With the Kremlin now claiming that it needs to hold on to the body of opposition leader Alexei Navalny for another fortnight for ‘tests’, there is little doubt in the West that Vladimir Putin’s regime was either directly or indirectly to blame. Inevitably, the talk is now of punishing it.

Junior Foreign Office minister Leo Docherty told the Commons yesterday that the government was considering further measures beyond the immediate diplomatic prospects, and that ‘it would be premature…to comment on the prospect of future sanctions,’ but that he could confirm ‘that we are working at pace and looking at all options in that regard.’

There are cheap and easy ways to challenge Putin’s toxic propagandists

It is quite right that there should be consequences. After all, the reason we do not know the details of Navalny’s end is because the Russian government is being characteristically untransparent and unreliable. It has been announced that the Investigative Committee (very roughly analogous to the FBI) is investigating, but as this was the same agency that built the trumped-up case used to send Navalny to prison, this is hardly a comfort.

However, already some are simply using Navalny’s death to push measures that have little real connection to his cause. He was a patriot and although he initially welcomed the annexation of Crimea in 2014 (in fairness, pretty near every Russian did think the peninsula rightfully theirs), he rejected the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Yet it’s unlikely he relished the deaths of ordinary Russian soldiers, and arguing that a suitable legacy is more military aid is questionable. To be sure, it may well make sense in its own terms, to repel Russian imperialism, but not necessarily in Navalny’s name.

Instead, the obvious go-to measure is sanctions. Certainly Navalny’s own Anti-Corruption Foundation has a lengthy list of Russian officials, politicians and businesspeople it would still like to see sanctioned. However, we must also be realistic. At this stage in the undeclared political-economic war the West is waging with Moscow, more individual sanctions may satisfy the urge to ‘do something’ but are unlikely to influence the Kremlin. Instead, this is an opportunity to be as imaginative and subversive as Navalny himself could be.

First of all, there is much more we could do to undermine the Kremlin’s leaden propaganda at home. Just as during the Cold War, the BBC’s Russian language service – increasingly accessed online – is a vital information source for many who know they are being lied to by their own state. At a time when many of the BBC’s foreign-language services are seeing their audiences shrink, the past year saw BBC Russian’s grow by 19 per cent.

This needs to be protected and developed, but there are other cheap and easy ways to help challenge Putin’s toxic propagandists. In particular, there are news services and platforms run by Russians opposed to the regime, now in the West, which can speak directly to their compatriots. The Meduza news service provides both news and analysis from inside Russia, for example, while Riddle Russia, based in Glasgow, provides a platform for some of the most innovative research on the country. These services tend to operate on a shoestring, and for a fraction of, say, the £4 million a Challenger 2 tanks costs, can take the information war to Putin.

That the Kremlin considers these online sources a threat is evident from the way it tries to cut off access to to them. Many Russians bypass these online barriers using VPNs (virtual private networks), which in effect allow them to pretend to be in another country for access purposes. As the Kremlin tries to crack down on VPNs as well, maybe it is time to address how to help Russians get and use them?

Navalny’s widow Yulia is a powerhouse in her own right

Of course, it takes courage for people to challenge this murderous banana republic of a regime. To this end, we ought to be making it a great deal easier and quicker for those with a demonstrable record of anti-government agitation and consequent retaliation by the state to gain asylum. Back in the (first?) Cold War, we tended to welcome defectors with open arms. It is a strange irony of the new one that, in effect, it is the West which has erected its own iron curtain to keep disaffected Russians at home.

Navalny’s widow Yulia is a powerhouse in her own right who has long been recognised as having dimmed her own light so as not to outshine her husband’s. As her passionate speeches after his death have shown, she is both formidable and determined to continue Alexei’s cause. While it is not appropriate to treat her as a president-in-exile the way Belarus’s Svetlana Tsikhanovskaya is, nonetheless she needs to be supported in practical as well as political ways as force of moral clarity.

In the Cold War, the West in general – and the UK in particular – became very good at political warfare, undermining the Kremlin at home and abroad, not so much with dirty tricks as truth and soft power. It’s time to recover some of those dark arts which can be used for good.