An article by Alexei Navalny was published in the NYTimes. In case you don’t know who Navalny is, you can find out here. It is huge that the NYTimes has published Navalny because his ultra-popular blog has been shut down by Putin. Navalny is under house arrest and is not allowed to speak publicly or write.
For a while, Navalny didn’t take any position on Ukraine. After repeated requests from his enormous group of followers that he specify what he thinks, Navalny finally wrote a post (remember, every post he writes can cost him 7 years in jail) denouncing the invasion of Ukraine. I can imagine that this was extremely hard for him to do, especially since this stance is likely to lose him many of his followers. Of course, Navalny supported Ukraine in his inimitable manner of, “Why should we be bugging Ukrainians when there are crowds of juicy Uzbeks and Azeri we could be hassling instead?”*
Navalny even joined the anti-invasion protests and published a photo of himself with his wife marching with the protesters. Compared to so many gutless and cringing politicians, one has got to admire a guy who risks so much so openly for a cause. And a cause that he supports on the level of reason and not emotion, too.
Navalny knows more than anybody about how corruption in Russia works because he has dedicated his life to investigating the bandits who exist in the top echelons of authority in Russia. And his article in the NYTimes explains what the sanctions would have been if the US really wanted to punish Putin and his oligarchs.
Please notice how what Navalny says about the current sanctions is exactly what I’ve been telling you:
First, although Mr. Putin’s invasion has already prompted the European Union to impose sanctions on 21 officials, and the United States on seven, most of these government figures cannot be considered influential. They do not have major assets outside Russia and are irrelevant to Mr. Putin.
The dissenting voices both from inside and outside of Russia agree: the current sanctions are meaningless and ridiculous. They are not even attempting to punish the real criminals:
After all the tough talk from Western politicians, this action is mocked in Russia and even seen as a tacit encouragement to Mr. Putin and his entourage, who seem to possess some magical immunity.
Again, this is word-for-word what I wrote yesterday. Can we now remember to trust my analysis, if even a politician from a political camp I oppose profoundly reports the same things as I do?
And what Navalny is practically begging the outside world to do is punish oligarchs “blocking access to their plush London apartments” and investigate the source of their wealth.
I always wondered, which side of Navalny’s personality would win: Navany the Anti-Putin Dissident or Navalny the Ultra-Nationalist? We now have our answer. I can imagine how painful it was for Navalny to write the following:
“Crimea has always been an integral part of Russia in the hearts and minds of people,” Mr. Putin claimed this week. But even among the most nationalist and pro-Soviet of our people, a longing to restore Crimea to Russian rule faded years ago.
Yet Mr. Putin has cynically raised nationalist fervor to a fever pitch; imperialist annexation is a strategic choice to bolster his regime’s survival.
But he did it, and that’s big. I hope that the next step is saying that the Uzbeks are not that bad either.
Navalny knows that his ultra-nationalism hurts him on the international arena. This is why he ends his article as follows:
There is a common delusion among the international community that although Mr. Putin is corrupt, his leadership is necessary because his regime subdues the dark, nationalist forces that otherwise would seize power in Russia. The West should admit that it, too, has underestimated Mr. Putin’s malign intent. It is time to end the dangerous delusion that enables him.
The risks Navalny has been taking in the past weeks are enormous. And it’s one thing to take these risks to defend a cause that you believe in but a very different thing to overcome your personal inclinations and do what’s right against everything that ever pleased you. Navalny is not pro-Ukraine (read the post I linked at the beginning to find out why I say this), and his initial post in defense of Ukraine feels like he was bleeding on his keyboard to write it.
The state-sponsored Russian newspaper The Pravda of the Komsomol (I kid you not, that’s its name) published a piece that makes it seem as if many of the states were practically on the verge of the secession from the US. Lies and idiotic statements about the former (?) Cold War foe abound in Russia and the US. This is why it’s good news that Navalny got to speak out in the pages of The New York Times.
* I’m not kidding about the Uzbeks and the Azeri. See this article on Navalny’s now banned blog.
Clarissa's Blog 
Secession is always being considered somewhere. Scotland will soon vote on whether or not to separate from the UK. Secession talk in the U.S. has gone out of fashion for states. It is always an extreme and impractical idea. Nevertheless, such talk resurfaces every few decades.
Recently, it’s been in fashion for aggrieved local regions to threaten to break away from a U.S. state and attach to a neighboring state, or form a new state. Such ideas are looney, but are always alive in the dreams of dissidents. In my home state, some people in Western Maryland claim to be serious about breaking from Maryland; and people on the Eastern Shore of Maryland are always ready to secede from Maryland, if they could figure out a way to do it, which they can’t. In my lifetime, the boundary line of my own county was adjusted to unify a municipality that had been split between two counties.
Change is always happening. The disintegration of the Soviet Union was an unusually rapid and unexpected event. Such dramatic collapse of an empire is likely to be followed by a sorting-out process that will continue for some time.
After 1776, the U.S. was unstable to one extent or another for many decades, eventually fighting a bloody Civil War — 1860 to 1865 — before it finally consolidated and stabilized as a nation.
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I don’t think you’ve been paying attention. This is not like Scotland or Catalonia or anywhere else.
A couple of months ago (or less) less than 40% of Crimeans surveyed had any problem with being part of Ukraine.
The Russian army invaded Crimea shut it off from the outside world and began patroling the streets allowing no pro-Ukrainian dialogue.
The invaders and the minority of their allies declared a wildcat flash referendum (what’s the hurry?) allowing no challenge of the equation Ukraine = nazis.
The ‘referendum’ did not have continuing the status quo as an option, the question wasn’t stay in Ukraine or leave, but ‘how far do you want to leave’?
There are reports of widespread fraud, people showing up at the polling stations and immediately being put on the voting rolls and allowed to vote.
One city had 123% turnout (which should indicate that something is rotten).
The larger point, was not that Crimeans were being kept in Ukraine against their will. If they really want to leave, a Ukraine governed by the rule of law would have ways to do so involving negotiations and eventually a legtimate referendum.
This was a fast moving putsch by forces who saw they could steal part of another country by acting quickly and ruthlessly and pathological bullshitting. They could also count on the fact that the EU never acts quickly, the US is governed by an enemy of his own military who doesn’t care anything about Europe and the UK is too addicted to Russian blood money to take an ethical stand.
We are not talking about rule of law, people of good will or any kind of political process, but rather sheer brute force that does not respond to anything but the credible threat of brute force in return. And you’re helpless against it because you don’t recognize it exists.
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“The larger point, was not that Crimeans were being kept in Ukraine against their will. If they really want to leave, a Ukraine governed by the rule of law would have ways to do so involving negotiations and eventually a legtimate referendum.”
– Exactly. France is not invading Catalonia to help Catalonians decide if they want independence. And the US is not invading Quebec to promote the secession of the province from Canada. These are things people normally decide on their own, without foreign troops being present.
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Cliff and Clarissa: I absolutely respect and agree with your observations about the heavy-handed and militaristic reaction in Crimea. It was an opportunistic aftershock to the undemocratic overthrow of a legitimate and democratically elected government in Kiev. Now the aftershock in Crimea will be followed by the aftershock of escalating economic sanctions, leading to further aftershocks that cannot be predicted.
The lesson for all of us, I think, is that earthquake-like political change in one jurisdiction (the political change in Kiev) is likely to be followed by after-shocks within and outside the immediate area. Therefore, all players would be wise to exercise caution and restraint, even as they work to advance their legitimate political goals.
Obviously, in dire situations, you’re unlikely to have a “gentle” revolution. You have to break a few eggs if you want to have scrambled eggs.
For example, the American Revolution of the colonies against England was a huge earthquake-like shock, followed by aftershocks both within the new U.S., in other colonial areas, and even in Paris with the French Revolution; and a follow-on earthquake in the U.S., the Civil War of 1860-1865.
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