Michael Ramirez Essay: Navalny's Courage 02-20-24
From America's Premier Editorial Cartoonist
Navalny’s Courage
By Michael P. Ramirez, February 20, 2024
The world is outraged over the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an Artic prison last week. Navalny died while serving a trumped-up 19-year prison sentence in the harshest Russian gulag in the bitter cold of Siberia.
Navalny exemplified courage.
He was a symbol of hope, a crusader against corruption, and a champion for free elections. Navalny tried to liberate his country from Putin’s authoritarian grip. He promoted nonviolent change in the vein of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.
Alexei Navalny was willing to sacrifice his life for his country. Vladimir Putin made sure he did.
Putin and his operatives had tried many times to silence him.
Navalny was attacked with chemicals twice, first in 2017 and then again in 2019. In the 2017 attack, he lost 80% of his sight from having a green dye with a corrosive agent thrown in his face.
He remained defiant.
Putin tried to assassinate him in 2020. Navalny was on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow when he fell violently ill. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk. He fell into a coma and was put on a ventilator. The hospital initially said they suspected poisoning. Later, the deputy chief doctor denied that and said it was just “one of many” scenarios.
When his wife arrived, authorities refused to let her visit him. Navalny’s personal physician, Anastasia Vasilieva, was not allowed to see him while he was in Omsk. Suspecting authorities were trying to cover up a crime, his team arranged for him to be transferred by chartered plane to a hospital in Berlin.
Hospital authorities delayed the transfer stating he was too sick and unstable to be transported. After German doctors intervened and deemed him fit to fly, they relented, and he was put on Bombardier Challenger 604, funded by Cinema for Peace, and flown to Berlin.
Doctors in Germany discovered a cholinesterase inhibitor from the Novichok group in his blood, urine and skin samples. Labs in Germany, France and Sweden confirmed it was Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent that is up to eight times deadlier than VX.
Navalny had only had water and tea before he boarded the flight. After pictures of him drinking tea in the airport in Tomsk surfaced on the internet, people assumed his tea was poisoned. For good reason.
In 2006, a former KGB agent and Russian defector, Alexander Litvinenko, was poisoned after drinking Polonium-210-laced tea with two Russian men at a London hotel. He died three weeks later. A British inquiry determined that the men were Russian agents.
In 2018, Russian GRU agents used Novichok in a botched attempt to poison former Russian military officer and British double agent Sergei Skripal.
Authorities reveal they found traces of the nerve agent on Navalny’s drinking bottle from his hotel.
The Kremlin denied poisoning him or delaying his flight.
Navalny had been arrested, convicted and sentenced for various charges by Russian courts in the years prior to and after his poisoning. They were spurious charges used to disqualify him from running for office. Many were overturned by the European Court of Human Rights.
Russia threatened to arrest him if he returned for violating the terms of his parole… for being flown to a hospital while he was in a coma to save his life.
Navalny knew that he would be arrested upon his return from Berlin. At the time of his return on January 13, 2021, he wrote to his supporters on Instagram, “I have never questioned whether I should come back, simply because I never left.”
When asked why he returned, he simply wrote, “This is our country, and we only have one.”
Russia withdrew from the European Court of Human Rights in September 2022.
In August 2023, Russia added an additional 19 years in prison for extremism-related charges. Apparently, in Russia, you are an extremist if you love your country, oppose corruption and totalitarian dictatorships, and have the gall to survive an assassination attempt.
The Russian government has refused to release Navalny’s body. His wife believes he was poisoned once again, and they are waiting for the evidence to disappear. Make no mistake, whatever the outcome, Putin is to blame.
Navalny’s death throws a shadow over the credibility of the useful idiots in America. His courage overshadows the weakness of those Republicans and their leadership, who refuse to stand up to Putin. The Putin sycophants who hide behind his propaganda are now being exposed to the sunlight of the truth.
Tucker Carlson’s feeble interview with Putin was criticized at the World Government Summit in Dubai for not asking about Navalny, the lack of freedom of speech, or fair elections in Russia. His subsequent answer, “Every leader kills people, some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people, sorry…” is looking worse for the wear, his credibility perishing alongside Navalny.
Most World leaders have condemned Putin and the death of Navalny.
Donald Trump has not.
He condemned NATO partners, bragging he would encourage Russia to do, “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country that doesn’t meet the spending guidelines on defense, but he has not condemned Putin. Not only does that demonstrate a degree of recklessness and a profound lack of intelligence previously unseen in any American leader, but it exposes a deep ignorance of NATO’s funding structure, the value of American leadership in an important global organization, and the purpose behind the alliance.
Instead, Trump compared himself to Navalny, saying the persecution of Trump’s own making was equivalent to what Navalny faced. Idiocy, that isn’t particularly useful. Oh, and I don’t remember Alexei Navalny refusing to fight for Russia because of a bone spur.
Have a good week,
-m
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M, I am practically brought to tears when thinking about the heroism of Navalny as well as reading his correspondence with Natan Sharanasky from a punishment cell in prison. This is Soltzenhitzen level importance. I hope his memory brings down both Putin and his American apologists. They both disgust me.
Chris