Just because Russia has been involved in a myriad of injustices both at home and abroad doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be alarmed with the news of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny being poisoned with a variant of the Novichok nerve agent.
It’s the Kremlin who invented this agent, and only the Kremlin has access to it. This is the same agent that was used to attack former KGB spy Sergei Skripal with his daughter Yulia in Britain in 2018.
Britain and Germany were quick to condemn Russia. German Chancellor Anglea Merkel said that Navalny is “definitely the victim of a crime,” adding that “they wanted to silence him.”
“There’re very serious questions now which only the Russian government can and must answer,” Merkel said. “The world will wait for an answer.”
The answer is simple. Time and time again the Kremlin has been instigating crimes, instability, hate and chaos on the international arena while silencing any sense of democracy and freedom at home. It’s becoming more difficult to find anything bad in international news that is not related somehow to Russia.
We in Ukraine are reminded of the Kremlin’s involvement every day as we report on Russia’s war on Ukraine both on the military and informational fronts. Close to 15,000 people have died because of the war.
The Kremlin’s involvement is also seen now in Belarus, where the Soviet structure is trying to silence hundreds of thousands of people who have been taking to the streets to demand strongman Alexander Lukashenko to step down after 26 years of authoritarian rule.
If post-Soviet states notice the success of the opposition against dictators, that will give hope for opposition elsewhere to succeed in establishing democracy — not something Russia would ever want.
Franak Viacorka, a Belarusian journalist, put it well in one of his recent op-eds saying that the “events in Belarus are a reminder that the fall of the USSR is actually an ongoing event that continues to shape the global geopolitical climate.” He said the EuroMaidan Revolution had a particularly profound impact on Belarusians, “many of whom empathized with the Ukrainian struggle to rid itself of an authoritarian ruler.”
This is why it is important for the West not to underplay the role of Eastern Europe on the geopolitical arena — the success of the region’s democracies have a profound impact on democracies across the globe.
Perhaps the Baltics understand this the best as they have quickly implemented sanctions against 30 Belarusians officials, including Lukashenko.
The rest of the EU has been more cautious with their response. Even though Merkel condemned the Kremlin with using a Novichok nerve agent, she still advocates for the construction of the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 pipeline project.
What the West should do is to implement more sanctions against Russia and Belarus while also support democratic initiatives within the post-Soviet countries, which aren’t just fighting for their own freedoms and democracies — they are standing on the frontline of global democracy.
