The head of Germany’s far-right populist AfD, has condemned what he has called the “theatrics” around the death of Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny, claiming it has been exploited for political means.
Tino Chrupalla said the speech of Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya at the Munich Security Conference last weekend had been “stage managed”, implying that it had been instrumentalised by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen to shore up her own support having just launched her own bid for reelection.
He was a person, so probably neither.
I’m not interested in debating his legacy. I’m interested in using this moment as a teachable lesson about what kind of person Putin is and what kind of state he runs.
Yes that’s the only point in this debate, but what kind of person Putin is and what kind of state he runs has been well known for quite some time. Navalny’s death is just another data point in a long history of awfully convenient and totally natural deaths of Putin critics and/or other dissidents and defectors.
His fate was sealed the moment he returned to Russia, I am honestly surprised that they let him live for so long.