How Putin prepared the ground for Navalny’s death

The Kremlin has been trying to kill Alexei Navalny for several years – but there has probably never been a better time to do it than now.

Vladimir Putin has laid the groundwork in domestic society. For more than a decade, he has tightened the noose around his charismatic younger foe, with the operation against him mirroring a broader crackdown on Russian society.

Alexei Navalny, pictured with his wife Yulia, in Berlin’s Charite hospital in 2020 recovering from poisoning.Credit: AP via Instagram

At first, there was enough life in the Russian opposition to prevent Navalny’s elimination. In the summer of 2013, a Russian court in a provincial town jailed him in his first criminal case – but it was forced to release him 24 hours later after thousands of people blocked the streets in central Moscow.

Even when the Kremlin was emboldened by its popular 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 have fled or been silenced

By 2020, that rationale had shifted. Internal repression had steadily grown. As the public increasingly shied away from direct protest – and the long prison sentences that resulted – FSB agents poisoned Navalny.

They failed to kill him, and hoping that there was still a heartbeat in the anti-Putin movement, he took the decision to return to Moscow.

Then, the full-pressure of the Kremlin vice was applied. He was thrown into prison, with spurious sentences piling up on top of each other. Where once he had commanded thousands in the streets, only the foolhardy raised their voices in the face of draconian new laws. Most of Navalny’s allies fled to exile or were jailed.

In retrospect, these moves appear to be part of Putin’s years-long preparations for invading Ukraine. By coming down so hard on the political opposition, he ensured there were few people willing to come out and protest against his criminal war, launched on February 24, 2022.

Almost two years into the war in Ukraine, Russian civil society has been decimated; almost every single prominent anti-Putin political figure and hundreds of thousands of anti-war Russians have fled abroad. The rare critics who have stayed, such as Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, joined Navalny behind bars.

Alexei Navalny firing up a crowd during a political protest in Moscow in 2019.Credit: AP

The Kremlin does not have to fear protests in a country where a 72-year-old retired woman was sent to jail for five years last month, simply for an anti-war post on social media. Putin can torture, jail and kill the country’s most popular opposition politician safe in the knowledge that he is untouchable within Russia’s borders.

Outside of them, he does not fear the West. It took several months of the war in Ukraine before sanctions were imposed on Russia’s energy sector and oil exports in particular.

But the Russian economy is nowhere near the point of collapse; the Kremlin can still sell oil and gas on global markets, if not in Europe, and linchpins of the Russian export market such as the diamond trade have not been affected at all.

Meanwhile, the death of Navalny comes at a moment when the West is clearly getting tired of having to fund Ukraine’s military. Putin, for his part, is signalling that he would not mind freezing the frontline where it stands and calling it a victory.

If Putin was not being blamed for the death of Navalny, one could foresee US and European politicians following in the footsteps of Tucker Carlson and visiting him for talks in Moscow, sooner or later.

Whether Navalny died in an assassination or as a result of the torturous conditions he had been exposed to for three years, his death should put a halt to any such overtures – at least for now.

This is Navalny’s parting blow against the man he fought against for more than a decade.

The Telegraph, London