US Spy Agencies Surprisingly Concluded That Putin Didn’t Order Navalny’s Death, by Andrew Korybko

Why would the intelligence agencies tell a story that absolves Putin when they could have easily promoted a story that discredited him? From Andrew Korybko at korybko.substack.com:

It remains unclear why they reached this conclusion and leaked it despite being in positions of authority to launder the lie that President Putin ordered Navalny’s death, which would have let them score easy soft power points against Russia.

The Wall Street Journal cited unnamed people familiar with the matter to report that the CIA, the National Directorate of Intelligence, and the State Department’s intelligence unit, among other US spy agencies, concluded that President Putin didn’t order Navalny’s death earlier this year. They still believe that he’s culpable since the US’ view is that he was wrongly imprisoned and lacked adequate medical care, but this disclosure still throws a wrench in the West’s information warfare operations.

Objective observers were already aware that “Putin Had No Reason To Kill Navalny But The West Has Every Reason To Lie That He Did”, with the first being due to the fact that he posed no threat to the Russian leader from behind bars while the second was attributable to their interest in smearing him. The West also wanted to reduce turnout during March’s presidential elections and pressure Congress into breaking its deadlock on Ukraine aid. Now that neither is relevant anymore, the truth is coming out.

President Putin revealed during his re-election speech that he had actually approved swapping Navalny for unnamed Russian prisoners being held by the West before that convicted non-systemic opposition leader’s untimely demise that Ukrainian military-intelligence chief Budanov blamed on a blood clot. Even so, many anti-Russian activists in the West refused to believe either of those two, and this was in spite of them previously treating the latter’s words as gospel.

It remains unclear why US spy agencies reportedly concluded that the Russian leader didn’t order Navalny’s death despite being in positions of authority to launder this lie for easy soft power points against his country. One possible reason is that his public confirmation that he was about to be swapped made it difficult for them to cling to that story since it truly doesn’t make sense why President Putin would approve of that only to then turn around and kill him.

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