Russia assassinates even unimportant people for revenge and intimidation. For instance: they hired assassins to kill a bunch of nobodies in Ukraine in 2016 because they'd helped supply Georgia with Ukraine-made antiaircraft weapons that had been used against Russia when they invaded in 2008.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/world/europe/russian-assa...:
> Russia Ordered a Killing That Made No Sense. Then the Assassin Started Talking.
> ...The war lasted only five days and ended with a crushing victory for Moscow. But in many ways, the conflict was an embarrassment for Russia’s intelligence services. Years earlier, Ukraine had secretly sold sophisticated antiaircraft systems to Georgia, allowing for the effective defense that I had seen....
> For Mr. Putin — who has described Russians and Ukrainians as “one people” — it was an act of bloody treachery.
> “We don’t know who decided to deliver equipment and weapons from Ukraine during the conflict, but whoever it was, that person made a huge mistake,” Mr. Putin said at a news conference shortly after the war.
This method lets people know what tools they are willing to use on an adversary. And it’s also a signature “we did it” so you don’t have to guess who’s after you. It serves as a warning to any upstarts as well.
It’s not all that different from the Ndraghetta bombings up and down Italy in the late XX cent.
We haven't seen any of that. Your version of events seems highly unlikely.
There is at least "Smart vote" (aka умное голосование) initiative, that helped to beat government on some regional elections earlier.
Oh, and it's big election day in less than two weeks, so there is definetely a motivation for poisoning.
Sometimes you get steak and sometimes you get chocolate.
Not fair to call it a "false flag" though as there's no obvious "flag" attached to this event. It's not like anybody has claimed the attack. There's a whole world of possibilities beyond "Putin ordered it" and "false flag". But whoever did it, it does seem like Kremlin is covering for them so at least partially morally responsible.
They want everyone to know they did it. That's Putin's MO. Everyone knows he did it, and he knows everyone knows he did it. But there's still enough plausible deniability that it would be hard to conclusively prove. And ultimately he has his finger on the world's largest arsenal of nuclear ICBMs, so he knows there's absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. It's the same as the mafia leaving a severed horse head in your bed. It sends a message.
Instead we could use facts that are already known about e.g. Putin -- that he's an individual for whom sowing fear is more important than not being blamed, as the other similar poisonings have shown.
And no, I am not a Russian troll nor do I have any connections to Russia. Check my comment history. I am just sceptical that one would do this and not just shot someone they wanted to get rid of them.
Is Putin really that stupid or was it someone else?
The uncertainty you're trying to sow is in no way reasonable.
In other words, just apply occam's razor to the problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
But I cannot imagine why would anyone do that to Navalny. First of (and this is very much arguable, but I'm just saying what is my opinion), I don't think he is any threat to Putin&friends. He has some supporters, but "opposition leader" is waay too generous, he isn't even treated very seriously by people who are against Putin, much less by Putin. So, some mundane harassment like police raids to his office... sure, why not? But assassinating him very publicly like that, when he wasn't even "in the news" (figuratively speaking) for some time? I have no idea, why would "the government" want it. He isn't anything new, he has no real power. And unlike Litvinenko or Skripal he isn't ex-GRU/FSB, so he isn't a "traitor" to any "interesting" agencies. Basically, I don't see why would his "enemies" (i.e. Putin&friends) even care about him.
His constantly embarrassing exposes where he demonstrates how much money they've fleeced from the Russian people don't count? e.g.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE1iw4seYt0&list=PLuBu40P6jU...
Or his videos demonstrating widespread voting fraud that's keeping "Putin and Friends" in power?
I like watching these videos, BTW, because I like how they are made, it's pretty fun. But are they "hurting" anybody? I doubt so.
A single assassination of Navalny gives much more bad publicity, than 100 years of Navalny & ФБК making "Он вам не Димон" kind of movies. If they care about the latter, they surely don't want the former.
Putin & co. is the simplest explanation. Why question it? Who else would stand to gain from this? Because they do gain from it: intimidating the opposition is the name of the game in a dictatorship.
Let me put it this way. There is a "perceived value" and a "real value" of assassination. So, if you want to send a message, "real value" is metric of people you want to get a message getting this particular message. Like if you are GRU/CIA/Medellin cartel (basically the same things) and you want every cartel member to know that traitors will be punished, you want it to be relatable for the other cartel members and gruesome. You don't really want it to be very much high-profile (which it must be to some degree if you want it to be gruesome, but only as a side effect).
"Perceived value" is what is "real" to complete outsiders unaware of situation. It is what will cause the resonance in BBC and among the people you really don't give a fuck about getting the message (and in case of Russia govt. — don't want to get the message: Russia absolutely isn't trying to tell the world there is a dictatorship, it wants for the outsiders to get exactly the opposite message, that there is "real competition", i.e. people like Navalny that are against the regime, but just don't have that much of a support).
So, to summarize, if you are Medellin cartel sending message to its members: maximize "real" minimizing "perceived". If you want to set up Medellin cartel: you maximize "perceived" and don't give a fuck about "real".
Now, what is real/perceived ratio in the case of Navalny? As I already said, this is my personal (pretty humble in this case, and not particularly strong) opinion, but my estimation is: very, very low. I don't know of any "people just like Navalny" (so it will be relatable), that are actually dangerous to the regime and need to get "a message". On the other hand, "perceived value" is very high: in fact, the moment Navalny gets to a hospital, everyone automatically assumes it is an assassination by the Russian govt, since he is such a prominent "opposition leader".
So, if I was GRU, I wouldn't want Navalny to be killed in an obvious way. If I was a CIA, I most likely would.
Your explanation requires too many assumptions, and fails to explain other facts of history - such as other people having been poisoned, or Putin et al doing other wildly unpopular things just for the sake of it.
Russia habitually invades the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish waters _just to show that they can_.
Your reasoning boils down to “if you can think of an explanation, it’s wrong”. The CIA furthermore has very little need for making Russia look bad right now. Russia is doing that all in its own.
P.S. I want to clarify, that I don't really blame CIA, it was just a way of simplifying the essence of what I'm trying to convey. I don't try to make any theories of what's happening, I'm acknowledging that I have no clue, because what I'm seeing is 2 political sides pointing at each other, shouting and swinging arms. All that I'm saying is that accepting "the simplest explanation because of Occam'z razon" here is stupid, because (unlike when setting up a physics experiment) the simplest explanation here is just words and pointing sides, the same as the more complex explanation, and I can think of dozens of "possible explanations" that all will be lies. So I don't pretend to know who poisoned Navalny (or even if he was poisoned, for that matter), but it would be baffling to me if it indeed was done under direct or indirect Putin's orders. So, I was only telling the GP that he is not alone in thinking this seems very suspicious. Indeed it does.
There were dozens of illogical things Russian government did for decades, and killing opponents (or just innocent people) is among them.