He might have wanted to exchange just these 2 US nationals for Changoschwili’s murderer and made it seem as if he would exchange Navalny as well to make the deal more appealing to the German government.

I don’t feel like Navalny had much say in the matter.

Probably somewhere in the middle, not as good as what western media made him out to be, but leagues better than Putin I assume.

Earlier in his political career (at least as late as early 2010s) he indeed skewed much more right, somewhat moderately right-wing. For instance he used to partake in russian marches, which are annual demonstrations of partially nationalist, mostly just conservative factions. Here is him speaking at Russian March 2011. He also made several comments about the status of Chechen Republic within Russian Federation (a complicated region that has lead to Russian armed forces clashing with local gov/insurgents in two Chechen wars), I think mainly arguing that it should be excluded from Russian Federation.

I, however, still believe that in late 2010s he genuinely switched to much more liberal views, mainly focusing on liberal populism.

In general, while he definitely started off in conservative crowd, it would be a huge overstatement to argue that he continued to be an active fascist and anti-islamist right up to his death.

My Lemmy experience got so much better after moving to an instance not federating with hexbear.

Unfortunately it seems that way: BBC Article.

All the bad stuff you can find about him is false or presented in a misleading way, by either pro-Putin propaganda or people who likes to get triggered by clickbait titles.

E.g. about the Muslim related thing: because the ad in question featured a photo of Chechen (?) soldiers, and the message about the right to bear arms was worded roughly as “you should be able to defend yourself from cockroaches”, clever people decided he compared Muslims to cockroaches. Even to this day in Russia, Chechen people are massively (and rightfully so) considered dangerous, and bearing arms is not legalized. I watched him for years and Muslims were never on his agenda. The ad was created in 2007 and available on Youtube on his personal channel to this day. Guess not enough Muslims were upset about such “calls for genocide”, heh. There is another ad about illegal immigrants and they too are still a problem for Russians.

Personally, I think he was the best politician of this time, maybe not only in Russia. Having watched him for years, there was never an ounce of radicalism or otherwise calls for unfair treatment of anyone. There were points to disagree but he was always open to public discussion and debates. They are correct when they say he was a hero Russians need but didn’t deserve.

tl;dr: Navalny was against criminals, not Muslims.