Unlike Shoigu and Gerasimov and, don't even whisper it, Putin himself, Prigozhin would go to the front line and be seen taking risks. - John Sweeney

For me, Navalny was killed in large part because of the West's appeasement of Putin that, even today, despite all the killings of innocent men, women and children in Ukraine, our leaders are afraid to stand up to the monster in the Kremlin, to properly enforce sanctions, to effectively arm Ukraine, to cut Russia off from the international financing system. The West is doing none of the above and is in danger of not just betraying Ukraine but its own security.

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 very function of the House of the People was [...] to make concrete the social inequality between the dictator's lowly vassals and the pomp and might of His Majesty. The architect of the House had been selected by a competition. There were a lot of interesting and arresting designs, but, to put it rather brusquely, the architect who came up with the most banal, Stalinist pastiche appealed successfully to the Ceausescu's taste. The prizewinner, after the revolution, has disappeared from view because she has been battered by much hostile criticism.