As soon as the death of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny in a Siberian penal colony was announced in February, conspiracy theories about who was behind it began circulating in Russia.

“That he was killed by his puppet masters from the west, not the Kremlin. That he was killed by them because his murder would actually make Putin look awful in the eyes of global community,” explains Ilya Yablokov, a lecturer in digital journalism and disinformation at the University of Sheffield in the UK.

Yablokov studies the spread of conspiracy theories in post-Soviet Russia, and says the stories about Navalny are the most prominent of many circulating ahead of a presidential election that looks certain to keep Putin in the Kremlin until at least 2030.