Navalny calculated that this process would be watched and documented through to the very end. He hoped that might be significant, perhaps even sufficient.
Do you remember the guy who flew over Belarus and his plane was redirected to seize him? Any news? I do not even remember his name.
Going back to Russia was a stupid move, he could have had much more visibility from the EU.
He wasn't doing that for the amusement of the West; he was doing it for the Russians.
He was pardoned by Lukashenka last year, since then there was little news, but this week he showed up in a video stream. I found out in Polish media, was very hard to find an English article about it, found just one:
https://www.txtreport.com/life/2024-02-14-%22i-ve-built-the-...
Lukashenka is not better than Putin, many oppositionists are rotting in prisons, but for some reason (young age?) he let Roman go, probably after some devil's deal.
Not all bravery is stupid. When people point to so-called inevitabilities of human character, as Putin and his ilk often do, I'll recall Navalny's name.
I'll also recall the victories that were only possible thanks to people of similar courage. Things looked as helpess for Václav Havel, but without him we wouldn't have had the Velvet Revolution.
I remember their names.
Prigozhin, technically?
They lack secure communication tools in the first place. I believe Telegram is backdoored by FSB and Whatsapp just bent over without fight.
If Russians had any of that, they won’t even need the communication means in the first place, to overthrow their dictator. When there’s a mass of people enough to fight the regime, the regime won’t even fight. They only fight the battles they believe they can easily win.
The truth is, Russians are, en masse, don’t care or even support all that. Those folks aren’t on Hacker News, they aren’t in any English-speaking communities as well. They barely speak even their own (complicated enough) language.
The so-called ‘liberal’ Russians try to persuade us that Russians en-masse don’t support all that, ’Putin’s war‘ they say [1], etc. But there are literally hundreds of thousands of Russian fight against Ukraine right now, and there are 400,000 dead [2]. They are Russians, aren’t they? Russians have the very long history of wars they started on their neighbours.
Is it Telegram being (possibly) backdoored or lack of Signal being too popular among Russians that stops them from growing in-house dictators and other murderers?
[1] As a very simple illustration, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39395697
[2] You may need a translator for this, casualties is the first number: https://www.mil.gov.ua/news/2024/02/16/za-dobu-sili-oboroni-...
> Только синие они и не крапа золота.
