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alexei navalny
Russia's Putin Secures Another Term
The controversial leader won a record number of votes for a post-Soviet candidate even as opponents organized a protest at noon on the election's third and last day.
Mar 17, 2024
Despite protests on Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin won reelection with more votes than any candidate since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Exit poll the Public Opinion Foundation (POF) put the final tally after three days of voting at 87.8%, the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) at 87%, and Russia's Central Election Commission (CEC) at 87.3%. Putin will now serve another six-year term, meaning he will have been at the helm of the Russian state for longer than any leader since Catherine the Great, surpassing Josef Stalin.
The election comes less than a month after the second anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and is likely to lead to more tensions between the Russian and U.S. governments.
"It gives me some hope to see how many people are not happy with the dictatorship, the war, with what's happening in Russia."
"For a U.S. administration that hoped Putin's Ukraine adventure would be wrapped up by now with a decisive setback to Moscow's interests, the election is a reminder that Putin expects that there will be many more rounds in the geopolitical boxing ring," Nikolas Gvosdev, director of the National Security Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told the Russia Matters project.
With most of Putin's prominent opponents either dead, imprisoned, or in exile, the elections results were considered a foregone conclusion by both friends and foes of his administration.
A Putin spokesperson said in 2023 that the election was "not really democracy" but instead "costly bureaucracy," according to CNN. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said the election was "obviously not free nor fair."
However, Russian opponents of Putin did find a way to demonstrate their position with a protest called "Noon Against Putin." The protest was called for by St. Petersburg politician Maxim Reznik, according to The Guardian. Participants were instructed to head to a polling place at noon and cast a paper ballot for one of the candidates running against Putin, or to write-in another candidate or spoil their ballot.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had endorsed the protest before his death last month in a Russian prison, leading the Independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper to dub it "Navalny's political testament."
The action drew crowds to polling places both in Russian cities like Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Yekaterinburg and at Russian embassies around the world.
"This is the first time in my life I have ever seen a queue for elections," one woman waiting in line in Moscow told
CNN. Russian journalists reported that the lines at some stations within the country reached the thousands, according to Reuters.
Navalny's widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who had also endorsed the protest, voted at the embassy in Berlin, while several protesters gathered outside the embassy in London.
"I expected there to be a lot of people, but not this many," London-based participant Maria Dorofeyeva told The Guardian, adding, "It gives me some hope to see how many people are not happy with the dictatorship, the war, with what's happening in Russia. And we want to stop it."
Ruslan Shaveddinov of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation told Reuters:
"We showed ourselves, all of Russia and the whole world that Putin is not Russia (and) that Putin has seized power in Russia."
"Our victory is that we, the people, defeated fear, we defeated solitude—many people saw they were not alone," Shaveddinov said
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From Assange to Navalny, Powerful Nations Show Their Contempt for Press Freedoms
It is not surprising that politicians in power do not want to encourage whistleblowers and autonomous journalists. Those who rule the world prefer to indulge in their power games in secrecy.
Feb 25, 2024
In the late evening of February 16, I was standing on the other side of the iron fence that surrounds the imposing white building of the Russian embassy in The Hague. Abundantly illuminated by the spotlights, the house resembles an expensive film set that has been abandoned for the night.
But the last people who arrived with flowers that night did not look like fans waiting for movie stars. They were silent mourners paying their respects to a person they held in high esteem. The flowers were for Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident who died that morning thousands of kilometers away, in the Arctic Circle.
In the Hague, the spotlights shone brightly on the golden double-headed eagle on the Russian embassy’s facade. Since the Bronze Age, the double-headed eagle has symbolized power. Used by the mighty Byzantine dynasty, the eagle is the oldest royal emblem representing both physical and spiritual power. The eagle has survived up to our times, even in countries without royal families. Russia abandoned its royal eagle following the 1917 revolution but resurrected its glory in 1993. The double-headed eagle on the Russian flag sports a red shield depicting a horseman slaying a black dragon.
Alexei Navalny challenged the Russian political system and lost his life. Julian Assange believed that the public has every right to know what their democratically elected representatives and their armies are doing. For now, he has lost his freedom and health.
