American intelligence revealed: Putin is not guilty; Europe is shocked

Let us remind you that the face of the Russian opposition, who has been serving a 19-year prison term since 2023 in one of the country's most notorious gulags, the one in the Arctic, mysteriously collapsed during a walk this February.

According to official records, prison guards immediately came to his aid by starting resuscitation, but it was too late, which is why they could only officially declare him dead. A later autopsy revealed that death was due to sudden organ failure. Predictably, the Kremlin was appalled by accusations that it was behind the mysterious death of Putin's biggest political opponent.

It is worth noting that the US intelligence agencies came to this conclusion based on classified data and analysis of publicly available information, and that the CIA, the National Security Agency and the State Department firmly stand behind this claim.

In their bombastic report, however, they emphasize that they do not have enough evidence to support the claim that the Russian president at that moment ordered the liquidation of his political rival, but that this does not mean that the Kremlin is not "logistically" behind the murder, in a wider context.

Intelligence agencies did not speculate further about the circumstances of his death, nor did they offer an alternative explanation.

"Anyone who can even for a second think that Putin's regime is not behind Alexei's death does not understand the way modern Russia works at all. The very idea that someone did not inform Putin in advance about the murder of his main political rival is hilarious," claims Leonid Volkov, longtime associate of Alexei Navalny.

European agencies also question the assessments of American intelligence.

"Navalny was a well-guarded prisoner of great political importance to the Kremlin, which is why Putin was personally involved in his fate. The chance that his death is a 'complex of unfortunate circumstances' and not an order from the Kremlin is so small as to be almost negligible," the director of the Polish Institute for International Relations, Slavomir Debski, told the Wall Street Journal.

For the sake of context, it should be emphasized that Alexei Navalny was a person who had enough support in Russia to seriously threaten the stability of the Putin regime, as far as it is possible in the current political circumstances, which is why his death was interpreted as a kind of crown of the behind-the-scenes showdown that the Kremlin was conducting with possible alternatives to Vladimir Putin.

Namely, since the beginning of the "special military operation" in Ukraine, several prominent Russians have died under so far unexplained circumstances, including the architect of the failed coup, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Another interesting piece of information is the fact that just a few days before the death of Alexei Navalny, US President Joe Biden and his German counterpart, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, allegedly planned a prisoner exchange in which Navalny (as well as US journalist Evan Gershkovich and Marine Paul Whelan) would be released.

In return, the Kremlin reportedly demanded the release of Vadim Krasikov, a Russian intelligence officer serving a sentence in Germany for the murder of a Georgian dissident.