Alexei Navalny Speaks Out Against Mobilisation in Court
During a hearing at the Kovrov District Court in Russia’s Vladimir Region, where he was challenging a warning issued by the prison authorities over alleged unlawful activity, Alexei Navalny spoke out against the mobilisation announced by Vladimir Putin.
Navalny said the authorities were sending more and more people to war in order to continue Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine. He said the war was driven by Putin’s determination to remain in power at any cost. Navalny stressed that the war had been a crime from the very beginning, and that mobilisation would only increase its scale.
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And already now, the main thing is clear: that this crime,
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this criminal war that is underway,
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this criminal war of aggression,
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it is worsening, deepening. And in
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all of this, Putin is trying to involve as
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many people as possible. He wants to stain
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hundreds of thousands of people with this blood. And,
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of course, this will lead to enormous
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tragedies, to a huge number of deaths.
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And it certainly will not lead to anything good,
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it will not and cannot. That is to say
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the scale of this crime and the number of
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those involved are growing, and this is being done
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solely so that one man can hold on to his
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personal power. In order to prolong his
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personal power, Putin
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is tormenting a neighboring country, killing people
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there, and is now throwing into this meat grinder
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of war yet another enormous number of Russian
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citizens, who, generally speaking, ought to
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simply live normal lives and go about their own
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business. So, of course, this was a crime,
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and now it has become a crime of a much greater scale.