"It’s not ‘Navalny died’, but ‘Putin killed Navalny’,” Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief of staff, said.
Grigory Yavlinsky, a veteran liberal, said Navalny’s death showed the need for reform and echoed many opposition figures in saying he feared for the health of other activists in jail.
In this context it just means ‘the outside world.’ It’s a hand-wave for major geopolitical forces besides Russia, China, and occasionally India.
Not that ‘X holds Y accountable’ implies Z does not. When someone says they love waffles, that doesn’t mean they hate pancakes.