Update(1748ET): Journalist and geopolitical commentator Aaron Maté explains that despite news of Alexei Navalny's death in prison driving world headlines and eliciting remembrances and comments from Western government leaders on Friday, he was still largely an unknown within Russian politics and society [emphasis ZH]...

What [former United States Ambassador to Russia] Michael McFaul says here is a joke. Navalny was a marginal opposition figure who polled at around 2%. Putin didn't fear him; it served Putin to have him seen in the West as his main opposition.

The Russian gov't meanwhile has just barred anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin. A Russian court has also issued a draconian prison sentence to anti-war sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky. We don't hear about people like Nadezhdin and Kagarlitsky in the West nearly as much for one reason: unlike Navalny, they don't collaborate with Western governments.

Navalny worked with NATO intel cutout Bellingcat and went through the "Yale World Fellow" program, a regime change training ground. For this reason, we also don't hear that Navalny was an unrepentant xenophobe who compared Muslim immigrants to cockroaches and rotten teeth. 

His death is a tragedy. He was undoubtedly mistreated. But because he served US interests, US state media will make him into someone he was not. And just compare their fawning coverage to their silence on, or even support for, the ongoing persecution of Julian Assange. Or their complete silence on the mistreatment and death of US citizen Gonzalo Lira in Ukrainian custody -- universally ignored in US media.

Below is McFaul interview that Maté is referencing...