Tapes about Navalny won an Oscar

The awarding of the Oscar to the authors of the documentary about the Russian opposition leader Oleksiy Navalny sparked active discussions about the role of the opposition in Russia in the context of the Russian war against Ukraine.

The film’s director, Daniel Roer, dedicated the award to all political prisoners in the world and said that Navalny is currently in solitary confinement because of “Putin’s unjust aggressive war in Ukraine.”

But while the award became an occasion for new statements in support of Oleksii Navalny, imprisoned since 2021, and indications of the brutality of Putin’s regime, there are also warnings, in particular from Ukrainian activists.

The caveats relate in particular to the fact that the film’s award draws a disproportionately large amount of attention to the Russian opposition against the background of its inability, and especially sharp critics say that it is unwilling to take a timely stand against Russian chauvinism and invading imperialism.

The tape “Navalny” tells how he was treated in Germany after being poisoned in Russia in August 2020, and then he himself participated in the investigation of the attempt on his life.

The then Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, stated that her government had no doubt that Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent of the Novichok class.

An international journalistic investigation has uncovered a group of Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents who investigators say were involved in tracking down and attempting to assassinate Navalny.

In January 2021, Alexei Navalny returned to Moscow and was arrested immediately at the airport, and then sentenced to many years in prison for a 2014 criminal case that the European Court of Human Rights called illegal.

“My husband is in prison only for telling the truth. My husband is in prison just for standing up for democracy. Oleksiy, I dream of the day when you will be free and when our country will be free,” Yulia Navalna, who was at the ceremony with two adult children, said in Los Angeles.

A Russian figure who has been living in the USA for many years, Garry Kasparovsuggested that an Oscar for the documentary “Navalny” can attract more attention not only to his fate, but also to the true essence of the dictatorship.

Another well-known opponent of Putin William Browder expressed the opinion that the tape about Navalny “should be seen by every American to understand that Putin is a cold-blooded murderer who must be stopped.”

But Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser in the administration of the Ukrainian president, took advantage Twitterto show dissatisfaction with the honor of the tape about Navalny.

He called the tape a “manifesto”…, “in which domestic Russian politics pours out.”

“If “Oscar” is outside the context of the war in Ukraine and the mass genocide of Ukrainians, then why constantly talk about humanism and justice?” – reproaches Mykhailo Podolyak.

Political scientist Anton Shekhovtsovwho researches far-right political parties and movements in the West and their ties with Moscow, notes that now “many Ukrainians are disappointed” that the film was given an “Oscar”, because, he writes, “they have many reasons not to trust Navalny and his motor”.

From the Ukrainian side, it is often reminded that Oleksiy Navalny did not condemn Russia’s wars of aggression in the Caucasus and did not unequivocally oppose Russia’s seizure of the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula in 2014, although he condemned Putin’s methods.

The Mayor of Lviv Andriy Sadovyi announced in Twitter a sarcastic post, comparing Navalny to a “spoiled sandwich”, apparently alluding to how Navalny once declared that Russia should not return the captured Crimea to Ukraine, because the peninsula, as he put it then, “is not a sandwich”.

“Navalnyi is a sandwich that was packed in a lunchbox and carried around the world as an example of the fact that there is still opposition in Russia. They are discussing its recipe, stale bread, spoiled cheese and the specific smell of Russian propaganda, which now smells of the Oscar statuette,” the Lviv mayor wrote.