Inside the Kremlin’s party as Putin celebrates election win

Minutes later Putin walked in, jumped up on stage like a Western politician on the campaign trail and personally chose whom to take questions from, mostly soft-ball inquiries from the Kremlin press pool. But while the victory he was basking in offered little surprise, the Russian leader did make rare news.Putin suggested he had agreed to the idea of swapping Alexei Navalny for prisoners held in the West, but offered no explanation for why just days later Navalny was dead.He was responding to a question from NBC News, which asked whether events such as the jailing of American journalist…