Why the Kremlin sees Britain as its greatest foe

Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny is, as of writing, fighting for his life, hooked to a ventilator in a hospital in Omsk. He was flying back to Moscow from Tomsk when he fell suddenly ill, and many assume poison. Think the government did it? Of course not: according to the Kremlin’s lead propagandist, it was us.

Navalny’s efforts to establish a nation-wide political party in all but name – every time he tries to register a party, the Kremlin finds a way to disallow it – and his glossy exposés of elite corruption presumably struck a chord at a time when the city of Khabarovsk is still protesting the arrest of its elected governor and Belarus offers an implicit commercial for people power.

He himself has been arrested time and again, seen his brother imprisoned as a virtual hostage, been sprayed with an antiseptic dye that almost cost him an eye, and even challenged to a duel by the thuggish head of Putin’s National Guard.