Yves here. John Helmer is continuing to follow l’affaire Navalny, having documented that Navalny appears to have cut his wife entirely out of his will. That is not surprising given other accounts that Navalny’s wife was living off his money and name while swanning about with another man and not even bothering to visit Navalny in prison in the hinterlands
By John Helmer, the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears
Alexei Navalny’s organization outside Russia is now repudiating Lyudmila Navalnaya, Navalny’s mother, for having accepted the medical evidence and official certification that the cause of his death was an embolism, or blood clot, which stopped his heart.
On Monday, several days after the release of the post-mortem documents and of Navalny’s body to his mother’s custody, Maria Pevchikh, Navalny’s script writer, and Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s press secretary, have repeated their allegations that Navalny had been murdered. In their revised version of the story on Monday, Pevchikh claimed in a self-produced video that “on February 16, 2024, Vladimir Putin killed Alexei Navalny”.
Reuters, the New York-based news agency, reported Pevchikh’s claim, adding that “Maria Pevchikh, who is based outside Russia, did not present documentary evidence for her assertion.” The New York Times amplified Pevchikh’s allegations, but omitted the Reuters qualifier. The newspaper did not report attempting to make contact with Lyudmila Navalnaya but added this innuendo: “it remained unclear whether his family would seek to conduct an independent autopsy before his burial.”
“Alexei Navalny could be sitting in this seat right now, right today,” Pevchikh broadcast. “That’s not a figure of speech, it could and should have happened…Navalny was supposed to be free in the coming days.” Pevchikh then recited details of a purported exchange of Russian spies in prison outside Russia in exchange for Navalny and Americans in Russian prisons.
The NATO-funded Bellingcat organization was involved, Pevchikh said. “Investigator Hristo Grozev helped us devise and implement this plan.” Negotiations took place with American and German officials, she said, but “they did nothing.” She then said: “Roman Abramovich was the one who delivered the proposal to swap Navalny to Putin. As an informal negotiator communicating with American and European officials, and at the same time representing Putin; an unofficial channel of communication with the Kremlin.” Pevchikh claims she asked Abramovich for details of what had been told to Putin and what the president replied. “Unfortunately”, Pevchikh said, “Abramovich did not answer these questions but he did not deny anything either.”
Yarmysh followed Pevchikh with a 3-line tweet: “We know why Alexei was killed right now. He should have been exchanged literally these days. An offer was made to Putin.”
The evidence of prisoner swaps between the US, Germany, and Russia is no news and corroborated officially, although the identities of the swap candidates keep changing, as do the names of the reported go-betweens. Abramovich’s role as the intermediary in the abortive Istanbul negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian officials of March 2022 has not been followed with any report of subsequent intermediation by Abramovich, except to save himself from sanctions.
All that is missing from the new Pevchikh-Yarmysh announcements is the medical evidence of the cause of Navalny’s death. That is being closely held by Navalny’s mother, and she is in charge of the arrangements for his funeral.
In her latest tweet, Yarmysh implies this too is no longer under the outside organization’s control, as it proposes an alternative, parallel ceremony. “We are looking for a hall for a public farewell to Alexei,” Yarmysh said yesterday. “Time: end of this work week. If you have suitable premises, please contact us.”
Pevchikh is based in London; Yarmysh left Russia in 2021 and is also abroad. They are the Whites now. The Reds, Navalny’s mother and Anatoly Navalny, his father, remain in Moscow. The Reds are holding the evidence that Navalny was not murdered and that everything the Whites are saying is false.
The 7-minute Pevchikh video applies the method of repeating the lie several times over with the juxtaposition of unrelated evidence to create the appearance of veracity.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqevNxQ2T8Y
Pevchikh’s video appeared early on Monday afternoon, Moscow time. At the same time, Yarmysh issued a tweet – her first since acknowledging two days earlier that Navalny’s body had been transferred, together with the medical documents, to his mother. Yarmysh’s new release provided the link to Pevchikh’s video.
