The extremism designation towards Mr. Navalny’s group, which a Moscow court docket will contemplate in a secret trial beginning subsequent week, wo
The extremism designation towards Mr. Navalny’s group, which a Moscow court docket will contemplate in a secret trial beginning subsequent week, would successfully drive Russia’s most potent opposition motion underground and will lead to yearslong jail phrases for pro-Navalny activists.
Mr. Navalny, in the meantime, stays on starvation strike in a Russian jail hospital, insisting he be allowed to be seen by medical doctors of his selecting. A lawyer who visited him, Vadim Kobzev, reported Tuesday that Mr. Navalny’s arms had been punctured and bruised after three nurses tried and failed six occasions to hook him as much as an intravenous drip.
“In the event you noticed me now, you’d giggle,” mentioned a letter from Mr. Navalny his crew posted to social media. “A skeleton strolling, swaying, in its cell.”
The White Home has warned the Russian authorities it “will probably be held accountable” if Mr. Navalny dies in jail. Western officers — and Mr. Navalny’s supporters and allies — reject the concept that the opposition chief is performing on one other nation’s behalf.
However within the Kremlin’s logic, Mr. Navalny is a menace to Russian statehood, doing the West’s bidding by undermining Mr. Putin. It’s Mr. Putin, Mr. Trenin mentioned, who’s conserving Russia steady by sustaining a stability between competing factions in Russia’s ruling elite.
“If Putin leaves, a battle between completely different teams breaks out, and Russia withdraws into itself, has no time for the remainder of the world and not will get in anybody’s method,” Mr. Trenin mentioned. “The West is, after all, utilizing Navalny, and can use him to create issues for Putin and, in the long term, assist Putin change into historical past in a technique or one other.”
How far Mr. Putin goes in putting again towards the West’s actual or imagined hostility continues to be an open query. Within the state information media, the temper music is dire. On the flagship weekly information present on the Rossiya 1 channel Sunday, the host Dmitri Kiselyov closed a section on Mr. Putin’s showdown with Mr. Biden by reminding viewers of Poseidon — a brand new weapon in Russia’s nuclear arsenal that Mr. Putin revealed three years in the past.