Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and fierce critic of Vladimir Putin, died on Friday while imprisoned in Russia. Navalny’s death comes as the American conservative movement has grown sympathetic toward Putin, an autocrat whose political enemies have a long history of dying under mysterious circumstances. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is at the forefront of the right’s adulation of the Russian president, and just days before Navalny’s death he defended the nation’s alleged political assassinations.
Calrson did so while speaking with Egyptian journalist Emad El Din Adeeb at the World Government Summit in Dubai on Monday, a week after he interviewed Putin in Moscow. Adeeb questioned why Carlson hadn’t pressed the Russian president on “freedom of speech in Russia” and why he “did not talk about Navalny, about assassinations, about restrictions on opposition in the coming elections.”
Carlson responded that he has spent his “life talking to people who run countries in various countries and have concluded the following: That every leader kills people, including my leader,” he said. “Every leader kills people, some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people, sorry, that’s why I wouldn’t want to be a leader.”
“Press restriction is universal in the United States, I know because I’ve lived it,” he continued. “So at a certain point, it’s like people can decide whether they think, what countries they think are better, what systems they think are better. I just want to know what he thinks, that was the whole point.”
The answer was stunning at the time, but Navalny’s death just days later cast an even more sinister pall over the assertion.
Carlson interviewed Putin last week in a rare sit-down between the Russian president and an American media figure. The interview was widely panned as a blowout propaganda victory for the Kremlin, and Putin even complained to Russian media that Carlson’s questions had been too soft.
On Friday, Russia’s prison service said Navalny felt unwell after taking a walk and lost consciousness. He was serving a 19-year sentence on controversial, extremism-related charges. “The facility’s medical staff immediately arrived and an ambulance brigade was called,” the prison service said in a statement. “All necessary resuscitation measures were taken, which did not lead to positive results. The ambulance doctors confirmed the death of the convict.”
The Russian government’s claims surrounding Navalny’s death were met with immediate skepticism. His wife, Yulia Navalnaya, made a surprise appearance at the Munich Security Conference shortly after news of her husband’s death broke, and asserted that the Putin government could not be trusted because “they are lying constantly.”
“I want Putin and his entire circle know that they’ll bear responsibility for what they did with our country and my family and my husband,” she said. “And this day will come very soon.”
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