2024-02-22 08:31:53
They laid flowers, lit candles and mourned. Now some Navalny supporters are apparently threatened with being sent to the front.
The citizens who lit candles and laid flowers for the late Alexei Navalny in Moscow and other Russian cities last weekend were well aware that their protest would have consequences. It now becomes clear how drastic the consequences are for some of them.
After the Russian authorities initially took hundreds of mourners into custody, some of them now received orders to be called up to the front. This is what the newspaper “The Kyiv Independent” writes, among others. Accordingly, Russian Telegram channels reported on six Navalny sympathizers in St. Petersburg who had been sent the call-up. Because they had silently expressed their disbelief over the death of the 47-year-old opposition figure, they were taken away by police and interrogated.
Video | Numerous arrests at mourning rallies for Navalny
Before they were released from police custody, they were apparently given a draft notice. “We had to sign on the spot, they threatened to break our fingers if we didn’t do it,” one of the Navalny supporters wrote on Telegram. The men are now obliged to report for military service within a few days.
The practice is not new – and it is humiliating. In recent months, opponents of the Putin regime have been poorly trained and sent to the front in Ukraine with unclear operational orders. You are threatened with death in action. In a war that they were protesting against, that they don’t want. And which Alexei Navalny didn’t want either.
Several members of the Bundestag have now emphasized that Russia’s dictator is probably responsible for Navalny’s death. The Green Party leader Omid Nouripour said on Wednesday at a Current Hour in Parliament that Putin bore “at least political” responsibility for the murder of Navalny. The CDU foreign politician Norbert Röttgen was even clearer: “This murder was of course a matter for the boss. Putin is the perpetrator.”
Navalny died last week in custody in a Siberian camp under unclear circumstances. The federal government is demanding that Moscow fully clarify the case and has therefore summoned the Russian ambassador to the Foreign Office.
The longer in power, the crueler the methods
A spokesman for the human rights organization “Amnesty International” (AI) called the rigorous actions of the Russian authorities “cold-blooded”. “Russian authorities are using arbitrary arrests, excessive use of force and unlawful charges nationwide against those citizens who are simply trying to mourn Alexei Navalny,” the AI spokesman said. The action is a massive violation of the right to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly.
But these basic rights have long been suspended in Russia. Russia is increasingly turning into a totalitarian system, with an unscrupulous autocrat at the top who does not tolerate protest and cruelly persecutes those who dare to criticize. The Navalny case is just the latest example of this. Putin shows no mercy to his opponents, even at the beginning of his political career he got rid of his competitors in one way or another and the longer he stayed in power, the crueler the methods he used became.
Whether the murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, that of the opposition activist Boris Nemtzov, the agent Alexander Litvinenko, the attempted poisoning of Sergei Skripal, and finally the murder of Navalny. Or the draconian punishments obtained in show trials against dissidents such as the historian Vladimir Kara-Mursa, who had to spend 25 years in a prison camp for his criticism of the regime: The Putin regime now bears the distinct characteristics of a dictatorship in which the state controls all areas of life and none allows for other opinions. Anyone who tries to rebel against this system will be consistently persecuted.