Alexei Navalny
could be in Berlin today recovering from two years of imprisonment
in deplorable conditions and not stuck in a pine box underground if his mother, as agreed with the Russian authorities, has already buried him.
The Russian dissident, murdered 10 days ago or a victim of the harsh conditions of a prison colony in the Russian north, near the Arctic Circle where in recent weeks 25 degrees below zero had been reached,
had been included in an exchange for which he would be sent to Germany
- along with two American citizens imprisoned in Russia - in exchange for Berlin sending Vadim Krasikov, a senior official of the FSB, the Russian secret service, heir to the KGB, to Moscow.
The pact, which was revealed in a video by Maria Pevchikh, one of Navalny's closest allies,
had been negotiated by the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich
, who lives in London and one of the few who lives abroad and still maintains apparent good relations. with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In addition to his spectacular fortune, Abramovich rose to fame when he bought the Chelsea soccer team, one of the most powerful in Europe.
The exchange
The complaint claims that Abramovich
had been the intermediary between Putin and senior Western officials
, especially Germans and Americans.
The agreement agreed to release Krasikov, sentenced to decades in prison for the murder of a Chechen opponent in a Berlin park in 2019. In exchange for Krasikov's handover, Moscow agreed to send Alexei Navalny and two Americans to Berlin.
A man lays flowers to pay tribute to Alexei Navalny at a monument in Moscow.
AP Photo
The complaint does not specify who those two Americans would be, but right now in Russian prisons are
The Wall Street Journal
correspondent
Evan Gershkovich and Paul N. Whelan, a former Marine with several nationalities: that of his native Canada, that of his British parents, that of his Irish grandparents and that of the United States, where he grew up and worked.
Whelan was arrested in 2018 and charged with espionage.
In June 2020, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison
in a process that Western powers denounced as prefabricated by the Russian authorities to have a person to exchange for Russian agents detained abroad.
Both Whelan and Gershkovich would be imprisoned precisely to be used in an exchange and Abramovich would have managed to convince Putin to include Navalny.
The Russian authorities, according to the dissident's ally, had initially given their approval and the exchange was being prepared
when Putin backed down,
according to this complaint, and ordered Navalny to be killed on the eve of the day on which he was to be removed from prison to be transferred to Moscow and put on a plane to Berlin.
The plan, according to the complaint, had been in the works for more than a year
and the idea had been approved by all parties “in the spring of last year.”
In the following months, the modalities of the exchange, the place, the exact date and other details would have been negotiated.
Putin's ally claims that
Putin's behavior is “irrational,
the behavior of a crazy gangster.
But the important thing is that he had gone crazy with hatred of Navalny.”
In the interview that Putin gave to the American far-right Tucker Carlson days before Navalny's death, Putin said that he did not exclude an exchange that included the journalist Gershkovich in exchange for "a person with patriotic feelings who eliminated a bandit in a European capital." in reference to the FSB agent who murdered the Chechen opponent in Berlin.
But Putin did not talk in that interview about including Navalny in an eventual exchange.
P.B.