It’s official, Alexei Anatolievich Navalny has balls the size of Crimea. When they make a movie about him only Gerard Butler in full-Leonidas mode could possibly do the man justice. They call him “the man Putin fears the most” and suggest, like Voldemort, that Putin actually won’t utter his name in public; but to correct the official record, Vladimir Putin is not Harry fucking Potter.
Putin fears no-one.
That Navalny, though…
The ‘Novichok-agent’ used in the Litvinenko-esque plot to poison Navalny is a banned cholinesterase inhibitor that totally gets the FSB-assassin thumbs-up of approval. But Navalny just shrugged that shit off while seducing a few sehr schöne frauleins in some secret German hospice, then scoops his shit up and saunters right back in to Moscow like a total badass. Testicles the size of Donald Trump’s big orange head, this guy. Comes back at Putin like a quarrel launched from a crossbow.
That said, there’s ballsy, and then there’s stupid.
Vladimir Putin is the sorta genuine alpha-male that makes me feel slightly effeminate. He sees a crowd throwing snowballs at his police force? He arrest four thousand of them. Where exactly does one even get a police force that can arrest THOUSANDS of people, let alone find a them a home? Putin’s Russia, is where. Gulags. A police force that can (and happily does) drag your dissident ass out of a crowd to house you uncomfortably behind barbed wire in Siberia.
Imagine if Russian police had manned the barricades on Capitol Hill. Those QAnon neckbeards would’ve opened up a serious can of whoop-ass. That said, there would have been no protests because there would have been no voting irregularities because President Putin says so. I can imagine Biden: “Aw c’mon man! Let Navalny go, you know what I mean?” and the Putinator just hangs up without even bothering to say ‘Nyet.’