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Alexei Navalny’s Big Shift on Crimea Is a Blow to Putin’s Imperial Designs [1]

['Casey Michel', 'Luke Johnson', 'Ben Makuch', 'Tori Otten', 'Alex Shephard', 'Jason Linkins', 'Timothy Noah']

Date: 2023-03-02

The problem for figures like Navalny and Khodorkovsky lies not in this recognition, however belated it may be, but in whether Russians are ready to hear what they have to say. Putin hardly operates in a vacuum, and there is little indication that the majority of Russians are opposed to his revanchism. Indeed, the single most popular moment of Putin’s presidency came when he initially launched his invasion of Ukraine, and when he seized his first Ukrainian province, in 2014. (There’s a reason Putin’s recent decade in power was built on this so-called “Crimean consensus.”) Even as his invasion turned sour over the past year, Russians have hardly evinced any significant opposition. At best, it remains a nation saturated in apathy—unwilling to face the legacies of Russian colonialism, let alone move against a regime dedicated to shattering Ukraine.

But with Navalny’s and Khodorkovsky’s recent shifts, prominent anti-Putin voices are at least willing to gesture at the imperialistic elephant in the room. And other voices have begun picking up the thread. “I think that Russian culture has a large imperial element, and the time has come to deal with it,” noted Russian sociologist Grigory Yudin said last week. “The collapse of an empire is a good moment to do that.”

Yudin is exactly right. And the good news is that this is a model we’ve seen play out successfully, time and again across the European continent, when listing European empires finally realized their best days of colonization were behind them. It’s a pattern we saw emerge in France after Algeria’s triumph, in the Netherlands after Indonesia’s anti-colonial victory, in Portugal after Angola and Mozambique secured their independence. Over and again, the shock of military defeat has ruptured the dreams of dying European empires—and set these former empires on a path toward eventual democratization.

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[1] Url: https://newrepublic.com/article/170865/alexei-navalny-crimea-ukraine-putin

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