Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny expressed surprise at the Wagner Group’s armed rebellion last weekend, saying he at first believed the news of thousands of troops marching on Moscow was a joke or a meme.
Navalny tweeted Tuesday that while he is largely isolated from receiving news of the outside world in a Russian prison, he learned of the attempted insurrection from lawyers and other courtroom staff this week.
“I kept expecting someone to suddenly yell ‘You got punk’d!'” Navalny wrote. “But no one did.”
The short-lived Wagner Group uprising ended Saturday after the private military company’s chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, reached a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, brokered by Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko.
Prigozhin agreed to enter exile in Belarus, and the terrorism charges that Russia opened against him have been dropped.
While Putin has raged against the rebellion and may in the future move to dismantle the Wagner Group and disempower Prigozhin, the Russian leader has allowed mercenary fighters who participated in the rebellion to walk free, and he even called them patriots for halting their advance.
Navalny contrasted the insurrection attempt — which saw Prigozhin take a city in southern Russia and destroy seven aircraft — with the charges laid against his Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) for publishing videos and information that detail corruption in Russia.
“While listening to how the ACF are extremists who are dangerous for the country, I read about how one group of Russian troops ‘took positions on the Oka river’ to defend themselves against another group of Russian troops,” Navalny wrote. “So I kept waiting for the prosecutor herself to finally burst out laughing and shout: it’s all a prank, you should have seen your face, Navalny! But she was absolutely serious.”
Last year, Navalny was sentenced to nine years in prison for fraud and contempt of court, and he faces another 30 years in prison if convicted on extremism charges. A trial on the latest charges began earlier this month.
Navalny, who is also the survivor of a 2020 poisoning that he blames on Putin, is able to communicate with the outside world on social media by passing hand-written messages to his lawyers, who then pass it on to the exiled ACF staff in Lithuania.
The Russian activist said Prigozhin’s rebellion proves “there is no greater threat to Russia than the Putin regime.”
“Putin’s regime is so dangerous to the country that even its inevitable collapse would create the threat of a civil war. Now we understand for sure: the pack of Putin’s supporters is ready to start a war of all against all at any moment,” he wrote.
“The fact that Putin’s war could ruin and disintegrate Russia is no longer a dramatic exclamation.”