On the western shores of Europe lies Belmarsh prison, which is known as Britain’s Guantanamo because of its torturous conditions as well as its population of mostly alleged murderers and terrorists. Near it and in front of the High Court in London, another group of people gathered four days after Navalny’s death, in the hopes that they could stop an extradition and stand up for press freedom. Too unwell to appear in court, Julian Assange was waiting for the decision in his cell. As expected, the judges decided to announce their verdict at some later date. It remains to be seen if Assange will be put on a plane to America, where he could face up to 175 years in prison.
On the American emblem, the eagle has a single head, like any normal bird of prey. Its only shield is a flag, not a mighty horseman with a sword. It carries 13 arrows in its left talon and an olive branch in its right talon, which denote the power of peace and war. The one-headed eagle eagerly awaits Assange. At most of the demonstrations against his extradition around the world, protesters have held up a photograph of his face with the lower part covered by the American flag, similar to the one on the breast of the emblematic eagle.
People formulate laws and can change them. The Russian administration is demonstrating great flexibility in introducing new laws that further limit freedom of expression and all other actions that the state doesn’t approve of. Those who would like to democratize the system do not stand a chance. On the other hand, Western countries are unreasonably slow in widening the scope of freedom by changing laws that are too rigid, overly general, or simply unjust. If the rule of law cannot be improved, then what is the sense of law in the ever-changing world?
Alexei Navalny challenged the Russian political system and lost his life. Julian Assange believed that the public has every right to know what their democratically elected representatives and their armies are doing. For now, he has lost his freedom and health. The authenticity of the thousands of confidential documents revealed through WikiLeaks has never been questioned. By revealing them, Assange allegedly broke the law, the Espionage Act of 1917. Since 1919, beginning with Schenck v. United States, the constitutionality of that law and its relationship to free speech have been contested in the courts multiple times. As Karen Sharpe writes in Counterpunch:
The Espionage Act, under which a journalist or publisher has heretofore never been prosecuted, was designed, as its name suggests, to prosecute those Americans working to undermine the U.S. war efforts by delivering national defense information to the enemy. Not only is Julian not an American citizen, and he was in Europe when he was publishing WikiLeaks, but the “enemy” to whom he was meant to have supplied classified information—information in the public interest—must ipso facto be any member of the general public anywhere in the world!
The same law can be used to hide atrocities and war crimes behind a wall of secrecy that protects guilty. None of those linked to the atrocities identified in the Wikileaks documents have been prosecuted. Only Assange is behind bars. In the United States, he is charged with 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. As Christophe Deloire and Rebecca Vincent of Reporters Without Borders put it:
Of course, Assange should not be in prison anywhere – not in the UK, nor the US, nor Australia… No one, anywhere, should be targeted for publishing information in the public interest. Assange should be immediately released – perhaps through a political solution if not the courts, given the political nature of the case against him.
In some cases, secrets must be respected and confidentiality is in order. But when crimes are committed, they must be revealed and not hidden, which is the purpose of any legal system. The only reasonable question is: are the laws that protect crimes acceptable or not in a democratic society? If they’re not acceptable, then Assange is a victim and not a culprit. As one of the posters held by a protester in London stressed: “Justice is locking up war criminals, not shooting the messenger!”
The two brave men are the martyrs of very different political realities and imperfect legal systems. Navalny fought for the freedom of his country, Assange for the transparency, freedom of information and press. One way or another, Navalny received the death penalty, delivered by the horseman shielded by two-headed eagle. Assange must wait in Belmarsh prison for the decision on his fate.
There is a clear and striking difference in the response of world leaders concerning these two men. In the case of Navalny, besides his supporters in Russia and around the world, politicians of the West are unanimously voicing their consternation. With indignation, trembling voices, and outrage, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz, Jens Stoltenberg, Ursula von der Leyen, and Mark Rutte, as well as Rishi Sunak, David Cameron, and many others are condemning the autocratic and murderous Russian regime and Vladimir Putin’s brutality. They are eager to demonize their proven enemy one more time.
