The people who let Putin get away with persecuting Navalny

The people who let Putin get away with persecuting Navalny

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By Garry Kasparov (CNN) The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was sentenced in Moscow on Tuesday to two and a half years of prison. His supposed crime was a probation violation committed while he was in a coma in Berlin after being poisoned by the same state security forces that have locked him up again. It's pointless to talk about the details of the case. Not when Vladimir Putin is the only real judge, jury and, from time to time, executioner (which he denies). The dictator Putin has up till now avoided imprisoning Navalny for very long, although he has targeted Navalny's family, as any mafia boss would.

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The point of this unprecedented crackdown is to reassure Putin's investors at home and abroad that everything is fine, that he is willing to crush the entire country under his KGB boot in order to keep the oil, gas and cash flowing. He's not afraid of scaring off his cronies and foreign partners or outraging his adversaries, because they have always come running back to him after each invasion, each assassination, each rigged election. Now with Navalny, the free world's political and business leaders have another chance to show newfound resolve — or continued cowardice. The initial condemnations of Navalny's sentencing from the United States, Canada and many European nations would be heartening if they did not sound nearly identical to those issued when he was poisoned last August. (There was, unsurprisingly, a sharp contrast between the rapid condemnation issued by President Joe Biden's Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and the Trump State Department's belated and feeble acknowledgment.) Putin has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to beef up internal security forces during his 20 years in power, and most of that money came from rich western nations, especially before Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2014 finally led to scattered sanctions — too little, too late. Such deals with the devil inevitably backfire. As I warned in 2007, with every act of appeasement Putin has gone from a local problem to a regional menace to a global threat. Germany thinks it can criticize Russia on human rights while going ahead with the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline that will fill Putin's pockets with cash and his military's guns with bullets. Those bullets are used against Europeans in Ukraine and, God forbid, against Russians in the streets. Europe thinks it can separate business and politics, but to Putin it's all the same: business.

Like Trump, Putin is all about the money. But unlike Trump, Putin isn't an incompetent boob. He gets away with this because the West is more than willing to do business with him.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/3jgJw4S