February 2, 2021

A Moscow court has sentenced Alexey Navalny to 2.5 years in jail for breaking the terms of his parole. Today the Russian opposition leader ridiculed the verdict, given that when he left the country for Germany, he was in a coma after having been poisoned with Novichok in August. He blames President Putin for the poisoning, which the Kremlin denies. Sergey Markov joins the program to discuss.

In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko was the first high profile Russian dissident to be poisoned in a public fashion. A British public inquiry found his death was probably ordered by President Putin himself, which the Kremlin denies. . Litvinenko’s widow Marina has long campaigned for justice for her husband, and she joins the program to Alexey Navalny's prison sentence.

In 2018, renowned artist Kehinde Wiley rose to global superstardom with his presidential portrait of Barack Obama – and his ambitions have only increased since then. Wiley has spent the last year at his Black Rock studio in Senegal, West Africa, and is also mentoring a new generation of artists. He joins the program to discuss Black Lives Matter and what inspires him artistically.