Tens of thousands gather for pro-Navalny protests

Well Moscown really **** the bed with this one. Not only did they turn a fringe politician into a high profile martyr by trying to off him (although it is yet to be ascertained if this was a rogue operation or something ordered by Putin - both offering extremely troubling consequences of their own) but then arresting him when he landed? It's almost like they're trying to turn him from a mild thorn in their side into a figure ordinary Russians can rally around.
After all, before this, he was a nobody as far as the average Russian was concerned (his support being young metropolitan types) but going from a cack-handed assassination attempt to quite obviously locking him up on trumped up charges to battering ordinary people in the street (apparently about 3000+ have been arrested in protests). It boggles the mind that a government, usually quite adept at managing dissent, keeps making things worse for itself.
At any rate, a dreadful shame for both Russia and her people now that UR isnt even trying to keep up the pretense of working for them as opposed to doing whatever they so wish.


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55783944

I don't think it will make any difference, Navalny will be killed in a gulag and the people will go back to their dictatorship.

Hopefully he won't end up like Sergei Magnitsky, Boris Nemtsov, Boris Berezovsky, Alexander Perepilichnyy, Georgi Markov or Leon Trotsky.

In fairness to Nemtsov, that was the Chechens as opposed to the Kremlin. As to Berezovsky though, wasnt that ruled a suicide after he was thoroughly trounced as a lying crook in court?