It’s strange to me that they don’t just kill this guy. It seems like it could be done, and the apathetic Russian people would shrug and say, “That’s what you get.”
Killing him turns him into a martyr. Keeping him alive allows Putin to have a manageable amount of opposition, which he can use to give himself the appearance of a certain amount of democratic legitimacy. I’m sure there are a lot of other factors at play, but that’s my best guess.
He also collects that opposition around him instead of finding someone fresh and not imprisoned. There’s an obvious cult about that person and calling for his freedom that is, although with good intentions, impotent before the change in regime, thus useless. With all my wish for Alexey to get free, it won’t take us anywhere if we’d just sit and wait for him. And his ex-team jumping around his disappearance is touching, but pathetic. He can’t lesd the change as he would stay in the joint, he’s just their and many other people’s reason to do nothing at all. That’s what serves chekists right. It stuns the liberal side of the public, and the conservative, bloodthursty side just lost Prigo-guy in a completely accidential plane crash, so there’s no challenge to the regime from both left or right. Such a sweet situation with elections in three months.
I tell that pov to others, and there’s still no way for them to just switch to someone else. Oppositional talking heads only care about their drama, and all it ends on Navalny not being free yet to lead. While he isn’t even the best man to do so. There’s a currently free but limited Roizman, who have a shady past, but did make his region genuinely like him, he did funding campaigns for SMA drugs for kids, campaigns against drug mafia, he never held himself from suggesting someone to eat a bag of dicks and previously paid my yearly wage for criticizing the war in public.
There’s a lot of such figures like him, like currently sitting Kara-Murza or the free but left director of Novaya Gazeta who I see more fitting, and I’m frustrated that all talks are fixated on Navalny who is a personal enemy of Putin and would never lead something. There is at least something chekists did right and it’s centering a discourse on a person who can never be free.
Arctic prison, not gulag, honest
Gulag