The protests erupted Sunday in San Antonio de los Baños, a town outside Cuba’s capital city, Havana. They spread from there, with demonstrations bursting out across the country, from the streets of Havana to the countryside. They became the largest anti-government protests to happen in the country in decades — a remarkable show of resistance against Cuba’s communist regime.

Outrage and desperation over Cuba’s deepening economic crisis and a resurgent pandemic fueled the demonstrations. Food and medicine shortages are widespread. Prices for food and utilities are rising, making it harder for Cubans to afford the essentials. Frequent blackouts are intensifying the public’s frustration. Cubans are waiting in long lines for food they can barely afford and may not have a fridge to store in, or even a fan to get them through the island’s July heat.

Cuba’s economic problems largely predate the pandemic, but the coronavirus sharpened them. It decimated Cuba’s tourism industry, a huge slice of the island’s economy. Trump-era sanctions — which the Biden administration has not rolled back — have added to the pressure. And the pandemic itself is taking a toll: Cuba is currently experiencing a record surge in cases and deaths.

“It’s been a perfect storm,” said Lisandro Pérez, a professor and chair of the department of Latin American and Latinx studies at John Jay College. “All of these factors that have long been there — with the addition of the pandemic.”

President Joe Biden’s pick to be the third-highest civilian leader at the Pentagon is already facing a tough confirmation challenge a week before his hearing — and it’s mostly because he staunchly supports the Iran nuclear deal.

A spokesperson for Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told me the lawmaker is concerned about Colin Kahl assuming the position of undersecretary of defense for policy. The person in that job oversees and develops how the Defense Department handles military threats from China, Russia, terrorist groups, and, yes, Iran.

However, the spokesperson added that “it’s still early in the process and there are still many steps before Sen. Inhofe makes a final decision.” When I asked if the senator would vote “no” if the confirmation vote were held today, the spokesperson reiterated that it’s “too early to say.” Politico was first to report Inhofe’s stance.

This whole situation is bigger than a lawmaker standing against the president’s nominee, though in a 50-50 Senate, any Republican opposition — especially from a prominent senator — spells trouble.

It’s really about how the 2015 Iran deal will be a perpetual source of tension between Republicans, some Democrats, and the White House for the next four years.

Political fights over the Iran deal have already begun

Congressional sources say Inhofe is following through on his threat, made in a Foreign Policy op-ed this month, to make Biden nominees favorable to the Iran deal sweat their confirmations.

The president should “reconsider his nomination to senior national security positions of former Obama administration officials who were directly involved in negotiating the original Iran deal, as well as those who promoted it,” the senator wrote.

Kahl is the exact kind of person Inhofe was talking about.

As a top Middle East official at the Pentagon and Biden’s national security adviser during the Obama administration, Kahl helped shape the nuclear pact known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The deal, simply put, had the US lift sanctions on Iran in exchange for severe curbs on Tehran’s nuclear work.

Out of government, Kahl spent time blasting the Trump administration’s 2018 decision to withdraw from the agreement in pursuit of a maximum pressure policy toward Iran.

“This a dangerous delusion,” Kahl wrote in a 2018 Foreign Affairs article. The Trump administration believed they could “force Iran to accept a better deal—one that eliminates the JCPOA’s sunset clauses, dismantles a significant portion of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, ends Iranian support for terrorism and regional militancy, and addresses the regime’s systematic violation of human rights at home.”

“It won’t,” Kahl continued. “Trump may hope to isolate Tehran, but it is Washington that finds itself largely alone.”

Kahl’s advocacy, and general Democratic support for the nuclear accord, has rankled Republicans for the past six years. Their overall view is that the Iran deal made Tehran stronger after sanctions were lifted, and that it did nothing to curtail the regime’s support for terrorist groups or its missile program.

In myriad conversations I’ve had, congressional Republicans cite these and other reasons for why they’re skeptical of Kahl’s nomination. (They also note Kahl was at the Pentagon serving in a key Middle East policy position when ISIS surged in Iraq in 2015, shortly after US troops left the country.)

But Democrats, including top members of the Biden administration, say the JCPOA was a targeted accord that put Iran’s nuclear work “in a box.” Only then, with the threat of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon off the table, could the US begin to try to convince Tehran to end the other aggressive aspects of its foreign policy.

The general belief was that the Biden administration would work quickly to rejoin the deal, especially since the president promised America’s reentry on his watch. But so far the US has been cagey in the process, holding firm that it won’t lift sanctions Trump reimposed until Iran stops enriching uranium beyond the pact’s caps.

