The brutal third act of Vladimir Putin

Clad in a light-brown sheepskin overcoat that fell over his wool felt boots, Vladimir Putin strode from a dacha outside Moscow across the thick snow. It was 17 degrees below zero on the morning of January 19. Putin disrobed, draping the coat over a wooden railing, and stepped out of his boots. Wearing just a pair of blue swimming shorts, he descended through a crucifix-shaped hole cut in the six-inch-thick ice, wading into the frigid water.

A 10ft-high cross, carved from clear ice, towered over the pool as Putin crossed his chest with his hand and crouched down to rapidly submerge his head three times. Like millions of Russians that day, the country’s president was marking the Russian Orthodox feast of Epiphany, when believers baptise themselves in the country’s rivers, lakes and ponds, and emerge shivering, but cleansed of their sins.

The 68-year-old president had reason to feel purged on that particular morning. Hours earlier, a makeshift court set up in a police station on the outskirts of the Russian capital had imprisoned Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most prominent critic and the leader of the country’s largest grassroots opposition movement, on charges for which he was later sentenced to two-and-a-half years in jail.

Navalny had only been in the country for 24 hours. He was detained at the airport upon returning from five months of recuperation in Berlin, following an assassination attempt using a Soviet-developed nerve agent. Navalny says Putin ordered the hit. The Kremlin denies this. But it certainly condoned his incarceration on the grounds that, while in Germany, he missed penal meetings mandated under the terms of a 2014 fraud conviction.

The intended message was clear: after years of handicapping and intimidating opposition groups but reluctantly accepting their existence, Putin had lost patience. No longer would Navalny and his followers simply be suppressed. Now they would be silenced.

For Russians who oppose Putin, Navalny’s imprisonment represents a bellwether moment that they have long expected and feared. As part of a forceful, sweeping effort to tighten political freedoms, it signposts a new era for a regime now extending into its third decade. After 20 years in which Putin’s rule was propped up first by economic prosperity and then by pugnacious patriotism, his government has now pivoted to repression as the central tool of retaining power.

“Putin has always been a person who supports the idea of an iron fist, a strong and powerful state,” says Andrei Kolesnikov, chair of the Russian domestic politics programme at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “Maybe he was always brutal, but now he has decided to be brutal freely, openly, without restrictions.”