‘God Bless Alexei Navalny’: Biden, Others Memorialize Russian Opposition Leader
President and others pin responsibility for the death squarely on Putin's shoulders
President Biden and other prominent Americans are remembering and honoring the Russian opposition leader who reportedly died Friday at a remote prison camp in Russia’s Arctic, where he was considered by international community as a political prisoner.
Alexei Navalny, an attorney who emerged as an anti-corruption activist and fierce opponent of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, is said to have died while serving a 19-year prison sentence in corrective colony FKU IK-3, in the village of Kharp in the Russian Arctic. He was 47.
Navalny, a fierce critic of Putin's authoritarianism, also ran afoul of that same authoritarianism.
President Biden hailed Navalny Friday during remarks at the White House.
“He bravely stood up to the corruption, the violence, and the — the — all the — all the bad things that the Putin government was doing,” Biden said. “In response, Putin had him poisoned. He had him arrested. He had him prosecuted for fabricated crimes. He sentenced him to prison. He was held in isolation. Even all that didn’t stop him from calling out Putin’s lies. Even in prison, he was a powerful voice of the truth, which is kind of amazing when you think about it.”
Biden also extended his condolences to Navalny’s family and supporters.
“So, I just want to say God bless Alexei Navalny. His courage will not be forgotten.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken unmistakably blamed Putin for Navalny’s demise.
“The fear of one man only underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built. Russia’s responsible for this,” he said. “We’ll be talking to the many other countries concerned about Alexei Navalny, especially if these reports [of Navalny's death] bear out to be true.”
Richard Haass, a one-time top US diplomat and former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, roundly condemned Putin for Navalny’s death.
“Yeah, make no mistake about it, Alexei Navalny was killed, whatever the immediate precipitating event. He had emerged over the last two decades as the principal opposition critic of Vladimir Putin, and his principal theme was one that Putin had amassed personal power and he was using it, among other things, for personal gain,” he said in an on-camera appearance with MSNBC. “That's why I think, Willie, he was such a threat to Putin that this powerful despot in Russia was so worried about this guy because corruption is something that the average person can appreciate and understand. You don’t have to be a reader of Foreign Affairs magazine to have a feeling for corruption.
“Putin took him seriously, which explains the attempts on Navalny’s life, the harsh imprisonment, and I think that’s what we learned from that,” Haass added. “I think it also tells us something about Vladimir Putin. He just doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about how the West will react. He basically dismisses it.”
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