In the case of Assange, the most vocal dissenters are Reporters Without Borders, the International Federation of Journalists, DiEM25, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and recently the Australian government. In the United Kingdom, where the proceedings are taking place, there was no major political pressure to block the extradition. Only a handful of British parliamentarians signed a petition calling for Assange’s release.
As for world leaders, they are mostly staying silent. Some, however, are not. Those calling on the UK government to block extradition include Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former president of Argentina Alberto Fernández, former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, former Spanish prime minister José Luis Zapatero, and some former heads of state from Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
It is not surprising that politicians in power do not want to encourage whistleblowers and autonomous journalists. A free press can be a serious inconvenience. Those who rule the world prefer to indulge in their power games in secrecy. The will to power prevents Western democracies from improving their laws and strengthening the pursuit of democracy and freedom. It would be surprising and welcome if some of them manage to radically change their attitudes and behaviors.
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Amnesty Condemns Russian Government Attacks on Those Mourning Alexei Navalny
"These callous acts are not only shockingly insensitive, but they are also a flagrant violation of the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly."
Feb 19, 2024
Amnesty International on Monday demanded that Russian authorities end their "widespread campaign of persecution" under which they've arrested nearly 400 people for mourning opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, whose death in prison was reported last Friday.
In at least 39 cities across Russia, police have arrested people for gathering at peaceful vigils to remember the anti-corruption political leader and steadfast opponent of President Vladimir Putin, laying flowers at monuments, and even carrying photographs of Navalny, in the case of Boris Kazadayev and Ilya Povyshev in Moscow.
The pair were arrested on Sunday in Moscow after police searched their backpacks near a memorial that had been set up for another late opposition politician, Boris Nemtsov. According to OVD-Info, police in Moscow searched selected attendees at Navalny memorials and "confiscated photographs of him as well as notes bearing his name."
"The crackdown we are witnessing following Aleksei Navalny's death in custody is not only a tragic reminder of what he fought against but also a clear indication that the Russian authorities are aiming to erase his memory," said Oleg Kozlovsky, Russia researcher for Amnesty. "The removal of photos of Navalny and the swift dismantling of memorial events across the country, sometimes directly in front of mourners, reveals how the authorities are seeking to expunge his name from the history books."
Navalny's death was reported by Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service on Friday; he allegedly lost consciousness after taking a walk in the penal colony where he had been relocated in December. He had been imprisoned for three years after exposing government corruption and organizing anti-Kremlin protests. He was also convicted last year of "extremism," having established himself as Putin's top political foe.
At least 387 people have been arrested for mourning Navalny since Friday, according to the rights group, with more than 200 detained in Saint Petersburg "simply for gathering peacefully to pay respect to the politician." The city's courts have also placed at least 26 people in "administrative detention"—accusing them of disobeying police, violating "the established procedure for organizing or holding an assembly," and other alleged offenses.
"Those who are detaining people are afraid of any opinion that isn't connected to propaganda, to the pervading ideology," a woman who identified herself only as Lena told The New York Times on Monday as she paid tribute at the Solovetsky Stone in Moscow. "They are scared of Navalny in jail, they are scared of dead Navalny, they are scared of the people who bring flowers here to the stone."
Kozlovzky highlighted cases of violent arrests, including that of Bakyt Karypbaev, who was reportedly tortured at a police station in Surgut, "including being beaten and having a gun pointed at his head for laying flowers."
A priest named Grigory Mikhnov-Vaitenko also "had a stroke after police arrested him to halt his plan to hold a memorial service," said Kozlovsky.
"These are not isolated incidents, but part of a country-wide campaign to silence dissent and instil fear across the nation," said the researcher.
Along with a prompt independent investigation into Navalny's death, Amnesty International demanded that the Russian authorities stop their campaign against those paying tribute, "immediately release all those detained solely for mourning or protesting peacefully, and ensure accountability for the abuses perpetrated against them."
"The Russian authorities have resorted to arbitrary arrests, excessive use of force and unlawful detentions of people across the country who are just trying to mourn Aleksei Navalny," said Kozlovsky. "These callous acts are not only shockingly insensitive, but they are also a flagrant violation of the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly."
