With Alexei Navalny’s death, Russia has taken another step into Stalinist barbarity

Editorial: That Navalny lost his life at the same time that world leaders were meeting at the Munich Security Conference doesn’t feel like much of a coincidence

Navalny’s death is a tragedy for Russia and for the whole world (Alexei Navalny/Instagram)

The circumstances in which Alexei Navalny died are, typically, unclear, but they are plainly suspicious. And so, with his death, Russia has taken another step into Stalinist barbarity.

He was, after all, in the “care” of the Russian prison service, incarcerated in an Arctic penal colony – where he should never have been sent in the first place – and generally maltreated in solitary confinement, denied healthcare and his wife’s letters.

Navalny was the nearest thing Russia had to a leader of the opposition. Therefore, his jailers would have known full well that he was an enemy of Vladimir Putin. They did not need to be ordered to mistreat him. Whether Navalny was directly poisoned, say, or merely succumbed to his depredations and collapsed, he was still assassinated by the Putin regime.