Russian journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan discuss Navaly's death

https://cepa.org/article/putins-assassin-toolkit-claims-navalny/

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Nonresident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists, and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. 

Putin’s Assassin Toolkit Claims Navalny
By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan
February 16, 2024

Excerpted

Navalny’s sudden death carries all the hallmarks of the Putin regime. The Kremlin won’t take responsibility because it doesn’t need to. Every time a Putin opponent is killed — a journalist, a politician, or an activist — the Kremlin presents the same line of defense: the victim was so insignificant that Putin would hardly have bothered to bloody his hands organizing their termination. Sometimes the Kremlin’s spin doctors might elaborate on that — who knows? — there might be some uncontrolled group, in the army, in wider Russian society, who could have taken it upon themselves to rid the nation of a troublemaker. But Putin and the Kremlin had nothing to do with that.

More than 20 years of Putin’s rule now provides a pretty good case study to demonstrate that political assassination makes perfect sense and that Putin, being a very practical man, embraced the strategy years ago. A whole panoply of assassination methods are part of his political toolkit.

In this dark marketing strategy, where Putin is the main product, the leader is sold to Russia as the nation’s only possible leader and as a man who must have the power of life and death. No one really doubts this — and the Kremlin does little to dispute it. The use of assassination, the reaction of the Kremlin, and the narrative promoted in pro-Kremlin media — all help to calibrate the effects on a target audience. There is always a very practical reason to attack a victim with poison or bullets — or to torture them to death in a prison camp beyond the Arctic Circle.

The slow murder of Alexey Navalny, forever moved between brutal Russian penal colonies, ever northward to ever-more ghastly conditions, eventually beyond the Arctic Circle, was also a well-calibrated strategy. The memory of Stalin’s Gulag archipelago is burnt into the Russian DNA. Navalny’s horrible final journey into the remotest parts of Russia’s vastness was a certain means to evoke those memories.