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 f… - John Sweeney

Studying how 'counter-terrorism' functions in Putin's Russia is worth the substantial effort. In March 2024, 144 Russians were massacred by members of Islamic State-Khorasan Province in the Crocus City Hall shopping mall in Moscow. The authorities tried to shift the blame on to the Ukrainians with absurd and unbelievable evidence. It turned out that the United States intelligence community had warned their Russian counterpart that IS-K were planning an attack in that very shopping mall, but the Moscow authorities were caught napping. Quite how the IS-K killers could succeed in killing so many innocent people becomes less puzzling when you understand how Russian counter-terrorism officers spend their time: not infiltrating extremist organisations but planning the blinding of the leader of the opposition.

Like Terminator 2, Navalny was an awkward sod but that comes with the territory if you have the balls to stand up to Putin. He was also charismatic, very; tall and blue-eyed, a natural leader whose love of the absurd saved him from turning into a full-blown messiah.

[...] 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.