, but it could energize his supporters and further rally Russian opposition to Mr. Putin around the figure of Mr. Navalny.
Mr. Navalny, 44, may seek to appeal the ruling, which held that he repeatedly violated parole by failing to report properly to the authorities in person — in some cases while he was in Germany recovering from being poisoned, and in others because he did so on the wrong day of the week. But the Russian authorities have signaled that they will not be swayed by public pressure to release Mr. Navalny. They have put several of his top allies under house arrest, and on Sunday they deployed a huge police force in cities across Russia to quell protests over the past couple of weeks calling for his freedom
“Hundreds of thousands cannot be locked up,” Mr. Navalny said during the hearing before he was sentenced. “I really hope that more and more people will recognize this. And when they recognize this — and that moment will come — all of this will fall apart, because you cannot lock up the whole country.”
In anticipation of more protests on Tuesday, a heavy presence of riot police officers in body armor, camouflage and black helmets cordoned off the Moscow neighborhood surrounding the courthouse. Officers stood in front of entrances to the nearest subway station and checked people’s documents, and parking lots around the station were filled with police vans carrying reinforcements. The police detained at least 237 people, according to the activist group OVD-Info.
The court ruled in favor of the prosecution’s accusation that Mr. Navalny had violated parole on a three-and-a-half-year suspended prison sentence that he received in 2014. He and his brother were convicted of stealing about $500,000 from two companies, a conviction that the European Court of Human Rights called “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable.”
The judge, Natalia Repnikova, accepted the prosecution’s request to convert Mr. Navalny’s suspended sentence to a real prison term. About nine months’ house arrest served by Mr. Navalny related to the case will be subtracted from the sentence, meaning that he was effectively sentenced to just over two-and-a-half years in prison.
Under the terms of his earlier sentence, the authorities say Mr. Navalny was supposed to check in with the prison authorities at least twice a month. But prosecutors charge that he repeatedly failed to do so last year, including after being released from a Berlin hospital in September while recovering from an assassination attempt by poisoning.
“Despite the preventive and explanatory measures taken with Navalny, he repeatedly failed to appear at the inspection for registration for unacceptable reasons,” Ms. Repnikova, said in her ruling, accepting the prosecution’s contention that Mr. Navalny did not fulfill the terms of his parole.
The ruling brought swift international condemnation. The Council of Europe, a human-rights body that counts Russia as a member, said it “defies all credibility and contravenes Russia’s international human rights obligations.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States was “deeply concerned” and called for Mr. Navalny’s “immediate and unconditional release.” President Emmanuel Macron of France said imprisoning Mr. Navalny was “unacceptable” because “political disagreement is never a crime.”
Toward the end of the hearing, Mr. Navalny delivered a fiery speech to the courtroom in which he blamed Mr. Putin for trying to lock him away. He said the Russian president was angry that Mr. Navalny had survived after being poisoned with the military-grade nerve agent Novichok in August, in what he and Western officials have described as a state assassination attempt.
Mr. Navalny has accused Russia’s domestic intelligence agency of trying to kill him on orders from Mr. Putin by applying Novichok to the opposition leader’s underwear. The Kremlin has denied involvement in the poisoning.
“His main resentment against me now is that he will go down in history as a poisoner,” Mr. Navalny said of Mr. Putin. “There was Alexander the Liberator and Yaroslav the Wise. Now we’ll have Vladimir the Poisoner of Underpants.”
Mr. Navalny’s associates have said that only street protests can force the Kremlin to change course, and tens of thousands of people have rallied for Mr. Navalny each of the last two weekends in cities across Russia.
Mr. Navalny sparred repeatedly with the prosecutor, Yekaterina Frolova, calling her “an honorable daughter of the regime,” but then adding, “You lie in every word.” He said he was being prosecuted to scare millions of other Russians out of rising up against Mr. Putin.
The choreography of the hearing appeared designed to portray due process being granted to Mr. Navalny. Officials moved the hearing from a courtroom outside Moscow to a bigger one in the city — in order, they said, to allow more journalists to be present.
Two sculpted judicial scales flanked the Russian double-headed eagle above the robed judge, Ms. Repnikova, who peppered the prosecution with pointed questions, probing its arguments. Mr. Navalny was allowed to give his speech, and criticize the judge and prosecutor, with few interruptions. But journalists were barred from filming the proceedings or taking pictures.
The prosecution’s case for sending Mr. Navalny to prison relied heavily on technicalities. A prison service official, Aleksandr Yermolin, read in a soft voice from a stack of papers detailing Mr. Navalny’s alleged parole violations. The prosecution said the violations had begun before Mr. Navalny’s poisoning last August.
Mr. Navalny and his lawyers, in a lengthy back-and-forth with the prosecution, insisted that they had properly notified parole officials of his inability to report in person because of his poisoning. Mr. Navalny noted that even Mr. Putin had publicly referred last year to Mr. Navalny’s being in treatment in Germany.
Mr. Navalny was confined to house arrest for much of 2014 and served repeated jail terms of several weeks at a time. Until now, though, he has never served a lengthy prison sentence.
Analysts say the Kremlin’s calculus has long been that Mr. Navalny could be more of a liability behind bars — as Russia’s most prominent political prisoner — than walking free as an often-controversial opposition activist.
That thinking appears to have changed as the Russian public’s frustration with Mr. Putin has increased, along with Mr. Navalny’s prominence.
After his poisoning, Mr. Navalny was airlifted in a coma to Berlin, where he recovered. He returned to Moscow last month, even though the Russian authorities made it clear that he would face years in prison.
He was jailed upon arrival, after which his team released a report by Mr. Navalny that described a purported secret palace built for Mr. Putin. The report has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube, energized the pro-Navalny protests and underscored the opposition leader’s ability to reach a huge audience on Russia’s mostly free internet.
The Kremlin on Tuesday again sought to minimize the significance of Mr. Navalny’s case, issuing a veiled warning to the European Union’s top foreign policy official, Josep Borrell Fontelles, who plans to visit Moscow this week.
“We hope that there will not be something as silly as tying the future of Russian-European relations to the case of this pretrial detention center inhabitant,” the Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov said, according to the Tass state news agency.
Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.
Anton Troianovski has been a Moscow correspondent for The New York Times since September 2019. He was previously Moscow bureau chief of The Washington Post and spent nine years with The Wall Street Journal in Berlin and New York. @antontroian
Tuesday, January 26, 2021
Biden and Putin had a phone conversation. My comment about this: I like Russians. I play chess with them every day. But their dictator is a stupid fucking asshole. For example, "reports of Russian bounties on U.S. troops in Afghanistan." What a fucking asshole.
|
|
|
|
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)