Russia, Ukraine and Navalny’s legacy

“What are Ukraine’s borders with Russia? The same as Russia’s with Ukraine which we recognised in 1991. There’s nothing to discuss here. Almost all borders are more or less accidental. We can’t just redraw them. Otherwise the world will sink into chaos.”

That might seem like a statement of the obvious. But not to leaders with something to prove who, all-too-often, mistake brute strength for the power to change things. 

Alexei Navalny wrote those opening words while serving 19 years on trumped up charges in a Russian maximum security penal colony in the Arctic. It was  nicknamed Polar Wolf – for good reason. 

Situated north of the Arctic Circle 1,900 kilometres from Moscow, IK-3 is one Russia’s toughest ‘corrective facilities’ (spravitelnie kolonii) . Stalin would recognise it as a simulacrum of his Soviet-era Gulags. The old tyrant would be pleased at how resilient his model to crush dissent has proved. 

Political prisoners live cheek by jowl with violent criminals. Isolation, cold, unsanitary conditions, beatings and solitary confinement aim to break the spirit.  “I will spend the rest of my life in prison and die here” Navalny wrote on March 22, 2022. “There will not be anybody to say goodbye to. I will never see my grandchildren.”  

Navalny died, aged 47, just under two years later on February 16, 2024. Vladimir Putin’s most tenacious critic suffered what the authorities called – without a hint of irony — “sudden death syndrome.” 

He had spent 300 days in solitary often in sub-zero temperatures. They recorded his death, just in case Navalny’s supporters believed he lived on somewhere in the polar wilderness waiting to return, at 14:19 Moscow time, before releasing his body to his mother. 

Navalny had survived an earlier assassination attempt in 2020. His underwear was laced with the nerve agent Novichok, the Russian state’s retail chemical weapon of choice, only to succumb, most probably, to another four years later.  

His short existence in between the two attempts on his life is set out in his compelling memoir Patriot , which he began writing it in a German hospital where he was taken after being poisoned. It offers a bleak, occasionally hilarious, always vivid account of the country he loved and the cabal that runs it.  

Why is this relevant today?

Well, for one thing Donald Trump will return to the Oval Office for his second term as US president in just over two months. One of his top priorities is to end the war over Ukraine. This would inevitably involve the surrender of Ukraine’s territory to Russia. 

Then, last week, Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, spoke to Putin for the first time in two years. Scholz urged Putin to withdraw his troops from Ukraine and negotiate a settlement to achieve a “just and lasting peace”. 

Scholz may have been playing to his war-weary electorate as his own position weakens. But it provoked alarm in Kyiv and other western capitals — as well it might. 

Before rolling out talks, both Scholz and Trump, or their advisers, might want to read Navalny’s book. His voice from the grave is worth listening to. It helps to understand who and what those who seek to negotiate with Putin are dealing with. 

Rewarding Putin for the atrocities and war crimes committed by his troops in Ukraine would be madness. But realpolitik offers up some arguments for trying to broker a settlement in Ukraine. 

The war which Russia started by invading its former fiefdom, now sovereign neighbour, in 2022 appears to have reached a stalemate. Hundreds of thousands — perhaps more than a million — on both sides have died. 

Europe and the US have spent countless billions arming Ukraine with money they can ill-afford. All wars end either when one side defeats the other (which no longer seems likely in this case) or in a messy compromise. 

Patriot is a ultimately a sad book. Navalny’s piercing blue eyes look back at you from the cover reminding you that he is dead, another victim of Putin’s lust for power. The book provokes outrage. But it is also funny, pacey, wise and a cracking read. 

“Some people,” he writes, “collect stamps. I have a growing collection of amazing court trials.” He never lapses into self-pity. On the contrary, he embarks on his Calvary (though he would object strenuously to this metaphor) with gusto. 

In a country ruled by fear, Navalny understood that his most effective weapon, the only card he held, was his freedom – while it lasted. He wielded it with formidable panache. 

Navalny describes, with cheeky good humour, a netherworld of made-up justice, corruption, double-speak and Alice-in-Wonderland logic. It’s a reminder that, beneath the trappings of runaway capitalism, red in tooth and claw, the fancy cars and private jets, Mediterranean villas and superyachts, Russia remains, at least for the privileged, a source of plunder. 

