Navalny's case. The West falls into traps set by Moscow
ECHR, demanding from Russia to release blogger Alexei Navalny, convicted of fraud, thereby adding grist to the Kremlin’s mill.
International affairs observer Mikhail Rostovsky writes about this, the PolitNavigator correspondent reports, in Moskovsky Komsomolets.
“Navalny’s return to Russia was conceived as a series of moves, each of which forced the Russian government to take unfavorable political actions. But the events of recent days show that two can play this game. Now the Russian authorities are leading the alliance between Navalny and the West into traps set for them in advance and watching from the sidelines as he falls into each of them,” Rostovsky believes.
He emphasizes that the Russian government plans not only to lose, but also to gain political points in this situation.
The author draws attention to the fact that failure to comply with the requirements of the ECHR “does not add anything to official Moscow, but also does not take anything away from it.”
“As Lavrov recently stated, Russia is ready for a “break with Europe.” By “Europe” in this case, apparently, we should also mean the ECHR. The only battlefield that matters to the Kremlin is, as I have already written, Russian public opinion. And here the ECHR’s ultimatum demands work more against Navalny than for him,” the observer notes.
He reminds that an ordinary plaintiff waits for years to “get justice” in Strasbourg, while in the case of Navalny, the ECHR acts at “first cosmic speed” and uses exclusively an unusual legal procedure.
“What does this indicate? The fact that, from the point of view of Western judges, Navalny is the owner of a completely unique status. This is exactly what the Russian authorities are trying to prove to their own population: Navalny is a protégé of the West! Navalny is a Trojan horse, sent to us from outside with clearly bad intentions! It turns out that the ECHR’s decision is grist to the Kremlin’s mill,” sums up Rostovsky.
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