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'Devastating': Wife of Imprisoned Journalist Julian Assange Mourns Death of Alexei Navalny
"Navalny was an opposition figure, but his investigative journalism exposed the corruption of the ruling elites in Russia," said Stella Assange.
Feb 16, 2024
The wife of WikiLeaks founder and imprisoned journalist Julian Assange said Friday that the reported death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is "utterly devastating," pointing to his work uncovering corruption at the highest levels of Russian society.
"He was only 47. Had he not been imprisoned, he would be alive," Stella Assange wrote on social media. "Navalny was an opposition figure, but his investigative journalism exposed the corruption of the ruling elites in Russia."
"I feel for his wife Yulia and their two children, who will probably never really know what happened," she added. "Condolences to his friends and family."
Navalny's past release of confidential documents from the Russian government and state-run energy companies had drawn comparisons to Assange's work at WikiLeaks, which exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as international corruption.
Assange is currently languishing in a maximum-security prison in London, awaiting a hearing next week that will determine whether he can appeal his extradition to the United States.
Stella Assange warned Thursday that her husband "will die" if he's extradited.
U.S. President Joe Biden, whose administration opted to run with the prosecution of Assange that began under former President Donald Trump, warned in 2021 that the consequences for Russia "would be devastating" if Navalny died in prison.
"They killed him. I am heartbroken."
Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service said in a statement Friday that Navalny lost consciousness after taking a walk at the penal colony above the Arctic Circle to which he was relocated in December. Navalny's health had badly deteriorated during his more than three years in prison on charges that he and human rights groups said were politically motivated.
Russia's prison service said Friday that "all necessary resuscitation measures were taken" after Navalny fell unconscious but were not successful.
"The ambulance doctors confirmed the death of the convict," the service added.
Leonid Volkov, Navalny's chief of staff, said he could not confirm the truth of Russian authorities' statement and that the opposition leader's attorney is heading to the prison where he was held.
"We have no grounds to believe state propaganda," Volkov wrote on social media. "If it's true, then it's not 'Navalny died,' but 'Putin killed Navalny,' nothing else. But I don't believe them for a second."
A spokesperson for Navalny said that "as soon as we have any information, we will report it."
Agnès Callamard, secretary-general Amnesty International, said in a statement that Navalny "was a prisoner of conscience jailed only for speaking out against a repressive government."
“He demanded political freedom for himself and his supporters. He called out corruption and challenged [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. His death is a devastating and dire indictment of life under the oppressive and stifling rule of the Kremlin," said Callamard. "He paid the ultimate price for being a critical voice, and championing freedom of expression."
"As the search for justice begins, it is clear, there are few avenues at our disposal," she added. "That's why it is crucial that the international community take concrete actions to hold all those responsible to account. We must urgently call upon the United Nations to employ its special procedures and mechanisms to address the death of Aleksei Navalny."
The Peace and Justice Project, an organization founded by former U.K. Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, wrote Friday that "the world is watching an assault on political freedom."
"From the death of Navalny in Russian custody, to Julian Assange's U.K. imprisonment, to the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners in Israel, to Modi's harassment of opponents in India, our duty is to speak up for justice," the group said.
Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister and co-founder of Progressive International, agreed with that statement.
"Precisely," he responded on social media. "From the genocide of Palestinians to the slow murder of Julian Assange to the eradication of Navalny... universal rights and freedoms are under fire."
In separate posts about Navalny's death, Varoufakis said progressives worldwide "need to fight for the right of all people not to be condemned to slow death in solitary confinement" and that his thoughts were with "all political prisoners languishing in jails."
This story has been updated with a statement from Amnesty International.
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Vladimir Putin: the Authentic Leader of the Republican Party
Forget Trump, it was Putin who built the ideological template for the GOP
Feb 20, 2022
Despite losing the last election by seven million votes, it is conventional wisdom that Donald Trump remains the leader of the Republican Party. Partly this reflects the Republican base. The media also plays its role: they would rather cover him like an ESPN announcer extolling Tom Brady than filling airtime with colorless androids like Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy.
Trump did not achieve this status purely on his own merit. There was another, formidable, force putting its thumb on the scale in the 2016 election campaign on his behalf. That force's minions even built his pre-presidential business model, helping him out of bankruptcy. Its enemies - Ukraine, the European Union - became trump's enemies.
