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

[...] 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.

Common sense says it would be madness for a group of Chechens to smuggle explosives all the way from Urus-Martan to Moscow. Since the First Chechen War, Chechens are routinely singled out for harassment by Russian police, vehicles are stopped and searched, identity papers demanded. Besides, there has long been a strong Chechen mafia in Moscow, very capable of getting its hands on arms or explosives in the city. In Russia, in the 1990s, you could bribe your way into a nuclear rocket silo. The 'Chechen terrorists' would have been risking a great deal by hauling their explosives roughly 1,000 miles to Moscow when they could have bought them at the back of a local flea market.

So was he a bit of a fascist? Yes, for a time. But I suspect that his spell in America changed him. At Yale, he could have hung out with all sorts, including white conservative neo-fascists in one of their yucky alpha beta frat houses. Instead, his gang were an African called Lumumba, a Nicaraguan and a black guy from Brizzle. His three months at Yale would have opened his eyes to the land of liberty, its absurdities, its crassness, its cult of money, but also to the fact that power is, more or less, democratic, that the authorities, more or less, respect the rule of law, that liberal democracy, more or less, works, that an open society open to all talents is so much brighter than the dark Soviet basement he had been born into and the place Vladimir Putin wanted Russia to return to.
After Yale, the fascist in Navalny slunk off into a dark corner.