On February 27, 2015, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down within sight of the Kremlin, just days after he had spoken out against Russian intervention in Ukraine. Nemtsov was only the latest Putin critic to be assassinated or to die under suspicious circumstances. In January 2016 a British public inquiry officially implicated Putin in the 2006 murder of former Federal Security Service (FSB; the successor to the KGB) officer Alexander Litvinenko. Litvinenko, who had spoken out against Russian government ties to organized crime both before and after his defection to the United Kingdom, was poisoned with polonium-210 while drinking tea in a London hotel bar. Britain ordered the extradition of the two men accused of carrying out the assassination, but both denied involvement and one—Andrey Lugovoy—had since been elected to the Duma and enjoyed parliamentary immunity from prosecution.

Aleksey Navalny, an opposition activist who had first achieved prominence as a leader of the 2011 protest movement, was repeatedly imprisoned on what supporters characterized as politically motivated charges. Navalny finished second in the Moscow mayoral race in 2013, but his Progress Party was shut out of subsequent elections on procedural grounds. In the September 2016 legislative election, voter turnout was just 47.8 percent, the lowest since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Voter apathy was attributed to Putin’s steady implementation of so-called “managed democracy,” a system whereby the basic structures and procedures of democracy were maintained but the outcome of elections was largely predetermined. Putin’s United Russia party claimed victory, but election observers documented numerous irregularities, including instances of ballot stuffing and repeat voting. Navalny’s party was prohibited from fielding any candidates because of its registration status, and Nemtsov’s PARNAS received less than 1 percent of the vote.

By 2016 Putin’s involvement had shifted the balance in power in Syria, and evidence emerged that Russia was conducting a wide-ranging hybrid warfare campaign intended to undermine the power and legitimacy of Western democracies. Many of the attacks blurred the line between cyberwarfare and cybercrime, while others recalled the direct Soviet interventionism of the Cold War era. Russian fighter jets routinely violated NATO airspace in the Baltic, and a pair of sophisticated cyberattacks on the Ukrainian power grid plunged hundreds of thousands of people into darkness. Ukrainian Pres. Petro Poroshenko reported that his country had been subjected to more than 6,000 cyber intrusions over a two-month period, with virtually every sector of Ukrainian society being targeted. Poroshenko stated that Ukrainian investigators had linked the cyberwar campaign to Russian security services. In Montenegro, where the pro-Western government was preparing for accession to NATO, authorities narrowly averted a plot to assassinate Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Ðjukanović and install a pro-Russian government. Montenegrin prosecutors uncovered a conspiracythat linked nationalist Serbs, pro-Russian fighters in eastern Ukraine, and, allegedly, a pair of Russian intelligence agents who had orchestrated the planned coup.

After Trump’s stunning victory in November 2016, renewed attention was focused on the cyberattacks and possible collusion between Trump’s campaign team and Russia. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Putin had ordered a multipronged campaign to influence the election and undermine faith in American democratic systems. U.S. President Barack Obama imposed economic sanctions on Russian intelligence services and expelled dozens of suspected Russian operatives, but President-elect Trump continued to reject the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies. Trump took office in January 2017 and additional investigations were opened by the U.S. Congress to examine the nature and extent of Russian meddling in the presidential election.

Putin’s foreign moves appeared to produce significant dividends at home, as his popular approval rating consistently remained above 80 percent in spite of Russia’s sluggish economy and endemic government corruption. Low oil prices and Western sanctions compounded an already grim financial outlook as foreign investors remained reluctant to put their capital at risk in a land where personal ties to Putin were seen as more important than the rule of law. Even after Russia emerged from seven consecutive quarters of recession, both wages and consumer spending remained stagnant in 2017. These and other domestic problems seemed to do little to dent Putin’s image; among those expressing concern for such issues in opinion polls, blame was most often affixed to Putin’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev.

Salisbury novichok attack and relationship with Trump

As the March 2018 presidential election approached, it seemed all but certain that Putin would win a fourth presidential term by a wide margin. Navalny, the face of the opposition, was barred from running, and the Communist candidate, Pavel Grudinin, faced incessant criticism from the state-run media. Two weeks before the election, Putin became the focus of a major international incident when Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer who was convicted of spying for Britain only to be released to the United Kingdom as part of a prisoner swap, was found unconscious with his daughter in Salisbury, England. Investigators alleged that the pair had been exposed to a “novichok,” a complex nerve agent developed by the Soviets. British officials accused Putin of having ordered the attack, and British Prime Minister Theresa May expelled nearly two dozen Russian intelligence operatives who had been working in Britain under diplomatic cover.

On July 16, 2018, fresh from the success of Russia’s well-received hosting of the World Cup football championship, Putin held a summit meeting in Helsinki with Trump. The two had conducted discussions at the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Hamburg, Germany, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation gathering in Da Nang, Vietnam, in 2017, but the encounter in Finland marked their first formal one-on-one meeting. It came at the end of Trump’s trip to Europe in which he had ruffled relations with the United States’ traditional European allies. Although some observers questioned whether Trump would be able to hold his own in discussions with a counterpart as seasoned and cagey as Putin, Trump said that he thought his meeting with Putin would be the “easiest” of his trip.

Asked by an American reporter if he had favoured Trump in the election, Putin said that he had, because of Trump’s expressed desire for better relations with Russia. When questioned about whether Russia had kompromat (compromising information) on Trump, Putin pointed to the St. Petersburg Economic Forum and talked about the impossibility of obtaining compromising material on each of the more than 500 “high-ranking, high-level” American businessmen said to have attended the conference. He also said that he had been unaware of Trump’s presence in Moscow during an earlier visit. Some press accounts of his answer, however, pointed out that Putin did not explicitly deny having a Trump-related kompromat. The Russian press trumpeted the summit as a huge success for Putin. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described the outcome of the summit as “better than super.” The response in the United States was mostly shocked, and a number of Republicans joined Democrats in strongly condemning Trump’s performance.

Although Russia remained something of a pariah on the global stage—its athletes were barred from international competition due to a massive state-sponsored doping scheme, it was suspended indefinitely from the G8, and it was the target of a raft of economic sanctions—Putin’s personal stature was undiminished. With Britain struggling to conclude an exit deal with the European Union, German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the twilight of her tenure as de facto leader of Europe, and governments in Poland and Hungary exhibiting increasingly authoritarian practices, Putin faced a West that seemed unable to find its direction. Against this backdrop, he boasted of a robust expansion of Russian military power, particularly in the field of hypersonic weapons. Speaking about the historic arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, in December 2019 Putin remarked, “Today, we have a situation that is unique in modern history: they’re trying to catch up to us.”

On August 20 Navalny became seriously ill on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk, and tests later confirmed that he had been exposed to a novichok. Navalny was flown to Germany to recover, and the following month opposition candidates performed surprisingly well in local elections held in the area where Navalny had been campaigning. The Kremlin denied involvement in the poisoning, but such protestations had become increasingly implausible, as the attack on Navalny represented only the most recent in a long series of attempts on the lives of Putin’s critics.