The martyrs we don’t deserve

NEW DELHI: A week before the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the world witnessed the death of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny. The dissident’s spokesperson confirmed the Russian opposition leader had died at a remote Arctic penal colony, emphasising he was murdered. At this point, there isn’t any information pertaining to the whereabouts of his remains. Since Navalny’s death, over 400 people have been detained across Russia as they attempted to pay tributes to him with flowers, per OVD-Info, a group that monitors political arrests. Authorities have even cordoned off memorials to victims of Soviet repression that were being used as sites to leave makeshift tributes to Navalny. Although the police removed the flowers at night, more kept appearing.

Political observers in Europe were pointed in their rhetoric when they remarked that the punishment for representing a view contrarian to that of the Kremlin, or even representing the opposition in Russia was no longer imprisonment, but death. While US President Biden was categoric in his sound-bite that there was no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something Putin and his thugs did, Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, called for an international investigation on the activist’s death. The Kremlin, which bristled at the outpouring of anger from world leaders, set off its spokesman Dmitry Peskov on the hapless onlookers, as he rejected allegations of a cover-up.

Navalny’s death has robbed the Russian opposition of its best-known and most inspiring politician less than a month before the election that is set to give Vladimir Putin another six years in power. Many Russians had viewed Navalny as a rare hope for political change amid Putin’s unrelenting crackdown on the opposition. In the aftermath of Navalny’s passing, the White House announced that it is preparing additional major sanctions on Russia that would be unveiled on Friday. The US and its allies have already imposed a range of stiff embargoes on Russia in retaliation to its invasion of Ukraine.

In the backdrop of the Russian activist’s untimely demise, social media went into a tizzy as netizens recalled the manner in which yet another dissident, Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi met his end in 2018. The Saudi journalist was assassinated at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by agents of the Saudi government, at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as concluded by US intelligence agencies. Khashoggi’s brutal slaying created a serious rift between the two countries, and Washington sanctioned a few Saudi nationals, while the Congress unsuccessfully attempted to cut off the sale of US weapons to Saudis. Riyadh in turn was funding the war in Yemen.

In defiance of American efforts to isolate Putin during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Saudi even went on to strengthen its relations with Moscow while reducing the oil output of OPEC countries in October 2022, in coordination with Russia. Digressions aside, there’s so much more to the stories of these two deceased dissidents, apart from their tragic shared history of martyrdom at the hands of the countries they called home. The fact that such state-sponsored eliminations can be carried out with such impunity, and that not one single leader from a non-Western nation could muster the courage to condemn Navalny’s death or call out those who are responsible, marks a new low in moral bankruptcy.