Experts say that’s for two reasons. One is a clear-eyed assessment by Biden’s team that it can’t just lift financial penalties and hope Iran comes back into compliance with the accord, though they’re willing to talk to Tehran about a way forward. The other is that holding firm signals to Republicans that the Democrats in charge aren’t too eager to rejoin the agreement.

That underscores just how rancorous the policy debate over that issue remains and how the yawning gap between the two parties will continue to color America’s Iran policy in the years to come.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the Senate Armed Services Committee chair, told reporters on Wednesday that he’s “hopeful” Kahl can get through the confirmation process. “The committee hearing will be absolutely critical and crucial because he’ll have an opportunity to explain his positions, and then my colleagues will make a judgment.”

But that judgment won’t be about Kahl personally or his experience to do the job. It’ll be about what he represents.

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This story is one in our six-part series The Pandemic Playbook. Explore all the stories here.

DAEGU, South Korea — Jo Hye-min stepped off the train and into a situation she had only seen in movies: a completely, and eerily, empty station.

It was February 2020, when the threat posed by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was only starting to become clear in much of the world. But the situation in Daegu was already dire: Hospitals were overwhelmed and on the brink of collapsing. Hundreds of people believed to have been exposed to the virus were being isolated in private rooms. A nurse’s association in Daegu issued a plea for volunteers to help.

“It felt like war had broken out,” Jo says, and the 28-year-old nurse enlisted. The national disease control agency called her at 10 pm, asking if she could be in Daegu by 9 am the next morning. She dropped off her cat with a friend and made the 60-mile trip from her home in Busan. When she arrived at the isolation facility, she was told it would be at least a month before she could leave.

Jo was joining a frantic, all-out effort by South Korean officials to contain a burgeoning epidemic.

A woman in her 60s, who would later become known as Patient 31, had tested positive for Covid-19. Public health authorities learned she was a member of a secretive religious movement and attended services in the days before being diagnosed, potentially exposing more than 1,000 people.

For decades, South Africa was under apartheid: A series of laws divided people by race. Then, in the 1990s, those laws were dismantled. But many of the barriers they created continue to divide South Africans by skin color — determining their quality of life, access to jobs, and wealth. Racial division was built into the fabric of cities throughout South Africa, and it still hasn’t been uprooted.

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That’s partly because while apartheid was the culmination of South Africa’s racial divisions, it wasn’t the beginning of them. That story starts closer to the 1800s, when the British built a network of railroads that transformed the region’s economy into one that excluded most Black people — and then made that exclusion the law.

To understand how this long history still impacts South Africans around the country today, watch the video above. You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on our YouTube channel.

The United States has an aggressive new commitment for fighting climate change: cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent relative to 2005 levels in less than a decade.

The announcement came at the White House’s Earth Day summit on Thursday, where 40 world leaders met virtually to discuss and announce their new ambitions for curbing greenhouse gases.

“The United States isn’t waiting; we are resolving to take action,” said President Joe Biden on Thursday, highlighting his plans for investing in agriculture to store carbon in soil, making electric vehicles, capping pipelines that leak methane, and building green hydrogen plants. “By maintaining those investments and putting these people to work, the United States sets out on the road to cut greenhouse gases in half by the end of this decade.”

The new target is a step forward for the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, after China. And it’s meant to signal to the rest of the world that the US is jumping back into the 2015 Paris climate accord with both feet after withdrawing in late 2020.

Some climate change activists and analysts are arguing that it’s not enough. And there are already some misleading claims about the target that have taken root.

To put it in context, here are some key things to know.

What is an NDC? And what makes the new US climate target so special?

Under the 2015 Paris agreement, countries agreed to limit warming this century to less than 2 degrees Celsius compared to average global temperatures before the industrial revolution in the 1800s. The agreement also has a secondary target of limiting warming to less than 1.5 degrees C.

To achieve that goal, every signatory to the accord (nearly every country in the world) is required to act. But it’s voluntary, and every country gets to set their own targets.

Those self-imposed targets are known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs. From the outset, it was clear that the first round of NDCs that countries came up with wouldn’t be enough to meet the Paris goals. But the idea was that over time, as technology improved and as urgency mounted, countries would become more ambitious.

