- Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said he first thought people were joking about the Wagner rebellion.
- Navalny is currently in a Russian prison, accused of "terrorism" against the state.
The images out of Russia this past weekend were surreal. But for jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who faces the prospect of life in prison over what are widely seen as fabricated charges of "terrorism," the news that Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin had pulled out of Ukraine and was marching instead on the capital of Russia was literally a joke.
"I kept expecting someone to suddenly yell 'You got punk'd'!" Navalny wrote Tuesday in a series of posts on social media, recounting how he first heard the news from lawyers ahead of a recent court appearance. "So how did martial law go for you?" one attorney had asked him, according to Navalny, who gained notoriety in Russia by campaigning against official corruption. "I thought it was some kind of new joke or Internet meme that hadn't reached me yet."
The rebellion, led by a former ally of President Vladimir Putin, began just a day after Russia's highest court ruled that Navalny — convicted of "fraud" after returning to Russia following an apparently state-sponsored attempt on his life — could continue to be denied a pen and paper while behind bars. His social media missives are communicated to his legal team and posted by staff outside of Russia.
The irony of it all is not lost on Navalny, who on Tuesday noted that he stands "accused of forming an organization to overthrow President Putin by violent means," even as Prigozhin, whose mercenaries shot down more than a half-dozen Russian military aircraft on Saturday, killing service members, had the criminal case against him dropped within 48 hours of launching an armed insurrection, despite very publicly threatening the life of Russia's minister of defense, Sergei Shoigu.
"It was Putin personally who did this," Navalny said, noting that rebellion was led by an erstwhile ally and that Putin himself "pardoned all those convicts who were on their way to assassinate Shoigu and whoever else they wanted to kill."
The lesson, he continued, is that change in Russian cannot come through violent means — nor can stability be delivered by an autocrat — but rather through a commitment to free and fair elections. Russia's next presidential contest is scheduled for March 2024, even as Navalny faces the new charges that could extend his sentence by decades.
"It is not democracy, human rights and parliamentarism that make the regime weak and lead to turmoil. It is dictators and usurpation of power that lead to mess, weak government and chaos," Navalny said. "Always has been."
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