Of course, we are talking about Vladimir Putin. Just to look at how Putin and Trump interacted when they met speaks volumes about the body languages of dominance and supplication. It is therefore instructive to cut out the middleman, or stooge, and focus on the prime mover when considering the GOP's ideological inspiration.
Although one can find several examples Republican-connected groups, like the Religious Right or the NRA, eagerly becoming fellow travelers of the Kremlin, the affinities are mostly unconscious and demonstrate a decades-long convergent evolution of beliefs within the GOP and ruling circles in Russia.
The development of the Russian Federation from the rubble of the USSR has mostly been a case of the new boss being the same as the old boss. If we substitute the oligarchs for the nomenklatura, polonium 210 for ice picks, and military threats against Ukraine for the Ukrainian famine, we find that Russia is much like the old Soviet Union. There's even an ex-KGB guy running the place: shades of 1982.
But there is one crucial difference. However miserable circumstances were, the USSR labored to represent itself as working towards a better future for humanity. True communism wasn't there yet, but the Soviet people were working to achieve a state where there was no exploitation or alienation. The shortcomings of today were the sacrifices necessary to reach utopia.
Russia under Putin makes no such claims. His propaganda apparatus, as extensive as the USSR's and more sophisticated, does not aim to make the world's people into communists. It seeks to make them cynical. Given prevailing global attitudes, it's a wise move. "You think we're bad? You're no better, just more hypocritical," is the theme. As for foreign reporting about actual conditions in Russia, they're all just fake news from the lying media.
Russia's foreign policy seeks less to influence foreign audiences positively than simply to create chaos abroad. Hacking, online trolling, and ransomware are part of this strategy. Calling out these actions merely elicits denials, accusations that the targets of the attacks did it to themselves, and cries of being an innocent victim of smears.
Does this sound familiar in the context of domestic politics? Once upon a time, the Republican Party actually enacted policies - damaging they may have been, but at least they were policies in traditional political terms. Since the Tea Party hysteria of around 2010 at the latest, the GOP has ceased offering policies (beyond the very narrow one of protecting the finances of America's own oligarchs) and is now solely dedicated to obstruction, publicity stunts, trolling, and clawing into power and staying there forever.
Such laws as it enacts in the states bear no relation to solving any public problem, be it health, safety, transportation, or education. Their "policies" are a catalogue of complaints, publicity-seeking, and trolling on issues like COVID, vaccines or abortion, signaling the base, and obstruction (or effective prohibition) of any political opposition.
The throngs who cheerfully vote GOP are not going to benefit materially from this - nor do they expect to. It is enough that their party tells them they are salt-of-the-earth Americans and harasses groups they don't like: all very much like Russian citizens who vote for Putin's Russia United Party and despise Alexei Navalny for the unpatriotic crime of promising to prevent the oligarchs from ripping them off.
Putin uses his tame courts to disqualify inconvenient candidates like Navalny; in America, the GOP prevents supporters for opposition candidates from voting. In case the election result still might be too close, the Russian leader creates bogus candidates he controls to divide the opposition. In America, there is the GOP's manipulation of Kanye West. The differences in technique are mere details.
The Kremlin's current line is that Navalny is an agent of the West, or even poisoned himself to make Russia look bad. It echoes Republicans' claim that the January 6th insurrectionists were tourists, or FBI provocateurs, or antifa. Under Putin, Russia is said to be a place where nothing is true and everything is possible. In like fashion, The Republican Party is in a protracted war with the empirical reality, leaving only endless conspiratorial possibilities known as alternative facts.
Airbrushing the facts extends to history books; as George Orwell said, "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." Putin has rehabilitated Stalin as a great patriot, and those who document Stalin's crimes are persecuted. In the same manner, Republicans whitewash bloody insurrection on behalf of slavery as being about "heritage," and seek to preserve statues honoring slaveholders and traitors.
