Words from Alexei the Brave

A kangaroo court in Russia today sentenced Alexei Navalny to prison for having the audacity of violating his parole because he laid comatose in a hospital bed after being poisoned by Peter Putin.  In reality, Navalny represented a potent threat to Putin and he needed to suffer as a warning to all the Russians who yearn for freedom from oppression at the hands of the Russian dictator.  Here (as translated by Meduza) is an excerpt from Navalny's speech to the court before he was sentenced:

[Putin] never participated in any debates or campaigned in an election. Murder is the only way he knows how to fight. He’ll go down in history as nothing but a poisoner. We all remember Alexander the Liberator and Yaroslav the Wise. Well, now we’ll have Vladimir the Poisoner. 

I’m standing here, guarded by the police, and the National Guard is out there with half of Moscow cordoned off. All this because that small man in a bunker is losing his mind. He’s losing his mind because we proved and demonstrated that he isn’t buried in geopolitics; he’s busy holding meetings where he decides how to steal politicians’ underpants and smear them with chemical weapons to try to kill them.

The main thing in this whole trial isn’t what happens to me. Locking me up isn’t difficult. What matters most is why this is happening. This is happening to intimidate large numbers of people. They’re imprisoning one person to frighten millions.