‘This Does Not Look Like Somebody Who Is On The Verge Of Death’: Shapiro On The Death Of Alexei Navalny

Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro spoke on “The Ben Shapiro Show” on Friday regarding the death of the leading critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Alexei Navalny, 47, who was reported dead in prison.

Navalny had been sentenced on a bunch of trumped-up charges to a penal colony, Shapiro noted.  Navalny had flown to Germany to seek treatment after falling ill on a flight inside Russia. Doctors concluded that he had been poisoned with a nerve agent called Novichok. When Navalny returned to Russia in 2021, he was immediately arrested by Vladimir Putin’s team, sentenced, and moved to a remote Arctic prison but no one knew where he was.

“For literally weeks they shuttled him around so that nobody could find out where he was,” Shapiro noted. “And then finally he released a message saying that he was in a place that was extremely cold, far in the north, where all he could see were some dogs and some snow.”

Shapiro showed footage of Navalny from Thursday in a court appearance. “As you can see, he looks alive and well,” he commented. “He looks skinny, obviously, but this does not look like somebody who is on the verge of death.”

According to The Wall Street Journal:

Navalny’s death eliminates the last real political opposition that still remained inside Russia following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, his crackdown on freedom of speech and the passage of increasingly draconian laws aimed at stamping out any dissent. … Navalny’s time in jail reflected the worst excesses of a judicial and prison system that has increasingly been used to punish Putin’s political opponents. … Navalny had suffered continuously, at times from sleep deprivation when he was woken up every hour at night by guards. He was sent into solitary confinement 27 times, rights groups said, at times for minor infractions such as a missed button on his prison uniform.

“Everyone suspects Putin because —  as people get ‘suicided’ regularly and ‘death by natural causes’ seems to happen regularly if they are opponents of Vladimir Putin — that the Putin regime had finally had enough of Alexei Navalny and they felt the threat from the outside or from Navalny or from maybe the inside of Russia and so it was just a convenient time to get rid of Alexei Navalny,” Shapiro said.

In 2020, Navalny did an interview on 60 Minutes talking about his poisoning on a flight from Moscow to Siberia, where he’d been campaigning against Putin’s party in a local election when he collapsed with no pain but knowing he was dying.

Shapiro posited that Putin might want to poison Alexei Navalny because, among other things, Navalny had obtained incriminating internal financial documents related to high-level Russian officials and posted them on a blog.

Navalny said on 60 Minutes, “And it’s something very special about Mr. Putin that he’s crazy about money, personal money, about his family being rich, his friends, like all his people who served with him, with them in the KGB, all of them, they are billionaires. That’s why fighting corruption means for him that he’s fighting me.”

“And now he has fought him to the point where Navalny is dead,” Shapiro noted. “The reality is that Vladimir Putin is a vicious dictator who kills his political opponents. The list is as long as your arm of people that Vladimir Putin has killed, ranging from journalists to fellow oligarchs to dissidents who have challenged him in any sort of way at home and abroad; he has had people killed well outside the borders of Russia.”