Just as pointing out unpleasant truths about the Nazi-Soviet Pact gets you prosecuted in Russia, GOP legislators now want to make it illegal for any teacher to "teach or incorporate into any course or class any 'divisive concept.'" That the bill illustrates what should be taught by citing the debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass when Lincoln's opponent was Stephen Douglas only adds to the surrealism.
One could go on with these comparisons: the false machismo of the Russian leader posing bare-chested like Mussolini, playing hockey games with professional teams who obligingly let him pile up goals, and so on. This play-acting dovetails with the tough-guy affectation of Republican politicians: the supposed hillbilly cred of a Yale graduate and Wall Streeter named J.D. Vance running for US Senate in Ohio, or the intentional crudeness of politicians who claim to speak for the trailer parks while groveling to their donors at $1500-a-plate fundraisers.
At this point we should ask, where did these similarities come from? Even if the Kremlin directly influenced a few screwballs like Dana Rohrabacher and a handful of party operatives, why is this behavior deeply embedded in so many Republicans, to the point where it is now quite popular in the conservative media-entertainment complex ? The GOP, like Putin and his United Russia Party, are both deeply authoritarian, but why?
Corey Robin, in The Reactionary Mind, talks of the Right's "narrative of loss and promised restoration." This is true of Putin, the KGB colonel who saw the Soviet empire collapse and called its demise "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." The threats over Ukraine are a consequence of this attitude.
We should bear in mind that it is occurring against a backdrop of sharp demographic decline. In the past year, Russia experienced a population loss of nearly one million, following many years of decrease. The economy has also steadily dropped since 2014. Its population is now smaller than Bangladesh and its per capita income lower than the Maldives. Male life expectancy is also below that of Bangladesh. Does this sound familiar?
The heart of the Republican base lives in counties that for many years have suffered population decline, such as in Iowa. This was mostly the result of outmigration due to the lack of good jobs, adequate health care, or educational opportunities. The 2020 census shows the trend has accelerated, with 90 percent of US counties that lost population in the last decade supporting Trump.
The outmigration is now accompanied by "deaths of despair" (suicide, drugs, etc.) among the white working class, a phenomenon that Anne Case and Angus Deaton discovered even before the COVID pandemic. While it is occurring all over the country, it is most severe in rural states like West Virginia. The trend is further exacerbated by failure to take sensible social distancing precautions or get vaccinated. Rural Americans are dying at twice the rate of urban dwellers. Owsley County, KY, has a life expectancy similar to that of Russia.
Weirdly, the reaction of GOP politicians to their own constituents' die-off is to double down on what is killing them, as we have seen with Florida's Ron DeSantis and South Dakota's Kristi Noem. In my state of Virginia, the first act of the new governor, whose electoral stronghold is the rural parts of the Commonwealth, was to ban urban northern Virginia's mask and vaccine mandates. Never mind that the protocols were already in effect and working. His action did nothing to help the former mining towns of southwest Virginia that voted for him, but it was a thumb in the eye of the godless city folk.
This parallels Russia. Most of its population loss since the beginning of the pandemic is suspected to be considerably underreported COVID deaths on top of the traditional deaths by suicide, misadventure, and vodka. Russia's disinformation campaign against Western vaccines has backfired on its own population, making it mistrustful of vaccination. The country's own vaccine, Sputnik, is only a little more effective than Republicans' own cure-alls like horse de-wormer or Clorox.
Demographics explain why, despite the machismo and the fascination with dominance, the deeper note is one of bleating victimhood among Putin and his followers, and the GOP and its base. "We have nowhere to retreat. They have taken it to the point where we simply must tell them: 'Stop!'" says Putin. This strongly resembles Trump's whining assertion of injustice: "We don't want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore, and they won't be."
Despite their endless bellicosity, leaders like Putin, Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, or Viktor Orban are rarely bellicose towards one another; they usually get along famously. It has often been noted that there is probably human chemistry among authoritarian personalities.
But they also have a solid community of political interest. They seek to rule polities that are socially or economically damaged, and to do that they attract aggrieved and nihilistic followers. They remain on top by continuing to inflame existing wounds as they steal everything that isn't nailed down. An outbreak in self-government to benefit the people in any one country might threaten the others by example
They have a common destiny: they will succeed as long as the people of their countries are made to fail.
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