Aleksei Navalny’s gone. He keeled over and died Friday after taking a stroll around Polar Wolf.

“All necessary resuscitation measures were taken,” Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service said in a statement. Those measures “did not lead to positive results.” The cause of death was unknown.

Let me try again. The cause of death was, and is, absolutely known: Navalny was Vladimir Putin’s most prominent living critic. In the context of Putin, “living” isn’t an adjective that’s compatible with “critic.” You can be alive, or you can be a Putin critic, but you can’t generally be both. Not in perpetuity. I’d tell you to ask Boris Berezovsky and his circle of pals in London but… well, they’re all dead.

Like everybody else who’s not a Kremlin sycophant, part of me feels bad for Navalny. On the other hand, Aleksei signed his own death warrant so many times over the past decade I lost count. It’s one thing to be a man of principle, but Navalny’s pursuit of righteousness in Russia was suicidally quixotic and, if I might be so indecorous on the day of his tragic demise, a bit vain at times.

It was never clear, to this observer anyway, what Navalny’s end game was. Yevgeny Prigozhin’s odds of overthrowing Putin in a military coup were infinitely higher than Navalny’s chances of… I don’t know, winning an election from a penal colony in the Arctic Circle? Being rescued from Kharp in a jailbreak following mass pro-democracy demonstrations in Moscow?

Aleksei could’ve run his campaign from outside Russia. He probably would’ve been assassinated anyway, like everyone in Berezovsky’s inner-circle, but if Navalny had stayed in Berlin after surviving Putin’s attempt to poison him in 2020, the Kremlin would’ve been forced to resort to another high-profile, extraterritorial execution. Salisbury wasn’t that long ago. The name “Skripal” still rings a bell with Western voters. And the word “novichok” remains part of the Western consciousness. Had Navalny settled in Germany (or the UK), Putin would’ve risked incurring severe backlash in the event of the dissident’s untimely quietus on foreign soil.

Of course, all that’s irrelevant now, and not just because Aleksei’s no longer among the living. Two years into the Ukraine war, the West’s running out of sanctions ammunition, and every other kind of ammunition for that matter. Putin’s proven to be largely immune from diplomatic and financial censure. But the point is: Navalny didn’t have to die suddenly in a freezing-cold, Siberian prison. He could’ve died hairless, in a warm London hospital, for example. Or he might’ve been impaled on the iron railings of a fence in Montagu Square.

These are terrible jokes, I know. But what’s a realist (or anybody else) supposed to say? That if only he’d lived long enough, Aleksei could’ve led a democratic Russia upon Putin’s expiry? I’m hardly the first person to point this out, but if that was actually possible, Navalny made it impossible by remaining in Russia, where he was sure to be assassinated sooner or later.

“Murder!” his supporters wrote on social media Friday. Forgive me (again), but “No sh–t.” What’d you expect? The New York Times quoted a despairing Russian who should probably be more careful what she posts on Telegram: “[I]t’s simple… No future, no hope, nothing….”

It is, in fact, that simple. And if Navalny wanted to change things, his best bet would’ve been to agitate from abroad. Instead, he famously insisted on going back to Russia after the 2020 poisoning. “I’m not scared of anything,” he declared, while being arrested upon his return. That’s fine — admirable, even — as long as “anything” includes death. Because death was certain for Aleksei, and not in the same way it’s certain for everyone.

Navalny’s last public appearance was on Thursday, via video link from a remote Russian court. On a serious, and wholly somber, note, his last know message to his wife, posted to Instagram on Valentine’s Day, read: “Although we’re separated by blue blizzards and thousands of kilometers, you are near me every second. And I keep loving you even more.” Aleksei was 47.