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Now this is getting interesting
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13124393/Ukraines-spy-chief-says-Alexei-Navalny-died-blood-clot.html
That makes no sense. Why would the Ukrainian chief of intelligence exonerate Putin and also put an egg on the face of all of the western allies that pearl clutched so hard? What are we missing?
Putin ordering Navalny to be killed doesn't make a ton of sense given he posed no immediate threat and was safely rotting in prison. But obviously being in jail could have hastened Navalny's death by quite a bit. I think there were reports that he was denied needed medical care. There shouldn't be much of a question that Putin is certainly willing to assassinate people he views as a threat, as he almost certainly did with Prigozhin. Also, other dissidents like Girkin fear being offed as well.
Whether Putin directly ordered Navalny to be killed doesn't really matter that much, nor will it likely ever be definitively answered.
I think that Putin's thoughts are sufficiently inscrutible to not make judgements based on your attempts to empathise with him. For example, Putin may have used Navalny's death to send a signal to oppositionists ahead of the presidential elections - "Don't cause trouble, this is my show." Or he might not.
Killing an opposition leader is certainly the type of thing that people like Putin are likely to do.
You could say that about practically every leader, especially autocratic ones. Any speculation is necessarily low-confidence because of this, although examining motives and wargaming out possibilities still serves some purpose. E.g. we can probably be quite certain that Prigozhin was assassinated due to being a perceived threat, either directly or merely by what he represented. Offing him was the clear logical choice.
This isn't a bad idea either given that one opposition guy was gaining a bit of traction, although, yeah, still low-confidence.
Indeed. I think it's a pretty unreliable way to make inferences about what happens in politics. Not coincidentally, it's often how conspiracy theorists reason.
Yes, my point is that doubting that Putin had Navalny killed because it's hard to think up a motive is weak evidence, especially because it's easy to be biased - someone looking to condemn Putin can overrate the plausibility of such motives, someone looking to exculpate Putin can spend minimal time actually trying to think up possible motives. When someone says, "I can't see how..." I usually initially doubt that they looked very hard.
I think we're mostly in agreement here, and you're probably mostly just prodding me over the fact that I should have had a "low-confidence speculation" qualifier in my initial post above. I don't think speculating on a leader's actions is always low-confidence though. I have medium-high confidence that Putin had Prigozhin killed for a number of reasons.
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