(The New York Times) MOSCOW — A pro-Kremlin propaganda film posted online before Russia’s 2018 presidential election smeared Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader now lying comatose in a German hospital after a poisoning attack, as the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.
A former prime minister, the target of Mr. Navalny’s most vivid exposé of corruption, denounced him as a “political con man.”
For President Vladimir V. Putin, however, the anticorruption campaigner looms like Lord Voldemort, a figure from nightmares who, like Harry Potter’s archenemy, “must not be named.” […]
“Nobody inspires such hostility and fear as Navalny,” said Nikolai Petrov, a senior research fellow at Chatham House in London and an expert on Kremlin decision-making. This, he added, means there is a very long list of potential enemies who might want him dead, or least incapacitated. […]
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