“Who knows, in the long run of Russian history Navalny may later be considered a hero.”
This may be sooner than later.
Putin may have made a serious mistake here. Navalny alive was a political prisoner and a living example to other people not to challenge the Putin regime.
Now that Navalny is dead he has become a martyr.
It also matters that Russians are affected by a kind of fatalism that is unknown in the West. If they think they’re going to die anyway the Russian people will not avoid their fate. Not at all. They will charge into it headlong.
Now there’s people in Russia who do not believe in Putin’s grand delusion of the ‘Russkiy Mir’ who will rise up. And they will fight.
The question is will it be hundreds of them, thousands of them, or millions of them?
“This may be sooner than later.”
I think it will be later and not sooner.
Putin is playing the “nationalism” of war to his advantage and no matter how the war ends, even with a major set back for Putin, he will, even then, on the defensive, play that card successgully, I believe. I think Russia and the world will have to wait for a post Putin era, and even then, and until then, we can’t know if that will be led by an existing Putin crony-oligarch. Those oligarchs with the state intelligence apparatus, joined at the hip with them, will still be very much running the show, even after Putin.