The United States plays an outsize role in the process as the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, but also as the country that played a dominant role in shaping the Paris agreement to begin with. Previous attempts at organizing international climate agreements fell apart for many reasons, but a major hurdle was US objections to setting binding greenhouse gas reduction targets. The US also opposed letting some countries, particularly developing countries, off the hook for their emissions. Hence why every country has to produce an NDC but gets to set its own target.

But when the US officially exited the Paris climate agreement in November, it became the only country to back out, which was particularly frustrating for countries that joined and came up with targets at the US’s behest. So the new, more ambitious commitment from the US (following Biden’s reentry into the agreement in January) is an important way to rebuild trust.

The US issued its first NDC back in 2015. It aimed to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below the level of emissions produced in the year 2005. The new target aims to bring the US 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

According to the White House, these new goals are in line with keeping average warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“As we look at the trajectory, the question for us very much has been: How can you make it consistent with getting on track to hold a temperature increase to less than 2, well less than 2, and to try to keep 1.5 degrees in sight alive? And that looks like it is consistent,” said a senior administration official on a call with reporters on Wednesday.

Beyond the impact on warming, the goal could spur countries that don’t already have comparable goals to step up their own ambitions.

“That is an extraordinary step that should be commended, and emulated by everyone,” said Christiana Figueres, one of the main negotiators of the Paris climate agreement, in a statement on Thursday.

US officials, however, were vague about exactly how the country is mapping its route to its new climate goals. But a key component is going to be Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan. The proposal aims to ramp up clean energy and electric vehicles, and facilitate the transition away from fossil fuels, but it still needs to become bills that can be approved by Congress.

The US’s new climate target is not a doubling of ambition or halving of current emissions

While Biden framed the new commitment as cutting US emissions in half, there are some critical caveats.

Again, this is not the first US commitment to curb greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris agreement. The initial pledge made under President Obama was aimed at 2025. The new NDC is aimed at 2030.

If the US were to simply meet its previous commitment, it would be on track to reduce emissions roughly 38 percent by 2030. So the new target is actually a 12 to 14 percent increase from the previous goal, not a doubling. And, to be clear, the US is currently not on track to meet its previous NDC, let alone the new one.

The other thing to keep in mind is the baseline. The US target is pegged to 2005, a year when annual US greenhouse gas emissions peaked above 6 gigatonnes. By 2020, emissions had fallen by roughly 21 percent compared to 2005, to 5.1 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, although the Covid-19 pandemic fueled the unprecedented drop in emissions last year.

Emissions are expected to rise again in 2021 as the economy recovers. All of this is to say that the 50 to 52 percent reduction target is relative to where the US was 16 years ago, not where it is today, when emissions are lower. The new target is closer to a 42 percent reduction from 2021.

It’s the biggest US commitment yet, but it still may not be big enough

On one hand, if the US were to meet these new goals, it would still likely be the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter by the end of the decade. On the other hand, the new target represents an enormous reduction in emissions, about 2.1 gigatonnes in nine years. This is almost the entire output of India in a given year. It’s a vast financial, technological, and political challenge.

While meeting this goal will help bring the world closer to limiting global warming this century, it doesn’t fully match the US contribution to the problem. The US currently produces about 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions but is responsible for the largest share of historical emissions.

Climate change is a cumulative problem; if one were to add up all the greenhouse gases the US has emitted, the US would top every other country. The largest share of human-produced carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right now came from the US.

The energy that created those emissions helped the US become one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The US also continues to have some of the highest per capita emissions of any country. Now the impacts of climate change are here, raising sea levels, fueling extreme weather, and wreaking havoc across economies, and the countries that contributed least to the problem stand to suffer the most.

That’s why some activists are arguing that the new NDC doesn’t go far enough. “As the world’s biggest historical emitter, the US has a responsibility to the most vulnerable nations on the frontlines of the climate crisis,” Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns at ActionAid USA, in a statement. He added that a fairer US target would be closer to a 70 percent cut in emissions, coupled with financial support to developing countries suffering under climate change.

US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry envoy acknowledged on Thursday that there is still more the country could do to limit warming beyond the new NDC. “Is it enough? No. But it’s the best we can do today and prove we can begin to move,” Kerry said.

The US could pull this off, but it won’t be easy or cheap

The US has already seen a general decline in its greenhouse gas emissions over the past decade, but that came largely from replacing coal-fired power plants with natural gas, which produces about half of the emissions per unit of energy. And before the Covid-19 pandemic, US emissions were beginning to creep up again.

