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Notes -
While I don't really have an emotional commitment to whether Putin had Navalny killed or not, I think it should be pointed out that even back in the 50s the KGB was capable of killing people and making it look like an accident. I'm not sure if you've heard of the meme of the heart attack gun but actually there are two things this might refer to, One is the CIA version (https://allthatsinteresting.com/heart-attack-gun) which fired a frozen dart of water mixed with shellfish toxin, which as far as I know wasn't ever used. The other is the KGB version, which was used at least twice, including to kill the Stepan Bandera of occasional political controversy. The gun blew cyanide gas into the victim's face, killing them almost instantly and leaving traces that resembled a heart attack. The triggerman botched the Bandera assassination so the authorities weren't fooled into thinking it was an accident, but he had assassinated Lev Rebet two years earlier and had succeeded in fooling everyone then. If you want to read more about it here's an interview with the author of a biography of the assassin: https://huri.harvard.edu/news/man-poison-gun-qa-serhii-plokhii
Anyway, my point is that it's reasonable to assume Putin has ways of making deaths look accidental. That being said, I don't see any reason for the head of the GUR to say this unless he believed it to be true, honestly I'm surprised he'd say it even then, so I'm much less sure that Navalny was assassinated than I was. It's easy to get lost in the wilderness of mirrors and see spook shit where it doesn't exist, on the other hand it's quite a coincidence.
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