Leslie Stahl interviewed Alexei Navalny when he was in Germany, having survived an attempt to kill him with a military-grade poison.
You can see why Putin was afraid of him: he was smart and charismatic, handsome and youthful. Left alone, he might have led an uprising against Putin’s dictatorship.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So why did Putin manage his assassination as he did?
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Plausible deniability
The throwing people out of windows thing has become too much of an MO, as has poisoning. And the buildings in the far reaches of Putin’s gulag aren’t that tall. But freezing people to death in Siberia, there’s a long tradition of that on the part of murderous Russian autocrats.
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Or do you mean the attempted assassination with a known Russian intelligence nerve agent? That, at that time, was doubtless meant to send a message to other Russian dissidents abroad, don’t you think?
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I have considered all these ideas, but there is a practical argument for arbitrary public torture as was used in medieval times and more immediately by the Islamic state
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