We must show support for freethinking Russians - Alex Cole-Hamilton

In large part I was sanctioned for the work I’d done in the Scottish Parliament, to press the government to do more to identify and close off Russian interests and influence in Scotland – in our opaque land ownership rules, in links to Russian business and in calling out our disgraceful former First Minister Alex Salmond, for helping, with his ridiculous chat show, to legitimise Putin’s propaganda channel RT (formerly Russia Today).

I’m also sure my regular appearances outside the Russian consulate in Melville Street, Edinburgh – speaking at protests against the invasion of the sovereign nation of Ukraine will have sealed the deal. In the early days of the full-scale war, I and my family would join every protest we could to decry Putin for the fascist kleptocrat he is.

In each of the speeches I made to those gatherings, I would ask fellow protesters to remember the brave men and women of Russia, at home and overseas, who still stand in defiance of Putin and his gangsters, who do not recognise his legitimacy and in whose name he does not act.

It was my privilege to join some of those same brave Russians at a gathering outside the consulate again on Friday night, to protest the murder of opposition politician and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny.

It was a scene replicated at Russian embassies around the world that evening. Flowers were laid, speeches made and we stood in vigil to the life and murder of a campaigner for freedom and democracy in Russia. Navalny was one of the people Putin feared most as a challenge to his stranglehold on power, so much so that even though Navalny had been incarcerated for three years, and even moved to a penal colony in Siberia, that coward Putin couldn’t suffer him to live.

How best should we respond to Navalny’s murder? Well for a start, he left us a list of oligarchs and Kremlin apologists who still remain unsanctioned. The UK Government should immediately act on that intelligence and cut their financial interests off at the knees.

While Friday’s vigil was triggered by his assassination, Navalny is just the latest in a long list of free-thinking Russians who have succumbed to Putin’s murderous regime. Journalists like Anna Politkovskaya, opposition politicians like Boris Nemtsov and defectors like Alexander Litvinenko have all paid the ultimate price for their resistance to Putin and everything he stands for. Each were remembered at our vigil.

Vladimir Putin is a threat to our way of life and the free democracies of the world should take that threat seriously. He has plundered the economic prosperity of Russia and sacrificed a generation of both Russians and Ukrainians on the battlefield of his ambition. He doesn’t belong in the Kremlin, he belongs in The Hague on indictment for war crimes.

Unwavering support for Ukraine in both financial and lethal aid is the most obvious route to destabilising Putin’s plans, but so too should be our support for free thinking Russians like Navalny who might ultimately prove the most likely route to Putin’s removal from power.

Alex Cole-Hamilton is Leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats