Five months after Russian intelligence services botched an attempt to kill him, Alexei Navalny audaciously returned to Moscow, in the process announcing himself the uncontested political champion of the Russian political opposition. He had succumbed to a military-grade poison on a flight to Siberia and was then evacuated in a comatose state to Germany, where world-class doctors saved his life and rehabilitated him.
After failing to kill him in a quasi-deniable fashion, Russian President Vladimir Putin would have liked nothing more than to have Navalny stay in exile. Understanding full well that staying in Germany would have ensured he would join the chorus of irrelevant exiled Russian opposition figures, routinely ignored by both the authorities and the Russian population, Navalny instead returned to Russia and inaugurated an accelerationist strategy of resistance against the Kremlin—breaking the status quo one way or the other.
