To understand the extraordinary fact of Ceausescu's monolithic power, and the otherwise incomprehensible lack of resistance to it, one must try to ex… - John Sweeney

What few people in the West properly understood then, and still don't, to this day, is the extreme nervousness in the West Wing of the Biden White House that a Ukrainian victory in the war could lead to Russia becoming Iraq 2.0. Their number one neurosis is that a Ukrainian victory would lead to the fall of Putin and that, in turn, would end up with the breaking up of Russia liberating two dragons the Americans are very afraid of. The first dragon is an Islamist Chechnya getting hold of a nuke and holding the Western world to ransom while Donald Trump is on the stump. The second, more terrifying, dragon is of China seizing Siberia while Russia is in chaos. Overnight, China would become the biggest, most resource-rich country on earth. [...] The negative to promoting timidity as your number one strategy is that the other players in the game will notice and react aggressively, making the possibility of the things you fear the most coming true more likely than not. And there are three specific weaknesses: one, real Russian victory in Ukraine is a worst outcome than future possible Russian chaos; two, the break-up of the Russian Empire established by Peter the Great and Catherine is long overdue and trying to wallpaper over the Tsarist, Soviet and now Putinist cracks won't work; three, rewarding evil never ends well.

Navalny's calculation was that Putin would not dare have him killed. But, once he had gone back to Russia and was locked away inside the gulag, two facts changed that materially altered that calculation: one, Western liberalism recalibrated its position on Navalny, selling his stock, making it easier for the Kremlin to have him snuffed out; two, Putin started Russia's big war against Ukraine, blurring focus on the fate of one prisoner so much so that he began to be forgotten, that he was in an oubliette from which there could be no return.

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.