World in Brief - The Economist Roundup

 

World in Brief

The Economist Roundup

February 17, 2024

Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, died, according to the Russian prison service. The prison service said he fell ill after a walk and “lost consciousness almost immediately”. Mr Navalny was serving a 19-year sentence in a harsh penal facility near the Arctic Circle. In December, while in another prison east of Moscow, he disappeared from public view for three weeks. Conditions in that prison, where Mr Navalny had been held since 2021, amounted to torture.

 

President Joe Biden joined other Western leaders in blaming Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, for Mr Navalny’s reported death. He said that his administration was considering “a whole number of options” in response, without offering details. Mr Biden also reiterated his criticism of Donald Trump for encouraging Russia to attack NATO allies who spend too little on defence. Mr Biden said that Mr Putin should know that America “will defend every inch of NATO territory”.

 

Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s new commander-in-chief, ordered his troops to leave the eastern frontline town of Avdiivka. Mr Syrsky took the decision in order to “avoid encirclement” and save lives. Russia has besieged Avdiivka for months—and the town had become something of a symbol of Ukrainian resistance. Losing it will be a blow to morale. Capturing Avdiivka would be Russia’s biggest battlefield win since taking Bakhmut in May 2023.

 

A judge in New York ordered Donald Trump to pay $354m for misrepresenting his net worth. The former president had been found liable for fraud in the civil trial before it had even kicked off. The judge also barred Mr Trump from holding senior positions in any New York corporation for three years, and applied a two-year ban to his adult sons.

 

Reuters reported that Egypt is preparing a patch of desert at its border with Gaza to accommodate Palestinians in case an Israeli ground offensive in Rafah sparks an exodus. The Egyptian government, which has consistently refused to take in Palestinian refugees, denied the claim. Other Arab states, as well as America, have repeatedly warned against the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.

 

Volodmyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, signed separate security agreements in Germany and France. Olaf Scholz, Germany’s leader, promised Mr Zelensky €1.1bn ($1.2bn) in fresh aid. Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, promised up to €3bn ($3.2bn) in 2024—up from €2.1bn ($2.3bn) last year. Both are significantly less than the $60bn that America’s Senate recently passed, but House Republicans have declined to hold a vote.

 

Word of the week: zhengbao, China’s political-security protection unit, housed within the broader police force. Read our story about how China manages to stifle dissent without a KGB.

The world responds to Navalny’s death

In 2021 President Joe Biden warned that Russia would face “devastating” consequences should Alexei Navalny die on Vladimir Putin’s watch. Now, according to Russian prison authorities, it has happened, and the world is waiting to see what happens next. Speaking after the reports of Mr Navalny’s death, Mr Biden said his administration was “looking at a whole number of options”. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, promised to “spare no efforts” in holding the Kremlin to account. Fresh EU sanctions could follow.

The demise of Russia’s most prominent opposition figure will dominate conversations at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend. Addressing the event on Friday Yulia, Mr Navalny’s wife, called on the assembled dignitaries to “defeat the horrific regime that is now in Russia”. Another attendee, President Volodymyr Zelensky, arrived in Munich planning to urge Ukraine’s allies to speed up deliveries of weapons and ammunition. Perhaps his message will now find more receptive ears.

Orban’s annual gloat

Viktor Orban, Hungary’s cantankerous prime minister, will strike a note of triumph in his state-of-the-nation address on Saturday. He always does. Last year he boasted of his Fidesz party’s huge win in the election of 2022. This year he has a tougher job. Two of his party’s bigwigs—Hungary’s president, Katalin Novak, and the former justice minister turned MP, Judit Varga—recently quit over their roles in pardoning an orphanage official who covered up sexual abuse. That scandal stained Mr Orban’s image as an exponent of Christian values and a hero of the international “national conservative” movement.

Mr Orban likes to brag about standing up to Brussels. In December the EU let him have €10bn ($10.8bn) in aid it had blocked over his rule-of-law violations. But earlier this month, under pressure, he dropped his veto of EU aid to Ukraine. He has since returned to form, holding up sanctions on Chinese firms that have aided Russia’s war effort. No doubt his audience will lap it up.

Alexei Navalny, Russia’s opposition leader

Alexei Navalny was not afraid of death. He had almost died before. In August 2020, on a flight in Siberia, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader fell into a coma: he had been poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent. He was flown to Berlin to recover, but after five months he returned home to Moscow—a defiant middle finger to President Vladimir Putin.

He was swifty jailed, on ludicrous charges. As his prison sentence grew longer his face grew gaunter. In December he disappeared for 21 days as he was taken deeper into Russia’s modern-day gulag, ultimately arriving at a penal colony in Siberia. Then, finally, Mr Putin got his wish. On Friday prison authorities said that Mr Navalny had died, having “felt unwell after a walk”.

Mr Navalny was an everyman. He was raised in Obninsk, a town south-west of Moscow. His father was an officer in the Soviet missile forces, his mother an accountant. After retirement they took over an artisanal willow-weaving business. Born in 1976, Mr Navalny was a generation younger than Mr Putin, who was a former KGB officer; he associated the Soviet era with decay. Especially influential was the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, in Ukraine. He had spent summers at his grandparents’ house on the edges of the town.

A lawyer by training, Mr Navalny said that it was Mr Putin’s rise that brought him into politics. In 2000 he joined Yabloko, Russia’s oldest liberal party, but found himself an outsider. The party expelled him in 2007, partly because of his nationalist streak. (He made ill-advised xenophobic videos, which he later came to regret.)

The activist threw his energy into creating a grassroots anti-corruption campaign, using blogs and YouTube videos to expose the graft that underpinned Mr Putin’s regime of “crooks and thieves”. His online calls for protest drew large numbers on to the streets, especially after Russia’s rigged election of 2011. He was banned from running for the Russian presidency in 2017, but his videos, watched by millions, continued to make the political weather.

Mr Navalny spoke of creating “the wonderful Russia of the future”—free, democratic and unthreatening. His death underscores how far away that Russia appears.

https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaI6FJZ8aKvHuAImSF2o            https://wa.me/c/923554754711