The uprising in Belarus and the poisoning of Alexei Navalny

TO RUSSIA’S WEST, Belarus, previously a model of authoritarian stability, is in tumult. On August 9th its people refused to accept the official assertion that they had, once again, chosen to elect Alexander Lukashenko, the country’s dictator. In Russia’s far east demonstrators have been on the streets since July, when the governor of the Khabarovsk region, who had been elected without the Kremlin’s blessing, was arrested on Moscow’s orders and charged with murders committed in the early 2000s.

Those protests were a harbinger of hope for Alexei Navalny, a charismatic Russian opposition leader. He was looking forward to issuing a palpable rebuke to the Russian regime at this September’s regional elections; the far-eastern unrest showed the strategy was working. But Mr Navalny now lies in a coma in a Berlin hospital, having apparently been poisoned in Russia by persons unknown on August 20th.