Free Republic

Voting in the Russian presidential election began this morning and will end Sunday. At that point, Putin's victory will be announced and he will start his 5th term as president. The vote tally doesn't really matter. It will be whatever the Kremlin decides it should be. Having killed off his only two real opponents in the past year, Navalny and Prigozhin, he probably feels like he earned it. The presidential vote in Russia, which began Friday and lasts through Sunday, features the trappings of a horse race but is more of a predetermined, Soviet-style referendum. President Vladimir V. Putin, 71,...

Into the depleted field of journalism in America, a handful of websites have appeared in recent weeks with names suggesting a focus on news close to home: D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and a newer sister publication, the Miami Chronicle. In fact, they are not local news organizations at all. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, meant to mimic actual news organizations to push Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it among an at-times odd mix of stories about crime, politics and culture. While Russia has long sought ways to influence public discourse in...

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For one day at least, Russia’s opposition came alive to mourn its lost leader. The funeral of Alexei Navalny on Friday almost did not happen at all. But thousands ultimately turned out — braving the snow, heavy security and weeks of Kremlin efforts to derail the event — so that they could pay their respects to the man who challenged President Vladimir Putin with a vision for a democratic Russia. Bearing flowers, candles and placards, the crowd chanted Navalny’s name as his body was first delivered to a church in southern Moscow for a brief funeral and then to a...

his week, Vladimir Putin finally — allegedly — murdered his chief political rival and critic Alexei Navalny. Navalny’s death followed an attempt by Putin’s operatives in 2020 to kill him by poisoning; Navalny survived the attempt, worked with online specialists to unmask the actual agents responsible for the poisoning and then returned to Russia, where he was promptly arrested on trumped-up charges and sent to a Gulag in the far north. Now, Navalny is dead. And Putin isn’t stopping there. This week, the Russian government announced an arrest warrant for Navalny’s brother, Oleg, on unspecified charges; Putin’s agents likely murdered...

BREAKING: Ukraine’s intel chief confirms Navalny died of a blood clot

Kyrylo Budanov, chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR) of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense has said that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died of a blood clot. “I may disappoint you, but as far as we know, he indeed died as a result of a blood clot. And this has been more or less confirmed,” Budanov told journalists on the sidelines at the “Ukraine. Year of 2024” forum on Sunday.

One week ago on Monday, news broke that Russian dissident Alexei Navalny had died in prison in a Russian gulag north of the Arctic Circle. Navalny leaves behind his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and their two children. Navalny organized anti-government demonstrations and ran for office to advocate reforms against corruption in Russia, and against President Vladimir Putin and his government. The media immediately blamed Putin for “his murder” in prison. Nikki Haley used Navalny’s death to attack her former boss, Donald Trump. Haley is at the point where she is using anything she can to damage President Trump. That’s why Democrats...

The globalist left used Navalny’s tragic death as an excuse to ramp up their hopes for a shooting war against nuclear Russia. At the same time, they are blaming President Trump for his death and attacking Trump following news of Navalny’s death.It should not surprise you that the American mainstream media is censoring significant statements by Alexei Navalny before his death.

Natan Sharansky, one of the great heroes of the twentieth century, corresponded with Alexei Navalny, one of the great heroes of the twenty-first. Navalny, through his lawyers, managed to get a Russian copy of Sharansky’s famous memoir Fear No Evil. He read it in the gulag where he was killed on February 16, 2024. We know this because he sent Sharansky two letters: one in March and one in April of 2023. Today we are honored to publish these historic letters in their original, handwritten Russian and in English. (We are grateful to Anna Lyubarskaja and Rebekah Koffler for their...

Starting almost immediately after the death of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a penal colony in the Russian Far North, Russian government agencies and Kremlin-controlled media began issuing implausible, contradictory speculation as to how Vladimir Putin’s chief political rival could have possibly met his demise in a remote facility administered by Vladimir Putin’s oppressive state apparatus. As an exercise in understanding just how disorienting the Kremlin’s firehose of falsehoods can be, The Insider sums up the most blatantly false “versions” of Navalny’s death that were offered to the Russian public.