President Biden, however, has set a target of making the entire US economy carbon neutral by 2050. In the meantime, he wants an entirely carbon-free power grid by 2035. That means even the natural gas plants will have to go, or will have to add carbon dioxide scrubbers. And to curb emissions by 50 percent relative to 2005 by 2030, the US would have to start taking drastic action right away.

A number of researchers and environmental groups have already analyzed whether such a target is feasible (see this Twitter thread highlighting the various papers out there looking at the new target). Almost all of them show that it is possible with our current technologies.

For example, an analysis by Energy Innovation found that the US would have to phase out all of its remaining coal power plants and halve its natural gas use over the next decade. The country would also have to dramatically increase its energy efficiency and electrify vehicles. The analysis doesn’t lay out a figure for the outlay but estimates that these changes would add $570 billion per year to the US economy via creating new jobs and avoiding pollution and health problems associated with fossil fuels.

According to a December study by researchers at Princeton University, the US is poised to spend $9.4 trillion over the next decade on energy infrastructure on its current trajectory. But getting on a path of net-zero emissions would just add an additional $300 billion to the price tag, raising it by 3 percent.

Other research has shown that the health benefits alone from getting off of fossil fuels are massive and would more than pay for the transition toward clean energy.

However, while there are massive health and economic benefits in switching toward clean energy, those benefits are dispersed over the whole population and spread out over years. To start on the journey toward the new 2030 target, the US would have to start making major investments and changes now — phasing out coal, building electric vehicle chargers, restoring ecosystems that can sequester carbon, pricing carbon, funding research and development to solve thorny technology problems, and setting new efficiency standards. That’s a political challenge, and it remains to be seen whether Biden has enough political capital to start this process.

The United States is not the only game in town

To limit climate change, the whole world needs to act not only to zero out greenhouse emissions but also to begin withdrawing them from the air by the middle of the century.

At the Earth Day summit, other world leaders highlighted their own new targets. Canada is now aiming to reduce its emissions 40 to 45 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Japan is aiming for 44 percent under the same benchmarks. And China is expecting that its emissions will continue to rise over the next decade but will peak before 2030 and decline thereafter, reaching net-zero emissions by 2060.

These new commitments will be formalized at the next major international climate meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, later this year. In total, about 59 countries have set some sort of benchmark for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

But the total global commitments to date are still not enough to reach the 1.5-degree target, and that target is slipping further out of reach every day. That’s going to be even more challenging as lower-income parts of the world develop. About 13 percent of the planet’s population, 940 million people, still don’t have access to electricity. They desperately need energy, and fossil fuels are often the only sources available to them.

And many of these targets are set decades in the future. It’s the interim targets where the rubber will meet the road and more tangible results will be visible, yet many countries are reluctant to commit to specific climate benchmarks over the next five to 10 years.

So a fresh round of more ambitious targets for limiting emissions has to be met with real-world action and meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. There is intense global momentum for action on climate change, but that has yet to bear out in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have now crossed 420 parts per million, the highest levels in human history. The planet has already warmed by at least 1 degree Celsius, and those effects are already visible in the ice caps, torrential rainfall, and wildfires. Some countries are certainly more responsible for climate change than others, but as Biden said, “no nation can solve this crisis on their own.”

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The greatest challenger to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule is a man whose name the dictator won’t say and whom he has tried to kill: Alexei Navalny.

Having defiantly returned to Russia after surviving a brazen assassination attempt only to be immediately detained and thrown in jail upon arrival, the opposition leader and anti-corruption crusader has rallied tens of thousands of supporters to his cause like never before — a real sign of trouble for Putin’s hold on power.

Alexei Navalny has spent over a decade trying to overthrow Putin. Through slick videos, public mobilization, and even an ill-fated presidential run against the autocrat, Navalny has aimed to expose Kremlin corruption and malfeasance.

While Navalny’s ultimate goal seems to be to take Putin’s place, not just depose him, few believe he will actually succeed. Still, his campaign has inspired tens of thousands across the country to take to the streets to express their frustration with the regime — many for the first time — posing an existential threat to Putin.

The problem for the president is, try as he might, he can’t keep the 44-year-old dissident quiet.

Last year, Kremlin operatives tried to assassinate the opposition leader with a highly toxic nerve agent planted in his underwear, a bold operation that most experts say likely would have required Putin’s approval to launch.

