In 2017, Navalny released a film about Medvedev that unexpectedly took off and brought a huge number of new faces onto the streets. Back then, many expected that the most important film—about Putin—was about to be released. We had to wait almost four years, but now we have a double blow: one about Putin’s palace, which is very effective and capable of igniting a new audience, and one about the FSB poisoners, which had a serious effect even on long-time observers.

On January 23, like most of my Russian readers, I will go out into the street to demonstrate my disagreement with Navalny being held in prison. This is a simple warning that the boundary between the extremely undesirable and the completely unacceptable today lies somewhere around “imprisoning a public politician of international standing through lawlessness on a live broadcast.” The use of violence against people in uniform or state property is not endorsed. But there is also an emphasis on the unwillingness to coordinate the protest itself in any form with representatives of the regime.

For its part, the regime is predictably demonstrating that it does not recognize our right to such a demonstration and will most likely not listen. This manifests in preemptive arrests of everyone who is presumed not only to intend to go out but is also capable of participating in the coordination of protest actions. Those who are administratively dependent are being assigned various chores for Saturday on a mass scale, students are warned of expulsion, loyalists invent horror stories about police shooting to kill, and Roskomnadzor-chan is scrubbing communities from VKontakte and videos from TikTok—in general, the direction of work is more or less clear.

Effectively, we are now at a fork between the Ukrainian and Belarusian scenarios. And I would, of course, prefer the Ukrainian one, but the Belarusian one seems more likely to me. I don’t know what other cards Navalny’s team has in their hand, but I suspect that the strongest ones have already been played, and the Ukrainian scenario requires the ability to raise the stakes significantly. In short, I am going tomorrow with a heavy heart and without much hope, not even for victory, but for at least some improvement in the situation. If no unpleasant surprises occur, tomorrow I will try to reflect in another post on what it felt like. And so, a channel about theory turns into a chronicle of some petty squabbling…