For more than a decade, Kremlin has tightened noose around its foe

movement, he took the decision to return to Moscow.

Then, the full pressure of the Kremlin vice was applied. He was thrown into prison, with spurious sentences piling up on top of each other. Where once he had commanded thousands in the streets, only the foolhardy raised their voices in the face of draconian new laws. Most of Navalny’s allies fled to exile or were jailed.

These moves appear to be part of Putin’s years-long preparations for invading Ukraine. By coming down so

‘Putin is untouchable within Russia’s borders. Outside of them, he does not fear the West’

hard on the opposition, he ensured there were few people willing to come out and protest against his criminal war, launched on Feb 24, 2022.

Almost two years into the war in Ukraine, Russian civil society has been decimated; almost every single prominent anti-Putin political figure and hundreds of thousand anti-war Russians have fled abroad. The rare critics who have stayed, such as Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, joined Navalny behind bars.

The Kremlin does not have to fear protests in a country where a 72-yearold retired woman was sent to jail for five years last month, simply for an anti-war post on social media. Putin can torture, jail and kill the country’s most popular opposition politician safe in the knowledge that he is untouchable within Russia’s borders.

Outside of them, he does not fear the West. It took several months of the war in Ukraine before sanctions were imposed on Russia’s energy sector and oil exports in particular. But the economy is nowhere near the point of collapse. The Kremlin can still sell oil and gas on global markets, if not in Europe, and the diamond trade have not been affected at all.

Meanwhile, the death of Mr Navalny comes at a moment when the West is tiring of funding Ukraine’s military. Putin, for his part, is signalling that he would not mind freezing the front line where it stands and calling it a victory.

If Putin was not being blamed for the death of Mr Navalny, one could foresee US and European politicians following in the footsteps of Tucker Carlson and visiting him for talks in Moscow, sooner or later.

Whether Mr Navalny died in an assassination or as a result of the torturous conditions he had been exposed to for three years, his death should put a halt to any such overtures – at least for now.

This is Mr Navalny’s parting blow against the man he fought against for over a decade.