Navalny lived, but he spent five months recuperating from a coma in Germany. Yet despite being threatened with immediate arrest upon arrival back in Russia, he vowed to return to his homeland to continue the fight against Putin. Navalny met that fate on January 17 shortly after his flight from Berlin landed in Moscow, and he’s now imprisoned for at least 2.5 years.

But even that attempt to silence Navalny hasn’t worked so far: Navalny has remained in the headlines even while in custody.

He started a hunger strike on March 31, protesting the lack of medical care he said he’d received while in prison, and his lawyers continued to publicize his plight throughout his ordeal.

His condition had gotten so bad that not even Russian authorities could ignore it. They transferred Navalny to a hospital earlier this week for treatment, though questions remained about the quality of care he’d get. Navalny’s aides were concerned that the pro-democracy leader was on death’s door.

“Alexei is dying … it’s a question of days,” Navalny’s spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said on Facebook this week.

Physicians close to Navalny made the same case, leading the dissident to end his hunger strike on Friday. But Navalny claimed victory in an Instagram post, saying pressure his supporters placed on the regime led independent doctors to check on his condition.

“Doctors, whom I fully trust, published a statement yesterday stating that you and I had achieved enough for me to end the hunger strike. And I will say frankly — their words that the tests show that ‘in a minimum time there will be no one to treat…’ seem to me worthy of attention,” he wrote. However, he added that he’s “losing sensitivity” in sections of his arm and legs and still wants to know “what it is and how to treat it.”

What happens to Navalny going forward is a serious matter of international concern, with US national security adviser Jake Sullivan recently promising “there will be consequences” if the Putin opponent dies in prison.

Putin is now on the defensive. He’s receiving calls from President Joe Biden and other leaders to release Navalny, even as Russian authorities round up members of the dissident’s team and family. He’s also under pressure at home from Russians who support Navalny.

“Putin was an untouchable, a god above everything else. But that’s no longer the case,” Maria Snegovaya, an expert on Russian politics at George Washington University, told me.

Putin broke an implicit promise to Russians. Activists pounced.

Little initially bothered Putin after he became president for the first time in 2000. The economy doubled and living standards rose during his first decade in charge, muting critiques from dissidents of the regime’s repression of free speech and civil rights.

Experts say Russians implicitly understood there was a grand bargain: If Putin could keep the money flowing and not act in an openly corrupt way, then the citizenry would abide by his iron-fisted leadership.

But two events in 2011 ended the fragile deal.

First, Putin that September announced he would reassume the presidency after serving one term as Russia’s prime minister, the No. 2 role. Simply put, Putin was still in charge of the country, but he accepted a technically inferior position to keep up democratic appearances. The president, Dmitri Medvedev, was viewed as little more than a puppet.

By effectively stating “I will be president again” — without giving Russians any real say in the matter — Putin defied the unspoken “don’t be openly corrupt” rule.

Second, Putin’s party, United Russia, got caught rigging the December 2011 legislative elections. Fraud in Russian elections was normal, and there wasn’t more than usual during that particular vote, “but examples of fraud were spread quickly on the internet for the first time,” said Timothy Frye, a Columbia University professor and author of the forthcoming Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia.

That provided ammunition to a growing cadre of opposition activists looking for a catalyzing cause — Alexei Navalny among them.

Who is Alexei Navalny?

Navalny, who grew up about 60 miles southwest of Moscow, made his name in 2008 as a blogger. His earliest posts centered on corruption at state-owned companies, and sometimes he’d get extraordinary access by becoming a minority shareholder in the company in order to ask probing questions.

His readership grew, and his platform turned him into one of the main leaders of the 2011 protests in Moscow. Featuring roughly 50,000 people, they were the biggest in the capital city since the fall of the Soviet Union.

“I’d like to thank Alexei Navalny,” a young activist shouted in a room of organizers the day before demonstrations began. “Thanks to him, specifically because of the efforts of this concrete person, tomorrow thousands of people will come out to the square. It was he who united us with the idea: all against ‘the Party of Swindlers and Thieves.’”

Navalny rode that wave of popularity to a run for Moscow’s mayor in 2013. It’s more than a prestigious municipal job; whoever runs the capital is viewed by many in Russia as a future top federal official. To win the election, then, would mean more than just getting to lead a global city. It’d mean Navalny was clawing his way into Russia’s inner circle of power.

Navalny ran on an unapologetically nationalist platform, most notably calling for restrictive immigration policies to keep Muslims from the Caucasus and Central Asia out of the country and supporting Russia’s 2008 war in Georgia. Duke University’s Irina Soboleva told me that the candidate’s hardline stances during the campaign alienated members of Navalny’s young, urban base.

