Showing that he means business when it comes to opposition groups, 68-year-old President Vladimir Putin ordered Moscow police to detain participants in a meeting of anti-establishment groups. U.S. and European Union officials sanctioned the Kremlin for jailing 44-year-old lead opposition leader Alexy Navalny. U.S. and EU officials can’t accept that in Russia opposition leaders, figures that threaten to overthrow the Russian Federation, get arrested. President Joe Biden, 78, has no problem joining the anti-Putin bandwagon for jailing Navalny who’s been leading a covert opposition movement to topple Putin’s government. Yet Biden, House and Senate Democrats were more than willing to charge, incarcerate and sentence form President Donald Trump for delivering a speech Jan. 6, followed by the infamous Capitol riot. Biden has no problem throwing the book at Trump, just not Navalny.
U.S. and EU officials were horrified that Moscow police cracked down on yesterday’s meeting of opposition leaders, many of whom have sworn allegiance to Navalny, now serving out a two-year-eight-month sentence in a Russian penal colony, formerly called a “gulag” in Soviet days. Showing the temerity of certain Russian groups, the opposition forum was organized by Andrei Pivovarov, executive director of Open Russia, a group funded by London-based dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once head of Russia’s Yukos Oil company and richest man, before Putin charged him with fraud and tax evasion, leading to a nine-year prison sentence. Putin agreed to let Khordorkosky out of on his sentence on the condition that he stayed out of Russia and refrained from seditious activity. Funding Open Russia, Khodrokovsky continues to push all limits with Putin.
When the forum got underway March 13, Moscow police entered the premises, arresting some 200 attendees for violating Covid-19 protocols. When there’s even the hint of seditious activity in the U.S., the Justice Department [DOJ] initiates investigations into whatever groups implicated. Condemning Putin’s crackdown on the Open Russia forum, U.S. authorities show the kind of hypocrisy that plays well in the Kremlin. Kremlin officials know about the FBI investigation into 74-year-old former President Donald Trump for alleged collusion with the Kremlin in his presidential campaign. U.S. officials don’t tolerate sedition for one second but they hail seditious Russian groups as “freedom fighters,” putting Navanly on a pedestal for working to topple Puin’s government. It’s difficult for Biden to improve U.S.-Russian relations when he backs Trotskyites like Navalny.
Unlike the U.S. that allows left wining groups to raze American cities under the excuse of “social justice,” Putin doesn’t tolerate seditious groups, especially Navalny’s, that threaten to undermine the Russian state. Backed by the U.S. and EU, Navalny and other Russian opposition groups make it difficult for Putin to have a working relationship with the West. When it comes to defeating the deadly coronavirus global pandemic, look what cooperation would do to eradicate the Covid-19 plague. Putin developed through Moscow-based Gamaleya Sciences the worlds first, maybe the best, Covid-19 vaccine, selling like hotcakes all over the planet. When the British Medical Journal Lancet evaluated the Sputnik V vaccines Feb. 2 as safe-and-92% effective, Western officials should have started placing orders. Instead the EU’s Medicine Agency, rejected Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine citing a lack of data.
Putin isn’t paranoid seeing the U.S. and EU as trying to undermine the Russian Federation. Clearly, Biden and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen back toppling Putin’s government, supporting true insurrectionists like Navalny. Putin commented the other day that so-called “insurrectionists” participating in the Jan. 6 riot were a “stroll” in the park, in comparison to the radical groups that routinely riot in American cities, using police abuse as an excuse. Unlike the U.S., Putin sees any group, left-or-right, that engages in street violence as subject to crackdown and arrest. “A significant portion of participants lacked personal protective equipment,” said the Moscow police. “Members of an organization whose activities are considered undesirable of Russian territory were among the participants,” referring to Khordorkovsky’s Open Russia group.
When it comes to setting down subversive organizations, Putin could give the CIA and FBI some lessons, since both U.S. groups tend to go after only right wing group, like the ones that showed up on Jan. 6. Putin found the Jan. 6 riot laughable in terms of the opposition actually put up by the allegedly pro-Trump crowd. It didn’t take long for QAnon shaman Jacob Chansley, AKA Jake Angeli, to start crying like a baby after his arrest, complaining that D.C’s jail-food wasn’t organic. “The finale of the short forum was very symbolic: Deputies in police vans and masked police twisting peoples arms,” detainee Ilya Yasim wrote on Facebook. “But no one promised us freedom on a silver platter. Russia will still be free,” pointing to the zealotry of protesters funded by Khordorkovsky and other opposition groups. No government, West or East, should tolerate open insurrection.