Alexei Navalny's mother has been told to agree to a "secret" burial for the Putin critic within three hours, his spokeswoman says. If Lyudmila Navalnaya did not agree, he would be buried at the prison where he died a week ago, the spokeswoman said a Russian investigator had told her. On Thursday, Ms Navalnaya said she was made to sign a death certificate saying her son died of natural causes. Mr Navalny's widow has said he was killed by Russian authorities. The Kremlin has denied the allegations, calling Western reaction to the death "hysterical". Mr Navalny died in a prison...

President Biden met Thursday with the widow and daughter of the late Russian activist Alexei Navalny, six days following the announcement of his death in an Arctic prison. The meeting with Yulia and Dasha Navalnaya took place in San Francisco and represents the first confirmation of Yulia Navalnaya’s whereabouts since her husband’s death. Dasha Navalnaya is a student at nearby Stanford University. In a statement, the White House said Biden “express[ed] his heartfelt condolences” to the women “for their terrible loss” and “expressed his admiration for … Navalny’s extraordinary courage and his legacy of fighting against corruption and for a...

The death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and accusations that Vladimir Putin was behind it have once again raised the spectre of Kremlin assassinations. World leaders and commentators instantly pointed the finger at the Russian president when the news of Navalny's death broke on Friday, with questions around the cause of death fuelled by officials delaying the release of the body. Some have suggested the 47-year-old dissident was poisoned - as he was in 2020 in a previous assassination attempt - while one source inside the prison colony where Navalny died has claimed he was likely killed by a...

Vladimir Putin set up Tucker Carlson by murdering Alexis Navalny just days after Tucker‘s controversial visit to Moscow and interview. That’s what happens when a scorpion rides on your back – it’s going to sting you to death even if it’s riding you across the river and will end up drowning itself, too. But the frenzy over Tucker Carlson‘s visit is still massively overblown, and the intensity of it by the ruling class is less an indication of righteous indignation than an attempt to distract from modern America’s shortcomings. Tucker Carlson is not correct in all his details, but Tucker...

Piers Morgan Uncensored is joined by former oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was imprisoned in Russia for a decade, to discuss the death of Vladimir Putin's opponent Alexei Navalny, Putin's interview with Tucker Carlson, plus he issues a chilling warning to the West. Speaking exclusively to Piers Morgan Uncensored on YouTube, Mikhail Khodorkovsky said the Russian leader would have no qualms attacking a NATO country if he was legitimised following the next Russian elections. He also discusses whether he fears for his life after making an enemy of Putin and if he thinks he will ever return to his homeland....

Feb 20, 2024- Alexei Navalny's political activities were funded by the US government through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) as part of an effort to repeat US-backed 2014 Ukraine regime change inside Russia itself; - The Western media had previously (and reluctantly) revealed Navalny as far-right, racist, and xenophobic despite efforts to pass him off as a progressive pro-democracy activist; - US government-funded polling agencies consistently found Alexei Navalny extremely unpopular in Russia with single digit approval ratings; - After an alleged 2020 "Novichok" poisoning, Navalny's popularity "surged" to 20% as the Western media accused Moscow of being behind...

I follow a lot of Russian language accounts on social media. I first realised something had happened on Friday when I saw a Russian listings magazine post a crying emoji with a picture of the face of Navalny, Russia’s leading opposition figure. This was odd. Their posts were usually apolitical – recently about Rothko in Paris, Timothée Chalamet in Wonka and Prince Charles’s health. News of Alexei Navalny’s death hit the Russian-speaking online world moments before it broke across international media. The very first reaction was cryptic and euphemistic. You could sense the thought behind the responses: Is he really...

Alexey Navalny, the dissident and political nemesis of Russian President Vladimir Putin, spent the last few years of his life behind bars but still managed to stay connected to the outside world. Letters from the final months of his life, obtained by The New York Times, showed Navalny, who had been imprisoned since January 2021, managed to stay on top of current events — including in the US. In a letter sent to a friend, photographer Evgeny Feldman, Navalny called former President Donald Trump's agenda for a second term "really scary," according to the Times. If President Joe Biden has...

Friday, February 16, 2024 is the day America codified political persecution. In a civil fraud case where no one was defrauded, New York Democrat judge Arthur Engoron ruled that President Trump must pay $350 million in damages. It’s unclear who Trump is supposed to pay. The victims—banks—made money in the transaction. Additionally, Engoron ruled Trump can’t do business in New York for three years. Seemingly the only people Democrat judges won’t prosecute for doing “business” in New York are illegal immigrants. On the same day as the Engoron ruling, Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader who ran for office against...