The key difference between Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Putin

Following Alexei Navalny’s suspicious ‘sudden death’ in an Arctic prison camp last Friday, two scenes immediately come to mind featuring Vladimir Putin, who almost certainly mandated it.

The first is from December 2018 and his meeting, at the G20 Summit, with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, suspected at the time of involvement in the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident journalist (a suspicion lent weight by a US intelligence report released in 2021). Though bin Salman was a virtual pariah at the time, felt to have blood still hot on his hands, Putin high-fived him shamelessly, the warmest of smiles on his face, and quickly they sat down to laugh and banter. Like meeting like, it seemed, utterly relaxed, one ruthless leader congratulating the other for playing the same game so adeptly. ‘Wickedness loves company,’ as the Biblical proverb puts it, ‘And leads others into sin.’