Putin suppressed all opposition within Russia Photo: ALEXANDER RYUMIN/SPUTNIK POOL KREMLIN
The Kremlin has been trying to kill Alexei Navalny for several years – but there has probably never been a better time for this than now.
Vladimir Putin has laid the foundation in domestic society. For more than a decade, he has been tightening the noose around his charismatic young enemy, and the operation against him reflects a broader crackdown on Russian society.
At first, there was enough life in the Russian opposition to prevent the Elimination of Navalny. In the summer of 2013, a Russian court in a provincial city remanded him in custody in his first criminal case, but was forced to release him 24 hours later after thousands of people blocked streets in central Moscow.
Even when the Kremlin was emboldened by the people's annexation of Crimea in 2014, Putin did not jail the pesky protest leader—it was clear at the time that the Kremlin would suffer more damage from the move than it was worth.
Dissenters.
Dissenters . fled or were silenced
By 2020, this rationale had changed. Internal repression grew steadily. As the public increasingly shirked direct protest (and, as a result, long prison sentences), FSB agents poisoned Navalny.
It was not possible to kill him, and, hoping that the anti-Putin movement was still fighting, he decided to return to Moscow.
Then full pressure was applied to the Kremlin’s vices. He was thrown into prison, and false convictions were layered on top of each other. Where he once commanded thousands of people on the streets, only the reckless have raised their voices in the face of new draconian laws. Most of Navalny's associates fled into exile or went to prison.
In retrospect, these steps appear to be part of Putin's years of preparation for an invasion of Ukraine. By coming down so harshly on the political opposition, he ensured that few people are ready to come out and protest against his criminal war, which began on February 24, 2022.
Almost two years after the start of the war in Ukraine, Russian civil society has been destroyed; Almost all prominent anti-Putin political figures and hundreds of thousands of anti-war Russians fled abroad. Those rare critics who remain, such as Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, have joined Mr. Navalny behind bars.
The Kremlin need not fear protests in a country where last month a 72-year-old pensioner was jailed for five years simply for an anti-war post on social media. Putin can torture, imprison and kill the country's most popular opposition politician, knowing that he is untouchable within Russia.
Outside Russia, he is not afraid of the West. It took several months of the war in Ukraine before sanctions were introduced against the Russian energy sector and oil exports in particular.
But the Russian economy is still far from the point of collapse; The Kremlin can still sell oil and gas on world markets, if not in Europe, and the linchpins of the Russian export market, such as the diamond trade, have not been affected at all.
Meanwhile, Mr Navalny's death comes at this moment , when the West is clearly tired of funding the Ukrainian army. Putin, for his part, makes it clear that he is not averse to freezing the front line where it is and calling it a victory.
If Putin had not been blamed for the death of Mr. Navalny, one would have predicted that the United States and European politicians will sooner or later follow in the footsteps of Tucker Carlson and visit him for talks in Moscow.
Regardless of whether Mr. Navalny died as a result of an assassination attempt or as a result of the torturous conditions to which he subjected for three years, his death should put an end to any such initiatives — at least for now.
This is Mr. Navalny's parting blow to the man he has been fighting for more than a decade.< /p>
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