“I consider Aleksei Navalny the most dangerous man in Russia,” Engelina Tareyeva, who worked with Navalny in a Russian liberal party until he was expelled from it in 2007, wrote of him. “You don’t have to be a genius to understand that the most horrific thing that could happen in our country would be the nationalists coming to power.”

Navalny didn’t win the mayoral race, finishing second with 27 percent of the vote behind incumbent and Putin ally Sergei Sobyanin, who won with over half the votes (four other candidates split the remaining count). But Navalny’s strong showing — despite very long odds — gave him the legitimacy and standing to seek more power.

“His ambitions were greater than just being the leader of the urban middle class,” Soboleva said.

Putin regained popularity. Navalny organized against him.

In 2014, Putin sent forces to invade the southern Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. He then annexed the territory because he wanted it returned to Russia’s fold and because Kyiv was on the verge of an economic pact with the European Union. For Putin, such a deal meant Ukraine — long in Russia’s sphere of influence — was tilting away from Moscow. The incursion, then, was both punishment and raw geopolitics.

But there was an added benefit for the autocrat: Russians celebrated the risky invasion. They rewarded Putin with record approval ratings, numbers he desperately needed to muddle through a brutal economic downturn wracking his country.

“Crimea bought the regime four years of wiggle room,” Columbia’s Frye told me.

That period was mostly a quiet one for Russia’s opposition. Just like in the 2000s, it was hard to find a receptive audience for the anti-Putin cause when most people were happy with the leader.

Navalny, then, used the lull to organize against his chief rival. Part of his animus turned personal after Russian law enforcement charged him in 2013 and 2014 with embezzlement, which most experts say was meant to discredit him. After the second charge, Navalny was placed under house arrest and only given permission to speak with his family.

But the opposition leader wasn’t discouraged. Instead, experts told me he developed a three-pronged strategy to prepare for whenever Putin was vulnerable again.

The first part was straightforward: He had to make his politics more appealing to a wider Russian audience. The Islamophobia and hardline nationalism might garner support from ethnic Russians, but certainly not the masses. Without disavowing his previous views, Navalny zeroed in on one core message: corruption.

“It was a sound political strategy,” said Angela Stent, who directs the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European studies at Georgetown University. After all, Russia was (and remains) one of the world’s most corrupt countries, and the problems this corruption has wrought have impacted nearly every Russian’s life. No other issue, the thinking went, would be as universally understood and enraging.

Getting his message out there would be difficult, though, as the Kremlin held a tight grip over the media. To get around that problem, Navalny made building a large social media presence the second pillar of his plan. “He saw the political utility of YouTube before other opposition leaders,” said George Washington University’s Snegovaya.

The opposition leader has posted video after embarrassing video exposing the corruption of Russia’s elites on his YouTube channel, which today has 6.25 million subscribers. One particularly famous upload from 2017 alleged that former President Medvedev took bribes from oligarchs disguised as charitable donations, a charge he denies.

When the Russian government succeeds in blocking access to the exposés, Navalny and his team place the videos elsewhere — including on pornography sites — so anyone can see them.

The success of his YouTube channel bolstered Navalny’s reputation as an anti-corruption crusader, and his audience grew. “He sensed that corruption would be accessible enough to build a large following on the internet,” Snegovaya noted.

That allowed him to undertake the third part of his strategy: forming a national network of opposition politicians. Instead of focusing all of his efforts in major cities like Moscow, Navalny opened offices around the country to help local politicians defeat members of Putin’s United Russia party. Providing candidates with financing and know-how, Navalny’s team has helped dissidents take power away from Putin cronies in regional elections across the country.

“There’s no opposition figure in Russia that has the network that Navalny does,” said Columbia’s Frye.

The main goal, of course, was to weaken the president’s party nationwide. But experts told me the side effect — Russians suddenly being able to see politicians without ties to Putin actually working in citizens’ interests — was equally important for Navalny’s movement.

Putin fought back. Navalny withstood the onslaught.

Navalny didn’t get to do all of that without pushback, especially after he announced in 2016 that he would run for president in two years.

In 2017, the opposition leader was attacked with an antiseptic known as “brilliant green” outside his Moscow office, covering half of his face in what looked like paint. “It looks funny but it hurts like hell,” he tweeted at the time, adding that he lost 80 percent of the vision in his right eye.