Source: https://twitter.com/
An hour and a half later Yarmysh broadcast an appeal for an alternative to his funeral and burial.
Source: https://twitter.com
Christo Grozev has been a member of the Bellingcat organisation in several of its formations and financings since 2015. His byline has not appeared on the Bellingcat website since 2022. Follow the archive on Bellingcat here.
Grozev has been a close collaborator with the Navalny organization and with Yulia Navalnaya since Navalny’s time in Germany from August 22, 2020, to January 17, 2021; and then during the production of the documentary film which was first announced on January 13, 2021, and premiered on January 25, 2022. Follow the story of the film here.
Source: https://johnhelmer.net/
Left, Christo Grozev (foreground left) in the recording studio preparing for Navalny’s fabricated telephone call in which an FSB agent admitted to the Novichok-in-underpants plot, December 2020. Right: Grozev with Yulia Navalnaya and Maria Pevchikh at the New York City screening of the Navalny documentary film, April 6, 2022.
Grozev has been publishing a Twitter stream since 2010, reporting himself as a journalist with the Bellingcat website.
Last week, on February 20, Grozev claimed in an interview with Meduza, which is published in Latvia, that he was pursuing evidence to support his theory of poisoning as the cause of Navalny’s death. There has been no response from Grozev on Twitter or other media since Navalnaya received the body and the medical documents.
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What a load of codswallop. Ex-junkie CIA asset meets untimely death, end of.
Not even untimely, except cleverly matched to the Munich Security conference. He was not a healthy person. Not worth wasting time on, and I cannot believe President Putin did spend any time on this nonsense.
Exactly, timed to distract the west from the disaster of the embarrassing Ukrainian defeat at Avdiivka.
Nobody wants to know the truth about Navalny’s death. Whatever the results of the autopsy, he was killed by Putin. Whether he was alive or dead, his only value was that he was Putin’s enemy. How many “liberals” mourning his death knew that he was a far-right white supremacist who called Muslims cockroaches?
I guess Trump is a “liberal” now.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-condemns-alexei-navalny-death-sharp-backlash-haley-biden
The whole framing of “liberals” mourning is weird. The American political class – both dems & repubs have the same reaction.
Maybe what you really want to say is – republicans are “liberals”, since dems are obviously “liberals”.
while “but trump” is satisfying to some people because it elides over anything else on planet earth, the american political class is wholly right wing, People can be justifiably non plussed that the purported right wing party has right wing tendencies, but tearing your hair out because the purported left party has moved so far right to be indistinguishable or possibly even more right wing than the ostensible right wing (global control, authoritarianism, censorship, spying genocide, unprovoked war on russia, debt for life, and etc…) has lost the support of citizens who are not in favor of those despicable actions is why some of us think the latter group needs therapy.
I think the word “liberal” should be assigned to phrases like “s/he”s a liberal drinker” or “I generally sprinkle a liberal amount of cocoa on my cappuccino”) . For myself it doesn’t exist in the political frame…
In a global context, “liberal” usually means “favoring Liberalism”, that is to say, pro-capitalist (because Liberalism, and its basis of private property ownership, is the fundamental justifying premise allowing capitalism to distinguish itself from monarchy). It’s mostly just the US where “liberal” and “progressive” are quasi-synonyms (inasmuch as either means anything given the application of the labels to “Democrats”, a highly “conservative” right-wing party).
In any case, if you’re in a place full of non-Americans, “liberals” are usually “conservative” (see the various Liberal parties in Australia and Canada as an example). And, if you’re in a place full of Americans, but particularly the ones more directly critical of capitalism, it’s pretty common to see “liberals” mean everyone participating in the political economy who is pro-capitalist and not literally fascist (that is to say, almost everyone). This comes from a long tradition of how Communists use the phrase because that ideology is meant as a critique, foremost, of Liberalism (through Materialism), a thing we’re not very familiar with in the US because there hasn’t been a visible Communist movement for at least decades.
