Navalny Versus Putin Is an Epic, and Existential, Battle

Seen from the outside, developments since Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny boarded a Moscow-bound plane in Berlin on Jan. 17 resemble the cruelest, crudest form of slapstick.

Navalny supporters gather at the destination airport, Vnukovo. After a failed attempt to keep them out by flooding the airport with fans of a pop singer also flying into Vnukovo, the authorities divert the plane to another airport, Sheremetyevo. (The singer’s plane and several others are directed there, too: collateral damage). Meanwhile, Navalny’s supporters at Vnukovo are rounded up by riot police. At Sheremetyevo, Navalny is allowed to get as far as passport control. The dozens of journalists who came on Navalny’s flight film his every step. As soon as the opposition politician crosses the Russian border, a group of people in police uniforms demand he come with them but refuse to let his lawyer, who was also on the flight, accompany him because they claim she had not crossed the border into Russia yet. For hours, Navalny is kept in a police cell without being allowed to call anyone, so his whereabouts are not known. Then suddenly his lawyer is notified that, within minutes, a judge will consider whether Navalny should be arrested in connection with an old case, in which Navalny received a 3.5-year suspended sentence in 2014 (a decision deemed “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable” by the European Court for Human Rights). Navalny is accused of violating his 5-year probation, which ran out on Dec. 30, by not appearing when summoned — but he couldn’t have responded since he was undergoing treatment and rehabilitation in Germany after an assassination attempt with military-grade poison that he and western governments attribute to the Kremlin.