Navalny and Putin: the next chapter

‘Arrest me? Why would anyone arrest me?’ said Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny to reporters last week as he boarded a Moscow-bound plane. Four hours later he was in jail — but not before spending an hour circling above the Russian capital as riot police shut down the airport where 2,000 supporters awaited him and diverted his plane to another.

Did Navalny truly believe he would not be arrested? Did anyone? A week before his planned return from Berlin, where he had been recovering from being poisoned by Russia’s security services, Navalny posted a video on social media in which he openly taunted Vladimir Putin. ‘Putin has been stamping his little feet, demanding that they do everything to prevent me from returning,’ he said. ‘I’m arriving Sunday on Pobeda Airlines… Come and meet me.’

Putin — notoriously sensitive to comments on his diminutive stature — did exactly that. To nobody’s surprise except perhaps Navalny’s, the Kremlin is now preparing to throw the book at him. A court hastily convened at the police station where he was being held remanded Navalny in custody for jumping bail and is likely to convert a suspended 2017 three-year fraud sentence to real jail time. A second world war veteran has brought a slander case against him, carrying a potential five-year sentence, and federal prosecutors have been preparing fresh embezzlement charges since December — a case that Navalny described in his video message as ‘demonstrably false’.

It’s hard to see Navalny’s return as anything but an insanely brave — and insanely provocative — act of self-immolation. Russia’s prison service had clearly stated that it had a warrant for Navalny’s immediate arrest for failing to show up to a November bail hearing. And for years, Navalny’s coruscating YouTube exposés of official corruption and calls for tactical voting against Putin’s ruling party have provided a steady drumbeat of criticism that have seen him grow from a mere irritant to an open threat to the Kremlin’s power base.