Nigeria’s former minister for foreign affairs, Bolaji Akinyemi, has said that Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, is involved in the death of major Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, as nothing can happen in Russia without Putin’s approval.
Akinyemi made this statement in an interview with ARISE NEWS on Tuesday, as he shared his insights on the death of one of Russia’s main opposition figures, Alexei Navalny, and Putin’s role in Navalny’s demise.
Speaking on Navalny’s death, Akinyemi said, “I think when things like this happen, the opposition side in international affairs will seek to milk it for all its worth, and I just believe that we should focus on seeking an explanation to what happened.
“Number 1, nothing happens in Russia unless Putin sanctions it, so, we don’t need to bother about who is responsible for the death of Navalny. We need to ask, why did he go back after they had sought to poison him?”
Regarding Navalny’s return to Russia after surviving a poisoning attempt, Akinyemi highlighted a peculiar aspect of Russian political dynamics, referring to it as a “Suicide Syndrome” evident in Russian literature. He said, “If you take a Russian book, there is always that main character who deliberately walked towards his own Golgotha. He knows he’s going to be killed, he knows he’s going to die, and yet it is like it’s an inevitability, it’s part of the plot, it’s part of his mission in life.”
Akinyemi then said that he believed that Navalny knew his death was coming, as he said that Navalny interpreted his surviving the poisoning as “God giving him another chance to play the role that he had carved out for himself, which was leading the opposition from within Russia,” which made him return to Russia despite the poisoning attempt.
He also speculated that Putin might have been provoking Navalny until he deemed it the right time to end the situation.
Expressing scepticism as to what would stop Putin’s action which are generally viewed by the international community as brutish, Akinyemi said, “I don’t know who is going to stop Putin, probably death. That is what happens in Russian history. Looking at their history, death stopped Stalin. Dictators are stopped either by a revolution. It was a revolution that got rid of the Saxa, it was a revolution that got rid of the emperor in France. It is usually death that gets rid of them, you know it was death that got rid of Abacha. So, we just have to wait and see.
“But let me make this clear. The responsibility for the death of an activist is not on the head of Putin alone. We are all victims of what we become on western media. When Russia came into existence, it was so disorganised that it was on the way of becoming a failed state. And why? Because the CIA, the British Secret Service, Western Secret Service, went into Russia, set up all these NFOs in the name of promoting democracy. But in fact, it was to destabilise Russia, and Russia was destabilised.
“It was then that the Russian Oligats then decided they needed a strong man to stamp out all these destabilising agencies called CSOs, and that’s why they turned to Putin. And Putin came in, and he had as a strong man, to stamp down upon the NGOs. They are presented to us by the western media as modernisation agents. Frankly, they were NGOs that were being used by the west to destabilise Russia. And that’s how we have got to the point where we are, where only death resolves the issue against Activists versus Putin. So, don’t let us play into this syndrome of good versus evil. Putin is not all evil, and the activists are not all angels.”
Regarding the potential vacuum left by opposition figures like Navalny, Akinyemi predicted, “Somebody will step into the void. We are going to have another major activist who will step into the void. There are several of them who are in it.”
Ozioma Samuel-Ugwuezi
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