Vladimir Kara-Murza writes:

There are many ways to kill an opponent. Sometimes it’s done out in the open, for the whole world to see — as happened with Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was gunned down in plain sight of the Kremlin by an Interior Ministry officer. Often it’s done with techniques that aim to maintain plausible deniability, such as poisoning — a favored method practiced by Soviet and Russian security services against opponents at home and abroad.

Sometimes there are near-misses, as with the author of this article, and, most prominently, with anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny, who last year survived a chemical weapons poisoning linked to Russia’s Federal Security Service. After recuperating abroad, Navalny — currently Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent adversary — returned to Russia in January, only to be imprisoned by the authorities under a false charge that has long been debunked by the European Court of Human Rights.

Now the Kremlin is trying to kill him again — this time slowly, painfully and in the confinement of the maximum-security Pokrov IK-2 penal colony some 50 miles east of Moscow.

Navalny is usually not one to complain. Whatever happens to him — be it his multiple arrests, an acid attack on his eyes that nearly cost him his vision or last year’s near-fatal poisoning — he takes it with a stiff upper lip and in good humor. So when he began to experience acute back pains about a month ago, while still in the pretrial detention center, he kept quiet. But he stood throughout his trial because it was too painful for him to sit down.

Alarm bells went off last week when authorities prevented Navalny’s lawyers Olga Mikhailova and Vadim Kobzev from seeing him in the Pokrov colony. When they finally gained access to their client, they saw a man hardly able to walk, struggling to get off his bed, unable to feel his right leg, and suffering sharp and constant back pain. “Navalny forbade us from making this public, but … we decided to come out into the open,” wrote Kobzev. “They are deliberately turning him into a cripple,” Mikhailova added. [Continue reading…]