Alright, I'm just going to put it out there: quite honestly, the past 48h have shaken even the most solid Russia-Ukraine war skeptics (like myself). So here’s one more very important side to it: any potential military action of any scale puts Navalny’s life at greatest risk yet. 
The danger to Navalny’s life, i.e. the probability of him being killed in prison, will increase exponentially depending on what happens in Ukraine. The odds are pretty bad already, but a full-on Russian invasion barely leaves him any chance to survive. Let me elaborate.
What do we know for sure? We know that Putin tried to kill Navalny and still really wants him dead. We also know that for a year already Navalny has literally been in the hands of the very same people who tried to kill him with Novichok in August 2020.
Here is how he is still alive. Imagine a pair of weighing scales with two bowls. On their one side is a very heavy rock - that’s Putin’s personal desire to see Navalny dead. This desire is very strong and driven by fear and perhaps personal embarrassment that Navalny caused him.
The other side of this imaginary scale represents the costs of to trying to murder Navalny again. For the past year we’ve been working hard trying to load this bowl with many little stones: protests, infinite social media posts, petitions, sanctions, newspaper articles, covers...
...the film, our investigations, our Youtube channels, interviews, speeches, awards — the list goes on and on. It has to. That’s how we keep the cost of doing anything bad to Navalny high. Not an easy job to do when your enemy is not only rich and powerful but also a psychopath.
I'm not done with my imaginary scale yet.There’s a trick to it. It only works well when someone is watching. Not just someone but millions of people at the same time. If we lose our focus for even a split second, the scale gets rigged and manipulated, losing its balance.
We need to watch the scale without blinking.The key to saving Navalny’s life is constant uninterrupted attention. There isn’t a better moment for Putin to get rid of his main enemy than the moment when the world is looking elsewhere, at something he is doing with his other hand.
At the moment it looks like Navalny’s new trial (Feb 15) is purposefully scheduled to coincide with the most tense week of the Ukrainian crisis. At the very least they are planning to extend his sentence for another 15 years while everyone’s distracted with something bigger.
We should hope it’s just the trial they are disguising and distracting us from, not something worse. Which, again, is not that crazy to expect. Putin did order to kill Navalny once and managed to get away with it. The line has been crossed.Nothing stops Putin from doing it again.
The hotter the war talks get the more I think about this. I urge everyone who’s reading this, journalists, analysts or politicians, to add this to your calculus and write it into your memos. While the invasion is still hypothetical, the threat to Navalny’s life already isn’t.
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