I'm surprised he was able to make such statements for this long.
I genuinely wonder why his captors even continue to let him live, when it seems like any post-2022 civil protest in Russia can and will be brutally repressed.
Putin is 71 and doesn’t look particularly healthy. It’s not clear that he has any strong successor, nor that he would leave such a successor alive if there was one. His government is strained to the breaking point and couldn’t fight off an internal military attack by one of his lieutenants, to the point where they almost reached Moscow in a few hours. When he dies, it seems likely that the country will fall to pieces as different factions try to gain power. Because of the way Putin has suppressed the opposition, Navalny is one of the only people who has any popular legitimacy in that environment. I still think it’s very unlikely he makes it, but prisoner to leader isn’t unheard of.
If he was making such statements (I'm not following this), does that mean that his lawyers were indeed being used by him to pass letters and that this is not propaganda?
Russian regime is strangely obsessed with following some procedure and complying to some law, even if it sounds like a joke. In this case they just found the way to legally stop publication of his statements and what they say is true if you accept their narrative as a whole. Still it is just propaganda and lie, because it is based on highly illegal (unconstitutional) foundation. The laws that they passed, the judicial process - everything is rotten to the roots.
For some people that's worse than death. It's a clear message from Putin. Get in my way and you'll end up like him.
Not everybody is going to take that risk.