Putin can ill afford a martyr right now

To have ordered the poisoning of Alexei Navalny would cause more of a backlash than it is worth

Alexei Navalny has been described as “the man Vladimir Putin fears most”. Since he set up as an anti-corruption blogger in 2008 he has become Russia’s best-known opposition politician, tirelessly demonstrating and organising to expose the rot in today’s Russia, and to demand democracy as the remedy. In his most remembered line, he dismissed Mr Putin’s parliamentary bloc as the “party of crooks and thieves”.

But he has paid the price that such brave men do in today’s Russia. Mr Putin has banned the public use of his name. He has spent time in jail on trumped-up charges of embezzlement and has accordingly been excluded from standing against Mr Putin in national elections. Acid thrown in his face in 2017 deprived him of most of the use of one eye. There was also an attempt to poison him during one of his many short jail sentences last year.

So the news of another attempted poisoning, which left Mr Navalny last night in a coma, is both tragic and unsurprising. We should nevertheless be careful about leaping to the conclusion, as most of the world will, that this is yet another dark act by the Kremlin. This may have been perpetrated by some element of the Russian state (Mr Navalny had many enemies). Yet I suspect that the Russian president and his most senior henchmen are watching by Mr Navalny’s bedside as nervously as his most ardent supporters.

Why? Because there is a deep malaise in Russian politics at the moment. This is odd given that

Mr Putin has just – even taking into account the normal level of falsification – won a convincing majority in a referendum that will allow him to stay on as president for life. He remains by a substantial margin the man Russians believe best offers order and stability, despite the accompanying price in corruption and repression. But Mr Putin has now been in power for 20 years, and the regime’s age is beginning to show. Living standards have been at best stagnant for a decade, and are set to fall sharply as a result of the virus. Russia sits in fourth place in the global league table of Covid-19 cases.

Mr Putin himself has more or less vanished from day-to-day governance in Russia, and seems increasingly ready to leave the management of affairs (particularly the pandemic) to others. The huge boost to his popularity from the 2014 annexation of Crimea has faded. The regime plainly doesn’t know how to handle weeks of public demonstrations about the removal of a popular local governor in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia’s third-largest city. And next year they face national parliamentary elections which, on present showing, Mr Putin’s party of crooks and thieves will lose by a landslide, thus removing a crucial prop to his power. It was, in fact, Mr Navalny who told me that while you can fiddle the results of elections in Russia, you can’t conceal an avalanche.

And then there is Russia’s hitherto more or less loyal satellite, Belarus. Here, precisely as Mr Navalny noted, massive electoral fraud by the country’s president has within the last few days brought the people out onto the streets in numbers that could see the demise of the regime. This is the stuff of

Kremlin nightmares. Steering between the dangers of “losing Belarus” to the West, or direct intervention, with all the costs that brought in Ukraine, Mr Putin is likely to find himself working for exactly the sort of peaceful democratic transition in Belarus that Mr Navalny has been pursuing in Russia itself. This is not an example that would go unnoticed back at home.

In these awkward circumstances, the last thing the Kremlin wants is the domestic and international blowback that would result from the violent death of another noted opponent. The parallel case is that of Boris Nemtsov, another charismatic opposition politician who was murdered right outside the Kremlin in 2015. Then, too, the world instinctively, and almost certainly mistakenly, blamed Mr Putin.

But Mr Nemtsov, while an irritant to the regime in his life, became a much more potent spur to opposition as the martyr for democracy he became. The same would almost certainly be true of Mr Navalny. Mr Putin knows this. That is why I suspect he is highly unlikely to have ordered the attack – and instead will be hoping for Mr Navalny’s swift recovery.