Bari Weiss, The Free Press, Feb. 16, 2024
Alexei Navalny had a choice.
After he was poisoned by Moscow in August of 2020, after he emerged from a monthlong coma in a Berlin hospital, after he overcame the terrible effects of the nerve agent Novichok, which was developed by the Soviet Union, he could have stayed in exile in Germany.
He had already become the most important dissident in Russia. The choice—certainly the rational choice—would have been to remain outside of Putin’s reach.
But Navalny made the opposite one.
“There was never a question for me whether to return or not,” he said upon his recovery in Berlin. “They are doing everything to scare me. But what they are doing there is not of much interest to me. Russia is my country. Moscow is my city. I miss them.”
So he flew back to Moscow. He was arrested at the airport on January 17, 2021. Then he was sentenced on bogus charges of embezzlement, extremism, and fraud and sent to a penal colony 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle. They called it “Polar Wolf.” The punishment was 19 years.
