As American and British politicians slowly began to see Putin for who he really was, Corbyn decided to echo, albeit in a faltering and weak voice, so… - John Sweeney

Full of flaws, unbelievably arrogant, a man who did flirt with the far right, but, over the course of the last ten years, the boy from Chernobyl stood up for the idea of another Russia, a country not defined by grotesque corruption, cruelty and a stupid war, but by honesty, courage and great good humour. That secures his place in history. When all hope was lost, and Russia turned, yet again, back to darkness, then along came a knight in dented armour, tilting at evil windmills.
Alexei Navalny was bold and good.
Alexei Navalny kept the red eye of Russia's soul alive and one day it will start blink-blink-blinking again as it stomps, like Terminator 2, towards the machinery of greed that controls the Kremlin.
Alexei Navalny is dead, but what he stood for will be back.

The evidence is compelling that the very thing which galvanized Vladimir Putin's career in Russian politics – his fightback against Chechen bomb outrages – was, in fact, a black operation by the secret police.
That Vladimir Putin blew up Russia.

[...] the evidence is compelling that Putin's record was murderous from the get-go. What I suspect happened is that the Blair government didn't want to examine his scoresheet by February 2000 – the Skuratov kompromat, the Moscow apartment bombs, levelling Grozny – too closely because it was so depressing. They were hyper-focused on the immediate geo-strategic nightmare in front of their eyes, that posed by radical Islam, not realising that another, greater threat to Western security was sitting in the Kremlin. Like Jack in the panto, Blair and Campbell traded the cow for some magical beans and realised too late, that they had been taken for a ride by a psychopathic conman.