I never understood why Navalny allowed himself to be captured and imprisoned the way he did. Then again, I don’t understand why Prigozhin didn’t fully commit to his rebellion. Russia seems plagued with men whose greatest ambition is to become a martyr: Even if they could have achieved more by staying alive.
The media seems reluctant to tell the public what anyone with common sense already knows: Navalny was murdered. Why is the media being so reticent? In terms of the media’s incentives, a story about murder will attract more attention than a story about a simple death. No questions about how he was murdered, or why Putin decided to murder him now? Does it have any relationship to his coming election? There are a slew of interesting questions, questions that would attract readers, that the media is simply refusing to address. Indeed, Putin’s decision to kill Navalny, a man who had been effectively marginalized and contained, seems to invite chaos just a month out from its next election: It doesn’t make much sense. Putin seems to be breaking down psychologically: This appears to be a highly emotional decision. The Prigozhin mutiny may have unsettled him. If this was a rational move, Putin must have felt a need to send a message to the token opposition opposing Putin in the upcoming shame election. But a lack of emotional self-control seems to be the most likely explanation.
One probable scenario is that Navalny was forced to take a “walk” outside at gunpoint so that the Kremlin could claim that he was merely taking his daily exercise and suffered hypothermia as a result (I doubt Navalny is allowed to go on walks alone). If he did ask to take the walk, his guards likely locked him out, which would still make this a murder. Poison is another option, but hypothermia offers more deniability while still being torturous enough to satisfy Putin’s sadistic personality.
It seems likely to me that the major media conglomerates have been “urged” to simply report the death and allow Biden’s speech, which will be given very soon, to frame public attitudes towards it. That said, I believe that—given the Russian obsession with “foreign agents”—it is a mistake for Biden to comment directly on what happened here as it will feed the Kremlin’s narrative that he was a CIA agent or NATO asset. This is simply too much to give the Kremlin. It would be better to embed a question about Navalny into an interview given a month from now and to simply leak evidence/intelligence to the press regarding the details of his murder.
Whatever is going on here, it is not organic.