Putin has turned Victory Day – the country’s most important secular holiday – into a pillar of his nearly quarter-century in power and a justification of his military action in Ukraine.

The intelligence community has found ‘no smoking gun’ that Putin was aware of the timing of Navalny’s death.

Putin’s fiercest political foe, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic prison last month, and other critics are either in jail or in exile.