Jailed Navalny calls for anti-war protests across Russia on Sunday | Hacker News Reader

Jailed Navalny calls for anti-war protests across Russia on Sunday

reuters.com

111 pointsawb27 comments

Serious question. How has this guy not fallen out of his jail cell window? What are the politics that keeps him alive?

Don't want to create a martyr...

I'm pleasantly surprised he was able to get the message out at all...

Per the article "He is able to publish social media posts through his lawyers and allies.".

Although this will be the last message that Russians will see from him on Instagram since Instagram will be banned in Russia as of March 14th (tomorrow).

Translation of his post....

"The most important people" is a stupid expression. Well, how do you define them? All important, and it is impossible to weigh all the factors that determine the importance of people.

In peacetime.

And now, I think, we can say that the most important people on the planet - those who in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities went out and will go again to anti-war rallies.Mad maniac Putin will most quickly be stopped by the people of Russia now if they oppose the war.

And it's a tough marathon. Fight for exhaustion. With fear and arrests. But it's definitely not a futile fight. Not a symbolic gesture of desperation.

Look even official, court sociology. They say 71% are for the war, 29% are against. Even if we believe it, it turns out that every third person supports the anti-war movement at the start. And this was before the war hit us too, with sanctions and economic disaster. Until the main horror of the war - coffins with sons returning to their mothers.

I am speaking to you as a viewer. Even the official figure of the losses of the Russian army - 498 people - was not mentioned on TV NEVER.

The picture of what is happening, drawn by Putin’s propaganda: there are almost no deaths on both sides, the Ukrainian army has fled, there is almost no destruction, “gangs of Nazis” have settled in some places, but they will soon be destroyed. Ukrainians meet Russian tanks with flowers.

To live such a picture of the world - even in the minds of the most stupid and stubborn - is not long.

Putin needs some plausible excuse to scale back his "special operation" without looking like a lightweight or a loser, and big protests throughout Russia would give him just that. So this is a very shrewd move by Navalny that just might work to tip things over, even though you would rightly expect such protests to be generally ineffective.

I agree that Putin could be looking for an excuse to pull back but this doesn't seem like the right one. His story is that Russians support him.

He has to be able to claim some sort of victory that fits with the denazification/liberation/"Ukrainian people love Russia" narratives. Maybe he'll be satisfied to turn Ukraine into cold war Germany with a wall through the middle of Kiev?

But even if he finds a way to pull out and save face, will the sanctions be lifted? I can't see that happening. It's not ok to go blow up your neighbor's cities then just pack up and go home. There would have to be reparations and Putin is clearly never going to agree with that.

He could claim "mission accomplished" and have at least a colorable argument that he's right. Reparations could be covertly agreed to and take the form of, e.g. significant liberal/pro-market reforms in both Russia and Ukraine to create a real, workable long-term alternative to NATO and perhaps even EU membership. Think the Chinese development model. That would mean Putin effectively gets the Russian Empire redux he wants, and stops squandering these countries' hidden long-term potential.

This would be a horrible approach, surely. He would give his citizens the precedent that exerting pressure on the regime yields results.

These are not normal circumstances though, everyone ought to be aware of that. And even then, "exerting pressure" is not the same thing as, e.g. trying to oust Putin. One can very much allow the former and not the latter.

Well, even mainstream Russian TV started to criticize the war. Recently there were two guests, one a film director and another a member of their Duma (parliament), and they both said the war has to stop (for different reasons). Famously, the director said that the suffering of one group of innocent people (real of alleged - the Russians in Donbas) will not be alleviated by suffering of another innocent group of people. This sane rhetoric is quite rare in public Russian TV so my guess is they are preparing some room for potential retreat, or whatever they will call it.

This is was a bit of a misinterpretation of the exchange in the viral tweet I think you're referring to. Consider as well that the other 7 guests, as well as the next three days' incarnation of the talk show, were all-in on pro-regime propaganda. Tthat Russia is just pre-empting an inevitable war against the US and NATO in Ukraine; that Biden has bioweapons labs in Ukraine; that the Americans launched their russophobic sanctions with the "special military operation" as an excuse, and an absurdly implausible excuse at that; also that said sanctions will hurt the Americans a lot more than they hurt Russians.

A lot of dictators have either propped up a specific opposition. Sometimes the person being propped up knows they're a puppet. Sometimes they don't.

I'm not necessarily saying that's what's happening here. But navanly isn't the savior that most russians would back. The really strong and unifying opposition though generally disappears.

Kind of like how Microsoft propped up Apple in the 90s.

Gotta keep an illusion of competitiveness to avoid accumulating too many targets on your back.

They didnt, but they sure build great PR story around it over the years.

Microsoft was involved in a lawsuit after paying one of Apple contractors to steal QuickTime code. "investing" in Apple was part of the settlement.

https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_...

"David Boies, attorney for the DoJ, noted that John Warden, for Microsoft, had omitted to quote part of a handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million. "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5TdqfNE1QU

No need. The popularity of Navalny in the West and in Russia is wildly different.

> a message on Navalny's Instagram account said

So, that'll reach zero Russians?

Firstly, Instagram isn't blocked yet. Roskomnadzor has decided to give people some time to prepare. Secondly, at this point everyone knows what a VPN is. Not everyone uses one though. Thirdly, he also obviously has a VKontakte profile[1] but didn't post that particular message there.

[1] https://vk.com/navalny

edit: he did post it but on his team's page https://vk.com/wall-55284725_1573788

I don't understand the balance of civil rights and government power in Russia. It's obviously not a free state, and the government has a pretty free hand to arrest protesters, suppress the press, etc. But Navalny is somehow still able to communicate from jail? Wouldn't it be easy to prevent that, for Putin or whoever else he annoys? Does his high profile make it harder to keep him incommunicado (ed: or heavily censor his comms)? Or should we assume that "from his Instagram" doesn't necessarily require the actual man's input, as long as the account is controlled by people who (even approximately) agree with him?

From my understanding, to protect themselves and claim that they were "just following orders" Russian corrections officers follow the letter of the law, which (as of now) still allows personal attorney visits.

The state might not make it easy, and move the prisoner to a facility in some remote part of Siberia, but unless rule books are re-written, the corrections officers have to reluctantly comply.

Result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XLwHzZo_mo

He's a hero imo

"But on review, Amnesty International concluded that comments made by Navalny some 15 years ago, including a video which appears to compare immigrants to cockroaches, amounted to "hate speech" which was incompatible with the label "prisoner of conscience"."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56181084

note to others: there are different levels of asshole. There are those who are bigots and there are those who would murder a nation to assuage his ego, they are usually not the same.

Indeed you are right, no moral equivalence is implied.

But in the long run, white supremacists should not be looked to as an appropriate or effective opposition to Putin.

And it is interesting that the western media can't find any one else to be the face of liberal democracy in Russia, is it because they can't find one or because they are just too lazy to check Navalny's actual position on things.

Everything that can take down Putin is an ally of mine.

Once Putin is taken down, we will discuss about the appropriateness of this or the other leader.

There are no heroes, when it comes to politics.

https://archive.ph/t6yUb

This should have more upvotes.

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