Thanks for that reminder!
The SMO has really produced a long parade of wise monkeys (hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil)…
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That is the logic many leftists in the West apply to Putin and Navalny. It is a faulty logic. I don´t know and I don´t care if Navalny was murdered or died “suddenly and unexpectedly” due to a blood clot or simply due to terrible prison conditions. I just know that it was incredibly brave of him to return to Russia and I know as a fact that he was admired by many people in Russia. His letters from prison were avidly read by young people in St.Petersburg who at the beginning had dared to demonstrate against the incursion into Ukraine. Not anymore. Nowadays you can get prison in Russia for speaking out against the Special Military Operation in a private conversation. They apply the same (or worse) pressure against opponents of the war in Ukraine and in “democratic” West Europe the pressure might be reduced but is existent nonetheless.
That Navalny was and is being used by the war mongers in the West is not his fault. Should he have reduced his critisism just so it doesn´t play into the hands of people like Victoria Nuland? It´s time to stop the moralising and realise that Navalny and Assange are basically the same only on different sides. Once Trump was asked whether Putin wasn´t a killer. Trump answered that there are enough killers in the US as well. Good answer and the only way you can look at this. It is actually also the only way that can lead to peace. Whether Putin ordered the killing or not is not important.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That is the logic many leftists in the West apply
it’s not a “leftists” thing, it’s an American/NATO thing.
You need to check the caliber of your sources. Navalny was a crook and a vicious, close to Nazi-level bigot.
The best Navalny ever did was 20% popularity, and that in the Moscow area for a mayoral-related post. He tried showing up Medvedev in his anti-corruption campaign (as in if he out-did the national effort, he could depict it as fake or captured) when he in fact was caught out using his post to create a new company to stop stealing by lumber company managers…..by stealing for himself through his middleman company. There was a second scandal involving Yves Rocher products where his brother was the lead guy but Navalny was involved in setting up the scheme and also on the take. I believe there was even a third scam.
As Scott Ritter and others have argued, it is highly unlikely he came back out of any principle, since he had been caught red handed in his corruption and had no defense. It is far more plausible that the CIA pumped him up on the idea that when he went to trial and/or lost, there would be a huge uprising and Putin would be overthrown. Nothing even remotely of the kind happened.
As for the Nazi bigot part, Amnesty International quietly took him off their list of prisoners of conscience. If not for the bona-fides of his corruption convictionns, it must have been for his racism. He called for exterminating Georgians like cockroaches and carrying a pistol to shoot Chechens. I can’t recall for which group, but he also called for one to be extracted, as in pulled out like a rotten tooth.
As for criticism of the SMO, I suggest you have a look at Russian Telegram. Military and military connected bloggers are all over the fine points of the war and criticize the MoD all the time. That is not to say that some types of criticism are not being censored, but with US officials demonetizing sites that engage in wrong-think and web searches on dissenting ideas turning up no results (often results to the inverse of the question), we hardly have a leg to stand on regarding press freedom. Small detail: Putin tolerated Mark Ames’ and Matt Taibbi’s The eXile, even though it ran several cover stories with outrageous cover art criticizing Putin (and I have no doubt many many jibes in the body of pieces). It was Medvedev who shut it down.
I am in the unusual position that I believe that it was the West which is ultimately responsible for the war but all my Russian friends don´t understand my reasoning. Some have had to leave the country others have been cowed into silence. On their part it is the enemy of my enemy is my friend as well. Now to Navalny: I have heard all these denunciations of Navalny. But if you have doubts regarding the trustworthiness of the US system of justice let me assure you: Russia is as bad and worse. So I don´t put much stock into any kind of “officially” determined accounts of wrong doing in Russia if it concerns oppositionists. Regarding the „20 percent“ that Navalny got in Moscow: I know for a fact that the honesty of elections in Russia is very much in doubt. But even if Navalny only got 20% despite being constantly smeared: the absolute numbers is not the point about Navalny. The point about him that there´s a sizable minority in Russia that loves and admires him for the stance he took against government corruption and later against the war. Last year in the summer I spent with some students who read his letters that were smuggled out of prison. These students had demonstrated against the war until it got to dangerous. One of them had spent one week in jail and then been fined a considerable sum simply for demonstrating. His mother is a seamstress making a few hundred Dollars a month and it was great hardship for her to come up with this sum. The alternative would have been yet more prison. Of course Navalny was supported by the West. With money, PR and what have you. The same thing Russia is doing vs. The West. Snowden didn´t have a choice and Navalny took his support where ever he could get it.
There is a cynical Russian joke which I quite like and which sums up the US vs. Russia. To understand this joke you must know that Putin started the second Chechen war after Chechens supposedly blew up some highrises in Russia proper. The dead ran into the hundreds and afterwards Putin had free reign to do in Chechnya whatever he wanted. That war made him the leader he is today.
So here is the joke:
It is the year 2000 and Putin and Bush have a meeting in the Kremlin. After a while Bush takes Putin into a corner to have a personal talk with him. „Putin how come you are so popular? Please tell me the secret. The thing is, everybody hates me back in the US. They say I stole the election and that really Gore is the president. Come on, tell me what I can do“. Putin whispers something into the ear of Bush and Bush lights up and smiles all over his face. „Really? That simple?“ Putin nods gravely.
One year later on the 12th of September. Putin phones Bush: „Bush you are an idiot. A total idiot. A few appartment blocks is what I told you. Not the highest buildings in your country“
Finally: Scott Ritter is a great and brave man. He stood up against the Iraq war and paid heavily for it. The FBI entrapped him a.s.o. Unfortunately he is naive to the extreme about the state of affairs in Russia. I understand why he thinks so and I will support him to the hilt in whatever he does. But just because the US is bad doesn´t mean that Russia is better. In international relations certainly but internally things are not that simple.
A friend recently told me about the apartment bombing allegation against Putin, so I bought an anti-Putin book to learn more: Philip Short – Putin-Henry Holt and Co. (2022)
About keeping secrets, okay, but reconsider after reading David Talbot’s “The Devil’s Chessboard” and Ross Baker’s “Family of Secrets”. It does all come out, but when done “right” not until it’s too late for consequences: Putin will have expired one way or the other before any chickens come home to roost.
Of course MI6, and the CIA were on top of that, they’ve been providing stellar intelligence on Russia lately…
To be a leader of a global power is to have bloody hands. It’s how and where one leads that determines historical acclaim, but I can’t think of a national leader of a major power who wasn’t a killer, off the top of my head maybe Gandhi.
Blowing up large numbers of one’s own random civilian citizens for no other reason than an election outcome would be something quite above and beyond what historically has been customary amongst even seriously ruthless national leaders.
It’s a very considerable jump to go from offing one’s political opponents, much less proven spies and traitors, to that kind of massacre of one’s own civilians.
It’s a huge chasm even between that and using bloody violence to crush an open rebellion.
Americans and to some degree westerners in general have become accustomed to expect THAT level of psychopathy from their “leaders” especially since the World Trade Center went down, but that doesn’t mean that such a sort of operation, at least on such an extreme scale, with thousands of well conforming, non revolting victims that didn’t even belong to any designated demonized scapegoat group, was in any way the historical norm, or at least something people expected or even necessarily thought possible.
Just because it seems quite plausible, indeed even likely, that the US Deep State either blew the World Trade Center or deliberately allowed it to be blown up, does in no way mean that it is plausible or remotely likely that doing something like blowing up apartment buildings füll of his own people ever entered Putin’s mind.
Especially seeing how american deep state have a huge trackrecord of displaying extreme psychopathic behaviour that Just isn’t visible anywhere to a comparable degree with Putin.
Would Putin ever have pulled a 9/11 equivalent?
Personally I strongly doubt it but I certainly think even considering it possible it would require at least as much reason to suspect foul play/an inside job as there is with 9/11, instead of assertions and general cynicism.
