He likes to invent history and pretend that he’s the toughest guy on the block, but Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to withhold Alexei Navalny’s body from his family is instructive.
For a start, it underlines Putin’s plain disregard for the most basic teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church, teachings he claims are central to Russia’s civil society. That church, of which Navalny was a member, requires that a family be able to pay respects to their departed loved one in the days immediately following death. Funerals are supposed to be held soon after. But Putin’s withholding of the body also illustrates his fear that Navanly’s body might explain how the investigative journalist died.
We know one basic fact: Navalny died in a Siberian gulag-style prison camp last week after being relocated there last December. The relatively short gap between when Navalny was moved to the camp and when he died is itself suspicious. It suggests that the Russian authorities wanted Navalny further away from public view and international attention. But the fact that Navalny’s body has not been released to his family is especially suspicious. Navalny’s family say they’ve been told his body will not be released for two weeks. This is about the time it would take for any traces of nerve agents or other toxins to become undetectable in a human body.
Prior context further reinforces that concern.
After all, it was a Novichok-class nerve agent that the Russian FSB domestic security service used against Navalny in a prior August 2020 assassination attempt. Much to the Kremlin’s embarrassment, the assassination team’s activities were then detected by U.S. intelligence services, and traces of Novichok were discovered in Navalny following his evacuation to a German hospital. The repeated use of Novichok as a chemical weapon is in plain breach of Russian treaty commitments, one of many other Russian proscribed-weapons treaty violations. The use of this cruel weapon was designed to ensure Navalny died a painful death, suffering uncontrolled muscular contractions and eventual suffocation or cardiac arrest. The same agent was used in a GRU military intelligence service attempt to kill a Russian defector in the United Kingdom back in 2018. When an innocent Briton with no connection to the intended target died after mishandling the discarded weapon device, the Kremlin thought it would be amusing to insult her children.
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Befitting Putin and the Russian security establishment’s penchant for theatrical, and what they regard as poetically just, forms of assassination, it is highly possible that Navalny was poisoned with the same or a similar nerve agent.
This kind of brutality should be intolerable to the West. The United States has said it will introduce significant new sanctions on Russia come this Friday. Unless, however, those sanctions directly target Putin’s hidden financial wealth and/or disburse funds from frozen Russian bank accounts, they will only signal weakness to the Kremlin.