Last month, Vladimir Putin insisted that he'd OKed a plan to release Alexei Navalny from an Arctic penal colony just before the opposition leader died in February. Now, a new report from the Wall Street Journal suggests the Russian president actually may not have directly ordered Navalny's death—or, at least, "might not have planned for it to happen when it did." That finding has been accepted and shared by multiple US intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the State Department's spy unit, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Sources tell the Journal that the intelligence agencies based their assessment on both classified intel and by looking into already public facts around the case, including the timeline of Navalny's death. None of this is to say that Putin doesn't bear culpability, notes the Journal—it's just that the timing was apparently off. The Kremlin has continued to deny both Navalny's death and his earlier poisoning. Bloomberg notes that Navalny's still-murky demise "triggered a fresh round of tensions between Russia and the West at a time relations were fractured by the Ukraine conflict."
Despite the US findings, some security officials in Europe say they're wary of the latest narrative, with the Journal noting that "in a system as tightly controlled as Putin's Russia, it is doubtful that harm could have come to Navalny without the president's prior awareness." Leonid Volkov, a longtime Navalny associate who was attacked and beaten with a hammer last month outside his home in Lithuania, concurs that it doesn't make sense Putin wouldn't have known. "The idea of Putin being not informed and not approving killing Navalny is ridiculous," Volkov says, telling the Journal that those who are pushing that narrative "clearly do not understand anything about how modern-day Russia runs." Navalny's allies say they'll eventually show proof that he was murdered, per Reuters. (More Alexei Navalny stories.)
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