And it’s telling in a way that in plenty cynical and authorities sceptical Russia this narrative apparently contrary to above assertions did NOT gain serious traction the way 9/11 trutherism did amongsts arguably much more gullible and heavily brainwashed Americans, at least outside perhaps some small, very westernized, very fifth column ish section many of whom very likely were deliberately arguing in bad faith.
Who knows, maybe the western intelligence people starting to promote this conspiracy theory were projecting what they already knew was being planned in the US at the same time.
Again, there is a difference between being ruthless and being a complete and total psychopathy.
And as Aurelien pointed out in his most recent essay, sociopaths and psychopaths tend to be very bad managers and incompetent at their jobs in general outside their skill for aquiring power in the first place and keeping up a facade of deception for a while.
They also tend to suck hard at recognizing, admitting and learning from their mistakes, thus eternally repeating them, they commonly have a need to denigrate and put down others and as thrillseeking, risktaking often compulsive gamblers, If they err, they certainly hardly ever do so on the side of caution, restraint or being excessively trusting.
Well, I can certainly think of lots of contemporary political actors that would fit such a description like a glove.
Even if we restrict ourselves just to the Second Chechen War, the way it was handled and ultimately resolved, unlike neocon wars, doesn’t exactly scream “Psychopath!!” to me.
If Russia and it’s economy indeed had collapsed like a house of cards under western assault, that would have been a hint of Putin probably really being the sort of cynical, kleptocratic, power crazed psychopath he is caricatured and smeared as and who wouldn’t blink an eye blowing up appartement buildings.
But it didn’t and he (almost certainly) isn’t.
Another point to consider is that Chechen forces invaded Dagestan a month or so before the apartment bombings and the Russian forces took a thousand or so casualties repelling that incursion. So not only is Putin supposedly a psychopath who orders the mass killing of his own citizens, he does it merely as icing on the cake not out of any real political imperative as the Russians already have been given more than enough pretext to sell a new invasion of Chechnya to the public.
“Navalny took his support where ever he could get it.”
And that should be an absolute dealbreaker if you’re a Russian. Surely you’ve got to realise by now that there is an abiding and uncompromising hostility to Russia at the highest levels of American government. A figure like Navalny does not become the face of opposition to Putin in Western political and media circles unless the Americans are absolutely certain that he’s their man and I would not like to be in the Russian people’s shoes if the Americans ever got their man into the Kremlin. Any alternative leader who derives their support from the West (Juan Guaido is another obvious example) is almost guaranteed to be the worst kind of traitor to the interests of the people they claim to represent.
The Navalny organization was linked to Western intelligence. Here is a link to the informative article by Lucy Komisar cited in Helmer’s piece. It is on the Oscar-winning (naturally) propaganda film, but there is a lot of information on ties between the individuals mentioned above and Western intelligence. These were pretty widely known for quite a while. There may have been some Russians who saw him as you do, but I don’t believe there were many. This “image” was more prominent as a Western propaganda construct.
https://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2023/02/navalny-documentary-nominated-for-march-12-oscar-is-crude-disinformation/
Tom67: I recall from your earlier comments that you reported from Russia and lived there. So I respect your reporting here about the pressure people in Russia not to criticize the war in Ukraine.
However:
Leftists? As a leftist, I’d say that the leftist viewpoint is agnostic on Putin (an obvious rightist) and even on Navalny. Further, they are two, separate political phenomena. Putin stepped in during a collapse in power, after the failure of US-backed economic “reforms.” Navalny arose in reaction to subsequent corruption.
I am also agnostic about Zelensky, who is not a great strategist and spends too much time on the cover of Vogue magazine.
The left’s political program can only be served by negotiations and peace. The most glaring fact here is that Navalny may have been part of a prisoner exchange, which means that Putin would have known of it and would not stand to gain by Navalny’s death.
“Should Navalny have reduced his criticism just so it doesn’t play into the hands of people like Victoria Nuland?”