Reports later confirmed he suffered a chemical burn. It’s still unclear who was responsible, but Navalny, unsurprisingly, blamed the Kremlin.

Later that year, 12 of Russia’s 13 election commissioners voted to bar Navalny from standing against Putin in the presidential race, citing his embezzlement charges from years prior. Navalny was never likely to win — the vote was already rigged in Putin’s favor, and reliable polls showed the dissident failed to attract much support — but the decision once again ended the pretense of a functioning democracy in Russia.

The government’s interest in Navalny didn’t end there. Moscow’s police force detained him in the summer of 2019 for planning what authorities said was an unauthorized protest. While in jail, he suffered a severe skin reaction that required him to seek medical attention at a hospital. He went back behind bars after his recovery, but he claimed the skin reaction was the result of having been poisoned.

The increased harassment made clear that Navalny was a prime Putin target. The worst, though, was yet to come.

Putin got scared. Navalny paid the price.

Navalny boarded a flight from Siberia to Moscow last August. He became ill on the aircraft; a video shows him moaning and needing immediate medical attention.

The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, near Kazakhstan, where an ambulance waited to take him to a local hospital. But Navalny’s condition worsened, and he fell into a coma before he arrived at the facility.

Russia’s Omsk Emergency Hospital No. 1, where Navalny was first treated, became the site of a frustrating standoff between Navalny’s family and supporters and the doctors overseeing his care. Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and team alleged the doctors were controlled by the Kremlin and tried to cover up the poisoning attack instead of properly treating their patient.

The physicians at the time said Navalny wasn’t poisoned but instead suffered from a “metabolic disorder” that led to low blood sugar. “Poisons or traces of their presence in the body have not been identified,” Anatoly Kalinichenko, the deputy chief doctor at the Omsk emergency hospital, told reporters at the time. “The diagnosis of ‘poisoning’ remains somewhere in the back of our minds, but we do not believe that the patient suffered poisoning.”

But Navalny’s team — including Navalnaya, who was barred from seeing her husband in the hospital — suspected foul play. They had good reason to believe that: The Kremlin has a long, sordid history of poisoning political dissidents, defectors, and other enemies of the state.

“The medics are being totally commanded by the FSB and hardly release anything,” Vladimir Milov, a close Navalny associate, told me while Navalny was in the Russian hospital, using the acronym for Russia’s Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB responsible for internal security.

“We of course cannot trust this hospital and we demand for Alexei to be given to us, so that we could have him treated in an independent hospital whose doctors we trust,” Navalnaya said in another press conference on August 21.

A medical plane sent by the Berlin-based humanitarian group Cinema for Peace Foundation later arrived in Omsk to take Navalny to Germany for treatment. The Russian doctors initially blocked the transfer, saying Navalny wasn’t stable enough to travel, before finally allowing the German physicians to take a look at the patient’s condition.

Luckily, doctors in Berlin successfully treated Navalny, leading to his release from the hospital on September 23 after a full recovery.

The next month, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons — the world’s top chemical weapons watchdog — concluded that Navalny had been poisoned with Novichok, a highly lethal nerve agent. It was developed by the Soviet Union, leading many to conclude that the Kremlin was behind the attack on its longtime adversary.

Navalny confirmed that himself while he remained in Germany. Working with CNN last December, Navalny tricked a Russian agent — part of an elite FSB toxin team that had trailed him for three years — to reveal secret aspects of the operation to kill him. The operative, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, told Navalny during a phone call that Novichok had been placed on “the insides, the crotch” of the dissident’s underpants.

When asked about the Kremlin’s involvement in the assassination attempt, Putin denied it, claiming instead that Navalny was getting help from US intelligence services to make a big fuss out of nothing. If Russian agents had really wanted to finish the job of killing Navalny, Putin told reporters during his annual press conference in December, “they would’ve probably finished it.”

There are no concrete answers as to why the regime would want Navalny dead now after all this time, but experts have two main theories.

The first is that United Russia’s supermajority in the nation’s legislature — the Duma — is under threat in September’s elections. Navalny’s organizing and Putin’s unpopularity due to a flatlining economy and worsening pandemic could lead some Putin-allied lawmakers to lose. If that’s the case, Putin would no longer be able to ram whatever he wants through the governing body.

Putin could try to rig the election, of course, but George Washington University’s Snegovaya told me that “it’s impossible to rig the election completely.” Fewer people actually support the president right now, she said, and international observers watch the vote closely. The dictator’s brutal calculation therefore might have been that killing Navalny would hurt the opposition’s chances ahead of the crucial election.

