MOSCOW — When a court conveniently jailed Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny a month ago, it was just long enough for him to miss the protest march he was promoting in Moscow's metro and it looked like the Kremlin was up to its old tricks. After mass protests against Vladimir Putin in 2011-12 triggered a crackdown against critics and the war in Ukraine sent his approval ratings through the roof, there barely seemed any need to persecute opposition leaders properly anymore. Navalny's march looked destined to flop; only one other top organizer, former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, had even bothered to hand out flyers with him.

By the time Navalny left jail two weeks later, Nemtsov had been shot dead just outside the Kremlin, and the planned demonstration became a funereal procession. Today, Russia's opposition looks further away from unseating Putin than ever, reduced to accusing him of ordering Nemtsov's murder but fully aware of its powerlessness to do anything about it.

"It's obvious that the only plan the Kremlin has for us is destruction," Navalny told BuzzFeed News in an interview in his Moscow office on Thursday. "The mood has gotten worse. That was the goal. To intimidate us and spread more fear."

A charismatic 37-year-old lawyer who rose to stardom exposing staggering corruption on his blog before leading the protests three years ago, Navalny is trying to unseat Putin at a time when Russians have less appetite for it than any time under the popular president's 15-year rule. Dissenting voices like Navalny's and Nemtsov's are routinely lambasted on state TV and marginalized elsewhere. The prosperous urban middle class that protested against Putin's return has largely chosen despondent apathy or emigration to the West over more street politics.

The loss of Nemtsov, Navalny says, makes the task of fashioning a powerful opposition movement more difficult than ever. "We didn't realize how important he was until we lost him," Navalny said. "He was a really unique person — he was from the establishment, but he behaved like an activist. Nobody values it when an ordinary political activist hands out flyers and writes reports, but when someone who was this close to the presidency does it, it carries that much more weight."

For Navalny, Nemtsov's sudden death and suspicions surrounding the investigation mark a turning point in Putin's efforts to hold onto power. Previously, figures like Nemtsov — who opposed the government but retained connections to the Russian elite — were seen as untouchable. Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, was once considered the favorite to succeed Boris Yeltsin as Russia's president in the 1990s and had even assigned Putin a government apartment when the latter moved to Moscow to run the security services. Two days before his death, Nemtsov visited Navalny in jail, where the two discussed how his status "in the system" allowed him to forego bodyguards or so much as worry about state persecution.

The war in Ukraine brought Putin sky-high popularity at home, but then helped provoke the biggest economic crisis in Russia in years. "Putin's main lever of control was never intimidation, it was buying people off," Navalny told BuzzFeed News. "There are fewer possibilities to buy people off, so he compensates with intimidation."