Alexei Navalny – seen as a pro-democracy, transparency, anti-corruption Russian nationalist gadfly – died while on a walk in his Siberian prison. He was serving a long sentence, one the Biden administration raged about: the Russian judiciary had convicted him of several crimes including fraud, embezzlement, “inciting extremist activities” and “rehabilitating Nazi ideology.”
I’m sure Donald Trump can sense the irony.
Navalny’s recent incarceration in Siberia comes of the heels of a less reported imprisonment and death of an actual pro-democracy, transparency, anti-corruption US, UK, and Ukrainian gadfly – who died of untreated pneumonia in a Ukrainian prison. Gonzalo Lira, a 55-year-old American citizen, married father of two, was a journalist and commentator. He had been charged by Kiev, without a date or plan for a trial, with “justifying Russian aggression against Ukraine.” Lira was said to have violated Ukrainian criminal code, a code Lincoln, Wilson and FDR would have enthusiastically enforced.
Lira and Navalny criticized and annoyed certain governments. One did so as a politician, backed by several countries that, as a matter of policy, constantly call for regime change in Russia; the other criticized the Ukrainian government, for its US-pressed bombing the breakaway Donbass region, its refusal to abide by the Minsk Accords, its Nazi influences within the Army and government, and its efforts to join NATO. Lira also reported what he saw during the past few years of war – Kiev bleeding billions of Western dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, and displacing nearly half of its population, because, as a matter of policy circa 2024, Kiev and its US master, will not negotiate with Putin.
The United States government was involved in the fates of both of these men. Navalny received continual support, funding and media advocacy from the West, in hopes of regime change in Russia; as for Lira, he was a US citizen by birth (born in California) and as an American, was due legal and welfare advocacy from the US Embassy in Kiev. Instead of support, he was ridiculed on the front pages of mainstream media in the US for his eyewitness reporting from inside Ukraine, and received no financial or any other kind of support as he served as one of the few objective American voices watching and reporting on this expensive and destructive proxy campaign. The US embassy in Kiev is large and quite well staffed. Yet, the embassy said little, and did even less for Gonzalo Lira.
DC’s upside-down morality is on constant display, but with these accidental examples of two middle-aged men, both working to expose government wrongdoing, only one was spending millions of dollars with connections to many European and NATO leaders, and their intelligence agencies, as this video illustrates. Only one was celebrated in the West, to include his wife’s invitation and presence at the most recent “Davos of Defense” three day military conference, along with the US Vice President and key EU leadership. Only one was a “democratic hero.”
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/02/karen-kwiatkowski/navalny-and-lira-a-case-study-in-western-hypocrisy/