Does the death of Alexei Navalny reveal weakness within Putin’s regime as it tries to project confidence about the direction of its war in Ukraine?
Many in the West will assume Vladimir Putin ordered the assassination of Navalny, given his track record of killing so many others.
His agents tried to poison him with Novichok four years ago, after all. But Navalny was in jail out of the way and unable to pose much of a threat. Why kill him now?
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Navalny made a name for himself campaigning about Kremlin corruption. He produced videos revealing the lavish palaces Putin had built for himself and his cronies.
But he also campaigned against the war in Ukraine, and that may have been the bigger worry for Putin, not least because of events ahead of presidential elections in Russia.
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The fortunes of anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin may have given Russia’s leader a fright. He was reportedly beginning to poll in the double digits.
Alarmed Kremlin authorities responded by barring him from running, citing ‘technical irregularities’.
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His treatment was picked up on by another very brave critic of Putin’s, the British-Russian writer Vladimir Kara-Murza who is also in jail on trumped-up charges for daring to speak up against the regime.
In an article written from his prison cell this week, Kara-Murza claimed that for ordinary Russians worried by the war Nadezhdin’s campaign “was not just a pleasant surprise, it was a much-needed morale boost”.
He added that Russian society has been “disoriented, demoralised and increasingly repressed since the start of Putin’s full-blown war on Ukraine”.
Nadezhdin’s campaign was catching fire, with long lines of people queuing to sign petitions for his nomination, as Kara-Murza points out, 200,000 signed up, he claims.
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Nadezhdin was never going to be a threat in an election the Kremlin controls completely but his growing popularity revealed a sentiment Putin will have been keen to snuff out.
And that may also have been the reason some will claim he ordered Navalny’s death now, to silence a far more charismatic opponent and critic of his war in Ukraine before that anti-war spirit gathered any more strength.
