Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Monday, April 19th. I'm Nyla Boudou. Here's how we're making you smarter today.

A new way for police departments to handle mental health problems. Plus, Richard writes new book on police brutality, published six decades after his death.

But first, President Biden's foreign policy crises are today's one big thing.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been on a hunger strike in prison for three weeks. And this weekend his doctor said he could die soon.

It's just the latest in a string of events from overseas that could become major crises for President Biden. Axios's world editor Dave Lawler is here to catch us up.

Dave, I wonder if we can start with Alexei Navalny. Can you remind us of what we need to know about Putin's most public enemy?

Right. So Alexei Navalny is an anti-corruption activist. And he was poisoned last year while he was on a flight between Siberian cities. And so he was eventually taken out of Russia to Germany where he recovered. And while there, the authorities said they had discovered that he was poisoned with this nerve agent Novacock, which is used by the Russian security services.

He was Navalny returned to Russia where he was arrested on basically charges that he had violated his parole while out of the country. And so he has since gone to prison, he was being denied the medical treatment that he requested.

He went on hunger strike. It looks like his health is in very, very dire condition. His wife recently visited and said he was too frail to stand for long periods of time.

So he certainly looks like he is in a pretty perilous position in terms of his health.

People might remember the massive protest that took place across Russia when he was arrested. How are we expecting Russians to react if he does die?

So there are efforts right now to mobilize a protest even before he dies to the save Alexei Navalny is the theme of the protest.

We know already the State Department has said that there will be repercussions for Russia if he's allowed to die in prison.

But this is a figure that the Russian opposition has mobilized around so we can expect some pretty clear shows of dissent from inside of Russia as well.

But right now what his supporters are saying is that if he's able to get the medical treatment that he's requested, this can be avoided.

Another story coming out of Russia is the 80,000 troops. Russia has been amassing along the borders of Ukraine. Is this a pretext to an invasion?

So we don't really know exactly what it's for. The CIA has said that this is a sufficient number of troops that if Russia were to go into Ukraine, they could sort of move this disputed line of territorial control to the west into Ukraine.

There are a couple other objectives that they could potentially seek to fulfill there. But right now it's just a very menacing sign on the border of Ukraine, like you said, 80,000 troops.

And Davey wrote a piece over the weekend connecting this situation in Ukraine with a few other foreign policy crises that President Biden might be facing.

Yeah, so when Biden was coming into office, if you would sort of listed the potential crises that were out there, certainly Russia and Ukraine would have been one another is China's aggression towards Taiwan.

And the third would be Iran's nuclear program. And what we saw over the last week is kind of the lights blinking red on all three fronts there in terms of Taiwan China sent 25 war planes into Taiwanese airspace last week is kind of a show of force.

We also had an explosion in a Iranian nuclear site that has been attributed to Israel that has caused Iran to say they're going to start accelerating their uranium enrichment.

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