As if transferring old archives to a supercomputer, Putin has ditched some of the redundant features of a totalitarian state and replaced them with a sleeker, more efficient, TikTok-friendly version of a thousand-year-old autocracy. 

Navalny reminds us that the post-war order the West created to cement the freedoms won in two world wars is complicit in Putin’s schemes. “Russia,” he writes, ”which is waging a classic war of aggression against Ukraine…is additionally protected by its membership in the U.N. Security Council and its nuclear weapons.” 

Navalny started becoming a thorn in Putin’s side around 2007. He leveraged the freedoms that came with the new market economy to expose corruption. He bought shares in state-owned oil giants to access company reports for evidence that exposed the vast riches of the Kremlin elites. 

At first he wrote about these on his blog. He then started making videos which his team posted on YouTube. These went viral. In 2011 he set up the Anti-Corruption Foundation which amassed a huge following. The Kremlin, which had been relaxed about his activities, began to take notice. 

He led unprecedented street protests against Putin. These became a serious embarrassment to Putin. In 2013 he came second behind the Kremlin-backed incumbent in the Moscow mayoral election. 

The tipping point was probably when he exposed the then prime minister Dmitry Mevedev’s estate (complete with duck pond) and Putin’s $1billion Black Sea palace. Navalny alleged that these were paid for with illicit funds, most probably obtained through bribes. 

Navalny saw clearly the metastasising effect of corruption. He understood that once a leader embarks on corruption on such a scale there is no turning back. They cannot afford to let anything or anyone stand in their way. Politics and capitalism, oligarchs and the state, became indispensable to each other in a rapacious feed-back loop. 

Navalny was smart, articulate and politically adept. He loved his country. His most extraordinary act – almost unthinkable really – was to return to Russia with his wife Yulia immediately after leaving hospital where he was treated for Novichok poisoning. He was arrested – as he knew he would be – the minute he cleared immigration at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. 

He knew exactly what he was doing. He writes: “By coming back to Russia, I fulfilled my promise to the voters. There needs to be some people in Russia who don’t lie to them.”

On her first extended visit in jail, he and his wife Yulia walked down a corridor as far removed as possible from cameras wired for sound. He whispered in her ear, “Listen, I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I think there’s a high probability I’ll never get out of here. Let’s just decide …that this is most likely…to happen. Let’s …arrange our lives on that basis. If things turn out better, that will be marvellous, but we won’t count on it or have ill-founded hopes.”

“Yep. Let’s do it.” Yulia responded. 

Why does any of this matter? What does the suffering of one man and his family, however courageous, have to do with Ukraine? 

Put simply, because it shows you can’t trust a word Putin says. Russia has promised to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty before. Twice. It lied. Even assuming Putin can be drawn to the negotiating table without preconditions (unlikely), nothing he says and nothing he signs should be taken for granted. 

An armistice, a ceasefire or a treaty would merely serve as a long pause to regroup, rearm and come back stronger. Putin has staked his future on Ukraine. It’s his crusade. As long as he is there – and even if he isn’t — Russia will not give up its claim. Ukraine has become a metaphor for lost glory. 

Russia’s insecurity will continue to pose a clear and present threat to Europe’s eastern flank, as well as to its democratic institutions (and infrastructure) which the Kremlin continues to subvert. 

Trump may want to draw America’s horns in. He may dislike multilateral clubs, including NATO. He may not see the value of continuing a strategic partnership with Europe. America First – his movement’s guiding credo – sits awkwardly with a Europe too long reliant on the American military presence. 

But if Trump thinks he can sup with the devil and come away unscathed, he is mistaken. There isn’t a spoon long enough to do that safely. The art of the deal would be fruitless. A soft peace that rewarded Putin would eventually backfire. He would simply come back for more.

Allowing Russia to swallow great chunks of Ukraine would confirm Putin’s belief that the West – unlike Navalny – doesn’t have the stomach to stand up for what it purports to believe in. It would signal weakness to China, eyeing Taiwan, and to Iran pushing for hegemony in the Gulf. Isolationism may be tempting for America (it always has been), but it would be far from painless. 

Putin was emboldened to invade Ukraine by the West’s docile response to his annexation of Crimea in 2014. Any agreement without a cast iron security guarantee for Ukraine — and membership of the EU — would not be worth the paper it’s written on. 

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