Stupidly to poison someone, and then give them to other country.... 0_0 Say someone is a leader this less then 2% stupidly too...
Killing a member of the opposition is pointless, broadcasting despair to all potential opposers is very valuable.
Disagree. Proactive removal of charismatic rivals is essential for cutting off potential opposition at the knees.
You always see Russian media claim that they were a "nobody" or had no chance in the election, and that might have been true today but they could be a serious threat in a few years.
The second advantage of killing off potential rivals is that it discourages smart people from running against you.
The downside is brain drain. You end up filling your organization with toadies and with no reasonable alternatives your regime falls into chaos when you die, and usually your successor is less competent and has to be more ruthless. It's a downward spiral and after a couple of generations the whole thing collapses.
A reliable source just verified to all other potential opponents that they might be poisoned.
They could have paid a homeless person to shoot him or just ask a Russian mafiosi to do it. But no, they want to send a message.
Putin isn't afraid of the foreign response. He's afraid of domestic enemies gaining enough confidence to attempt a coup. Domestic enemies are the sole threat to Putin. He wants them terrified; he wants them to understand that he will kill them as necessary. Putin knows very well the first rule of being a dictator (which Lukashenko has forgotten): if you want to be dictator you're going to have to kill people, and if you want to remain dictator, you're going to have to keep killing people so long as you want to retain that position.
If you're Putin, ideally Navalny lives and is grotesquely destroyed, broken, by the poison; an example for all that would challenge his power. It says: I can do this to anyone in Russia at any time, I don't need to be very subtle about it beyond minimum plausible deniability, and there is nothing the world can do to stop me.
NATO has enough commandos to take down Russian political leadership in a single evening.
NATO is a big gun, but it has no trigger.
And Russia probably has enough commandos to do the same to NATO leadership as well. Neither side actually does that because it would be a suicide mission that would just result in a war.
2. NATO towers over Russia for when it comes to size, and quality of elite infantry forces.
3. The loyalty of Russian military is so low, that the collapse of the military leadership will be near immediate upon news of heads rolling in the Kremlin. Absolutely nobody wants to die for those guys.
4. Even if none of the points above will come to fruition. The attack is guaranteed to deliver big enough shock to the Russian C3 to assure that a followup with conventional forces will succeed.
There cannot be a single scenario in which Russia would be able to keep any advantage in force if NATO takes the initiative, and goes on offensive. This a plain statement of the fact that even the USSR's military was acknowledging.
I reiterate this for the 100th. Neither China, nor Russia is an impossible to defeat adversary to the NATO. Not only an option for the decisive defeat is still very much on the table for NATO, that can be done as a very much contained, quick, and mess free military operation. A controlled demolition of the regime in few large swoops, over a "whack-a-mole" of conventional C3 suppression campaign.
If the political leadership of a nation gets assassinated, I do not think it's reasonable to expect the military leadership to sit on their hands forever, waiting for orders from the dead.
And if you want to get down to brass tacks, both NATO and Russia have the military capability to literally exterminate the bulk of each other's populations, and I beleive Russia is known to have automated fail-deadly retaliation systems.
> 2. NATO towers over Russia for when it comes to size, and quality of elite infantry forces.
Honestly, I would think surprise is more important than anything with such an operation as you propose, because success would mainly depend on attacking a target with military-level force that's completely unprepared for that.
> 3. The loyalty of Russian military is do low, that the collapse of the military leadership will be near immediate upon news of heads rolling in the Kremlin. Absolutely nobody wants to die for those guys.
Maybe not for those people themselves, but they might be willing to die for the nation that those people lead. I'm sure a scheme to assassinate the entire political leadership of a country might evoke some nationalist feelings.