A court in Moscow has issued an arrest warrant for the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on charges of extremism, according to state media.
The charges brought against Yulia Navalnaya, who lives outside Russia, in absentia are to do with her alleged “participation in an extremist society”, Tass news agency said.
Navalny was Russia’s most significant opposition leader of the past decade. He died in February in an Arctic Circle jail. Russian authorities said he died of natural causes - but his widow said Navalny had been “tortured, starved, cut off and killed” by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.
Navalny had been serving 19 years on extremism charges that were widely seen as politically motivated.
Responding to the arrest warrant against her, Yulia Navalnaya posted on X: "When you write about this, please do not forget to write the main thing: Vladimir Putin is a murderer and a war criminal.
My impression from reading Institute for the Study of War’s blogs is that Putin is a “moderate” in the perverted sense. There are actually much worse people, with real power in Russia, that could conceivably take power, and he kinda keeps everyone in line.
So maybe the people in a position to depose him have no interest in doing so, not just for their own interests but because the resulting power vacuum would not be fun. And I’m sure he makes the possibility extremely difficult.
There is one guy who tried, and actually came surprisingly close: Yevgeny Prigozhin. He started a small rebellion, and it might’ve worked with a slightly different roll of the dice. He seemed kinda populist and Trumpy to me, with a lot of grassroots support from the more militant factions in Russian politics, especially on social media… if Trump was the leader of a notorious mercenary outfit.
He died in a plane crash exactly 2 months later. I’m sure its a total coincidence.