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Notes -
Navalny is dead.
IMHO it is stupid to seriously discuss the circumstances of his death, especially after Litvinenko, Nemtsov and Navalny himself in 2020. He was killed and many new details that are brought in every hour only prove this more. Prison conditions as a reason are not an excuse, especially when we can see yesterday's Alexei, looking unhealthy, but not at all near death. Prigozhin's fate only further confirms the presumption of guilt.
His death is the right choice for the regime. Navalny posed a much greater threat to them in prison than abroad, and no possible reaction is scary enough to keep him alive. The authorities hope that in the current conditions there will not be a new leader in the opposition who will be able to unite the disparate dissident branches. This is quite likely, especially considering that the deceased did not have a successor (official or informal).
The opposition has lost its head, and the FBK have lost the remnants of their legitimacy. This tragedy for many will be a time of opportunity for others. Surely the next leader is already here, although I hope we wouldn't need to wait too long. In his posthumous address that he recorded for the 2022 film, Alexey asks Russians not to give up and I am sure that no one is going to do this. As a Russian I can say that as long as Russia exists, there will always be people willing to risk their lives for freedom and truth.
It's interesting to see a certain weird tic that's become common in various American stories make its way into this one:
Without citing evidence. Without. Citing. Evidence. Are you people fucking kidding me? Who is doing the editing for this that they feel the need to inject that phrase into every claim that isn't bibliographically footnoted and addended with appropriate Bayesian odds? Yeah, when the leader of political opposition to an autocrat dies in a prison colony at 47 years old, the default is that they were murdered by the regime. Even in the event that they didn't do anything in particular to him that day, any reasonable person looking at the basic facts would conclude that the regime is responsible for his death, because that's the whole point of sending to him to a Russian prison colony in the Arctic Circle called the Polar Wolf.
On the flip side, I had assumed that this stupid editorial tic was mostly just directed at the American right, but it seems that it's now standard practice.
It has absolutely lost its original propagandistic edge and become all-purpose filler. A recent NYT article about a scandalous Russian party made me laugh out loud:
Perhaps it was a joke? Is anyone here willing to own up to entryism at the New York Times?
[Edit - instead of being so snarky, I feel like I ought to give more weight to the opposite interpretation, that it was an occult signal, a quiet protest or a cry for help from within.]
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