Aleksei Navalny, it appears, has just been canceled – by Amnesty International.
The venerable human rights organization this week moved to strip the Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner of his “prisoner of conscience” status over nationalist and xenophobic remarks he made in the past.
And the move apparently came following a coordinated online campaign by Kremlin surrogates and RT journalists.
What does this mean for Navalny? And what does it say about the ability of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime’s to manipulate Western institutions? On this week’s Power Vertical Podcast, host Brian Whitmore discusses these issues with Ilya Zaslavskiy, a Senior Fellow at the Free Russia Foundation, and journalist and Kremlin-watcher Casey Michel, author of the forthcoming book American Kleptocracy.