The Wall Street Journal raised plenty of eyebrows when they recently reported that United States intelligence agencies do not believe that Vladimir Putin gave the order to have Alexei Navalny murdered in a labor camp located near the Arctic Circle. Many seasoned foreign policy analysts quickly weighed in, saying that the odds of someone at the camp going rogue and doing such a thing without getting the go-ahead from Mad Vlad would have been very low. But it’s no longer simply critics in the West questioning the story. Even the Kremlin has issued a statement saying that the report was nonsensical. They aren’t flatly claiming that Putin personally ordered the killing, but they’re not really denying it either. (Daily Beast)
Russia has dismissed a report claiming Vladimir Putin did not order the killing of famed dissident Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison in February.
Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, told Russia’s state-run media on Saturday that he had seen the Wall Street Journal report, which cited an assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies, and that there was little reason to believe it. He derided its logic and said it wasn’t worth looking into.
“I would not say that this is high-quality material that deserves any attention. Some very empty reasoning,” Peskov said.
We’ve covered the activities and adventures of Alexei Navalny here quite a bit over the years. He was an ever-present thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side, which has not traditionally led to a long and prosperous life for most Putin critics. Honestly, I’m rather shocked that he survived as long as he did. When the Kremlin initially failed to kill Navalny with poison, they waited for him to recover enough to go to Moscow and stand trial on trumped-up charges of violating his parole. He stayed in a Moscow jail through several bogus trials before being sent to the Arctic Circle. Sadly, the news of his death up there was likely unavoidable.
At first glance, it might seem odd that the Kremlin would knock down the Wall Street Journal report. After all, they were providing the perfect cover for Putin, suggesting that someone else must have been to blame or that perhaps it had been some sort of terrible accident. But that’s not the way that Putin tends to operate. He doesn’t tolerate dissent in his own country (obviously) but he’s somewhat subtle in how he handles things. He doesn’t simply march dissenters out into the street and have them gunned down in a public spectacle, but he also seems to make sure that any other potential dissenters get the message.
You will recall that Yevgeny Prigozhin was openly talking about the possibility of a Russian revolution during his brief revolt against Putin. You remember what happened to him. His brief efforts to mend fences with the Russian President were cut short when he failed to survive a tragic accidental plane crash. (And he wasn’t even flying a Boeing.) Other Putin critics have mysteriously suffered a loss of balance while walking near windows on the upper floors of hospital buildings. Vladimir Putin doesn’t put out press releases taking credit for those deaths, but he also makes it clear that similar “accidents” probably await anyone else who begins to get any ideas. Navalny was only the latest one to go down. He was far from the first.
The thing I find myself wondering about now is whether or not our American intel agencies really believe that Putin didn’t give the order for Navalny’s death. Could this have been some sort of organized misinformation campaign designed to throw the Russians off the scent? Another disturbing possibility is that Joe Biden was somehow trying to provide cover for Putin. Or maybe our intel folks simply screwed up. We may never know. Just don’t expect Vladimir Putin to suddenly begin behaving like a saint out of the blue.