The other possibility experts floated was that Putin is worried about the revolution in neighboring Belarus. A strong opposition formed against Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s longest-serving dictator and a staunch Putin ally, and revolts started last year after an election many believe he rigged. Demonstrations haven’t stopped, and Putin, who is notoriously concerned about being toppled in a revolution, might fear a similar phenomenon in his country.

“Putin definitely follows what’s going on in Belarus closely, and he takes what’s happening very personally,” Duke’s Soboleva told me. Putin might be thinking “if you don’t eliminate your political opponents and rivals early, they might be a big problem for you later,” she said.

But instead of eliminating Navalny, Putin made him stronger.

Putin tried to silence his rival. Navalny just gained a larger audience.

After Navalny recovered from the poisoning, the Kremlin did everything possible to try to dissuade him from returning to Russia.

Late last year, the Kremlin placed him on the government’s federal wanted list, claiming he avoided Russian federal authorities while abroad. As part of a probation sentence from the 2014 embezzlement case, Navalny had to check in with inspectors regularly — but that’s hard to do while you’re in a coma.

Even with the threat of arrest hanging over him, Navalny flew to Moscow on January 17 while downplaying widespread fears that he’d be detained upon arrival. “It’s impossible,” he told people aboard his flight. “I feel like a citizen of Russia who has every right to return to my home.”

But, of course, it proved completely possible: Video showed an official approaching Navalny at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport near passport control. Navalny then kissed his wife, Yulia, before going with the official and other guards. He’s been held by the federal prison service ever since as he awaits his February trial.

But Navalny and his team have fought back. They released the “Putin Palace” video — alleging that the Russian leader has used bribe money to build an estate on land 39 times larger than the principality of Monaco — which had the president answering questions raised by the man he wants silenced.

“Nothing that is listed there as my property belongs to me or my close relatives, and never did,” Putin said during a video call at the time, as always refusing to say Navalny’s name. But many people didn’t buy his denial.

Russians erupted in protest after the video’s release and Navalny’s detention. The nation’s citizens, suffering an economic downturn and an unrelenting coronavirus outbreak, occupied the streets of more than 100 Russian cities on January 23, some braving temperatures as low as minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Demonstrators tussled with law enforcement more than they had in the past — ranging from snowball fights to physical violence — culminating in the arrest of nearly 4,000 people.

“It’s probably the most nervous he’s been in his 21 years in power,” Georgetown’s Stent, who served as the US national intelligence officer for Russia from 2004 to 2006, said of Putin at the time.

Moscow police’s responded forcefully. They arrested Navalny’s brother and harassed multiple members of Navalny’s team. In one stunning video, Navalny’s doctor was seen playing the piano as law enforcement searched her home. The goal, experts said, is to stop the opposition from inciting more protests and continuing their leader’s work while he remains in custody.

So far that plan hasn’t worked, and Navalny’s hunger strike kept him in the global spotlight even as Putin has tried to push him out of it.

The hunger strike may be over, but it’s still possible that Navalny dies in Russian custody. If that happens, it’s possible the pro-democracy movement he built will suffer. At that point, Putin may have won his long game with Navalny in the cruelest fashion possible. Or, ironically, turned Navalny into a powerful martyr, potentially threatening his rule long after the dissident is gone.

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This story is one in our six-part series The Pandemic Playbook. Explore all the stories here.

Every January or February, Le The Linh and his wife pack their children into their car and drive 80 miles to visit family in Haiphong, a port city east of Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, for Lunar New Year. But this time, as they reached the last stretch of the Hanoi-Haiphong Highway, a police officer approached and pointed them toward a group of guards in face masks under a makeshift tent. It was one of 16 checkpoints erected around Haiphong to control travel into and out of the city ahead of the Tet Festival holiday.

They joined a lineup of other travelers, nervously waiting for their turn in the rain. When they reached the front, the officials asked for proof of their travel plans, residency, and Covid-19 status.

“Don’t worry!” Linh exclaimed tensely. He could show, with his identity card, that they lived in an area that had no coronavirus cases recently.

The family was among the lucky ones let through. Travelers from areas near Haiphong that had recently recorded Covid-19 cases got turned away; a group of young people on motorbikes who tried to circumvent the checkpoint were arrested; still others chose not to travel at all, opting to meet family over FaceTime or Zalo (Vietnam’s answer to WhatsApp).