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October 28, 2024 - 6:00pm
The widow of the late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny has questioned the morality of the West supplying weapons to Ukraine in an interview with German newspaper Die Zeit.
Asked whether it was right for the West to send weapons shipments to Ukraine, Yulia Navalnaya offered an equivocal response. “The war was unleashed by Vladimir Putin, but the bombs are also hitting Russians,” she said. “All Russian troops must be withdrawn from Ukrainian territory immediately. The war must be ended immediately.”
Navalnaya stressed that the war is bolstering Putin domestically, but she remained unconvinced over who would win in the end. “There are two sides to the matter,” she said. “I understand the Ukrainians, their country was invaded. The Ukrainians see the invasion as a sign of Putin’s weakness, and that is important,” she said. “On the other hand, people in Russia are outraged: ‘What? Our country is being attacked?’ That brings people together, which in turn benefits the propaganda”.
Her husband, Putin’s most prominent critic who died in prison in February, has been held up as a hero in the West for drawing attention to crime and corruption in Russia. The criticism comes as Navalnaya promotes a new, posthumous memoir of her husband’s collected prison diaries, titled Patriot, which she helped assemble. In February, Russia announced that Navalny had died after falling unconscious during a walk. The US has blamed Russia for the his death.
That his wife has sympathy for Russians has come as an unpleasant surprise for some. Roderich Kiesewetter, a member of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, said Navalnaya’s comments came across as supportive of Russia’s attack on Ukraine. “It is not only Putin’s war, but obviously Russia’s war. Instead of strengthening the legitimate right of self-defence of #Ukraine, with such statements she comes across more as an advocate of imperial Russian claims,” he wrote.
It is estimated that there are around 1,500 political prisoners in Russia. In August this year, there was the most high profile prisoner swap between the West and Russia since the Cold War, which saw the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Shortly after Navalny’s death, it was reported that there were initial plans in the works for his release.
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SubscribeYulia Navalnaya’s words are wise. There’s nothing wrong with them to criticize. Indeed, they should be heeded. Too many people are viewing the war between Russia and Ukraine as the Manichaeans viewed life millennia ago — a battle between good and evil.
It’s true that Manichaeism at its height was one of the most widespread religions in the world. Manichaean churches and scriptures existed as far east as the Han dynasty and as far west as the Roman Empire. But that kind of thinking was too primitive to survive. It died out as a religion. We need to kill it off in geopolitics too.
In its place we ought to adopt the philosophy of a wise Russian, who like Alexey Navalny learned through suffering in a brutal Russian prison camp what so many of us who never suffer fail to learn. He said: