ATHENS — With 16 related tweets launched from behind the bars of a Russian penal compound, Alexei Navalny has a message for the world about President Putin: He is more or a less a disciple of Satan who is hell-bent on trampling Ukraine and any other country in his path in order to divert Russians’ attention from a growing economic crisis at home. The 45-year-old Navalny, who heads the Russia of the Future party even as he languishes while awaiting trial on what many see as trumped-up charges of embezzlement, has long bedeviled Russia’s increasingly reviled president, and the Twitter storm he unleashed this week was a stark reminder why. It should come as little surprise that the man who branded Russia’s ruling United Russia party as comprising “crooks and thieves” would not hesitate to lambast the assault on Ukraine and assail its author as a cold-blooded killer. Notwithstanding animosity toward the man Mr. Navalny accuses of having given the order to have him poisoned with a nerve agent in August 2020, what triggered his 16-tweet tirade was watching a televised meeting of the Russian Security Council that preceded the invasion of Ukraine. He begins by slamming it as a “gathering of dotards and thieves,” adding that it reminded him of a meeting of Politburo nomenklatura in days of Soviet yore. Not just any Politburo meeting: Navalny cites the fateful one when, “on their own whim,” they decided to send Soviet troops into Afghanistan. Mr. Navalny wasn’t alone in squirming at the sight of the creepy conclave; the Moscow Times said it was like watching a real-life scene of a James Bond movie where villainous Ernst Stavro Blofeld holds court. Mr. Navalny was even more entertaining when the tweetgates flung open: “Those morons from the Politburo covered themselves with a two-faced ideology…. Putin’s dotards do not even have an ideology — only constant and undisguised lies. They don’t even bother to give their casus belli the slightest credibility.” Tweet no. 5 read: “Both of them need one thing: to divert the attention of the people of Russia from real problems — the development of the economy, rising prices, reigning lawlessness — and switching it to the format of ‘imperial hysteria.’” Next: “And so, the head of the 21st century Politburo makes a truly insane speech.” He points to another tweet that “gave the most accurate metaphor for it: ‘It’s just like my grandfather getting drunk at a family celebration and annoying everyone with his stories about how world politics actually works.’” Then, in Tweet no. 9, Mr. Navalny delivers a coup de grâce, of sorts: “It would be funny if the drunk grandfather was not a man of 69 who holds power in a country with nuclear weapons. Replace ‘Ukraine’ in his speech with ‘Kazakhstan,’ ‘Belarus,’ ‘Baltic countries,’ ‘Azerbaijan,’ ‘Uzbekistan’ and so on, even including ‘Finland.’ And think about where the train of geopolitical thought of this senile grandfather may take him next.”He added that Mr. Putin “will not allow Ukraine to develop, he will drag it into the swamp, but Russia will pay the same price.” Before asserting that Mr. Putin “kills and wants to kill more,” there was this: “Putin and his senile thieves from the [Russian] Security Council and United Russia are the enemies of Russia and its main threat, not Ukraine and not the West.” His call for all Russians to fight for the removal of “Putin and his kleptocrats” from power? That was the bittersweet tweet 16.
