Why’d Putin Want To Swap Navalny?

While many “Non-Russian Pro-Russians” celebrated Navalny’s untimely death when it happened, in hindsight, it would have arguably been a lot better for Russia’s objective national interests had he lived and been swapped.

President Putin revealed during his re-election speech early Monday morning that he’d earlier approved swapping the late Navalny for unnamed Russian prisoners being held in the West before his untimely passing due to what even Ukrainian military-intelligence chief Budanov said was likely a blood clot. It was assessed at the time that “Putin Had No Reason To Kill Navalny But The West Has Every Reason To Lie That He Did”, with this latest development adding further credence to that claim.

Navalny was a high-profile prisoner who was jailed on corruption charges and was previously alleged by President Putin himself to have been working with American intelligence so it’s natural that he’d figure into any proposed swap to free similarly high-profile Russians who’d been imprisoned by the West. The most likely candidate could have been Vadim Krasikov, who’s serving a life sentence in Germany for killing a former Chechen terrorist that the Russian leader claimed had murdered his country’s soldiers.

He told Tucker last month that “do you know what he [bandit] was doing? I don’t want to say that, but I will do it anyway. He was laying our soldiers, taken prisoner, on the road and then he drove his car over their heads. What kind of a person is that? Can he even be called a human? But there was a patriot who eliminated him in one of the European capitals. Whether he did that of his own volition or not, that is a different question.”

One of Navalny’s associates claimed shortly after his passing that he was supposed to have been swapped alongside two Americans imprisoned in Russia, likely referring to Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich, for Krasikov so there’s was already an independent precedent for speculating this. That’s not to imply that this associate is an entirely truthful figure, but just that this particular claim aligns with President Putin’s mentioning of Krasikov and his subsequent revelation of a planned swap.

There are reasons to believe that Navalny really could have been included in the proposed swap for Krasikov and whoever else since it could have both increased the odds of the US agreeing to this as well as advanced an important Russian soft power point. If this arrangement went through, then there’d be little doubt that Navalny actually was working with American intelligence exactly as President Putin claimed since he’d have been swapped alongside two others who are formally accused of this crime.

In that event, the US would have also secured the release of a similarly high-profile unofficial intelligence asset just like Krasikov is suspected of being for Russia, but at the expense of discrediting his entire network since they’d all be implicated by association with this CIA asset in that scenario. President Putin could also have earned some rare praise from the West for releasing the man who was misportrayed by them for years as a so-called “top opposition figure”, thus discrediting claims of him being a “dictator”.

Simply put, President Putin would have killed three birds with one stone through these means by securing Krasikov’s release, discrediting the rest of the CIA’s network inside Russia, and subverting popular Western perceptions of him. While many “Non-Russian Pro-Russians” celebrated Navalny’s untimely death when it happened, in hindsight, it would have arguably been a lot better for Russia’s objective national interests had he lived and been swapped.