Yes. Fortunately or unfortunately. One must consider that social-media grandstanding is mainly slacktivism. Further, social media are unreliable as vehicles of change. I am also reminded how careful dissidents were in Central Europe and the U S S R. Sakharov and Bonner were almost saintly–and didn’t rely on Western interviewers for validation and grandstanding. Likewise, Vaclav Havel. I recall working with a group in Amnesty International in the late 1970s and 1980s that had a particular interest in Czech dissidents. Some of these dissidents refused contact with Westerners and Western organizations because of legitimate apprehensions of being portrayed as cat’s paws of the West and spies.
Social media have not eliminated the requirement of taking care in being a dissident. Sensationalism doesn’t produce political change (working with Bellingcat?). And, yes, Navalny was likely railroaded into prison.
Havel did have some Western contacts – he had ties with Frank Zappa, who was not exactly a pro-establishment figure, and tried to make him an ambassador at one point. I will never forget being on a small town in Crete in 1992 or 1993 when a fairly large yacht pulled up, which was odd for this town. Out came Vaclav Havel, donned in shorts, flip flops and a Zappa T-shirt. He made a point of finding the Czech waitress who worked in one of the tavernas and inviting her to have lunch with him. Very humble man from what I saw that day at least.
I do think he had closer ties to the West/NATO later in his career as president (he’d pretty much have to when holding high office), but I admit to not following him much after his Zappa ties ended.
Sorting things on a left-right axis is rough at best, in particular when coming from a US standpoint where both major parties are at best center-right vs the rest of the world.
For all the memes a two axis system like the political compass, that allow the separation of economic and social policies, have the potential to give a more accurate depiction of one’s political position.
These days i suspect most mainstream “leftist” are neolibs with some token gestures towards gender and sex but little interest in buckling free market orthodoxy. There is a trust fund to care about after all…
The Tucker Carlson interview with Michael Benz should color everyone’s view of social media as a political force.
And it appears to be in an overly dynamic situation, perceptibly evolving in real time under the punctuating equilibrium force of two failing wars and a national election the Atlantic Council is losing control over.
I’ve been trying to understand where the RNA of the Blob migrated when Bush the elder passed, with seven former CIA directors on its board, as I learned from Benz, I’m now betting The Atlantic Council.
I find it very hard to believe that Navalny wasn’t an asset for Western intelligence and if that’s the case he was very far from the courageous journalist that is Julian Assange or even some of the principled dissidents of Cold War times.
But there was no sign of that! Being a Yale World Fellow 10 2010 and, IIRC, having your daughter attend Stanford is par for most minor political figures in Russia /sarc.
So-called “good guys” don’t make it to the top of a power structure. We can only hope that there’s a “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” hierarchy within it.
In this context I’m going with Putin as Clint Eastwood doing the work the rest of us can’t…
The “journalist” Grozev hands out immediate blocks for “whataboutism”, does he? Pre-Trump Derangement Syndrome, “whataboutism” used to be called “context” and it was considered essential for good reporting.
Whatever, NC readers are well aware that Bellingcat is a propaganda outlet run by spooks anyway.
Funny how whataboutism as a slur had a massive resurgence after HRC flopped like a dead reptile.
The Navalny narrative as presented, so far, has the air of pure Page Six reporting. Lots of wild adjectives, accusations and conjecture, whatever side you’re in. There should be legitimate links for the most serious charges: he was a Nazi, White Nationalist, CIA spy. His wife is cavorting in the arms of someone else, etc. — all salacious gossip.
Navalny died in an isolated Siberian prison after several prison moves, not in his home bed, and like the Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin, his death is full of intrigue, with a reason.
If you want to challenge what Helmer wrote, the onus is on your to disprove it, not to handwave, because much of what he says is common knowledge to those who have followed Navalny’s career.
There are many videos of Navalny making stone racist remarks.
As Helmer explained carefully in another recent story (https://johnhelmer.net/the-case-of-the-navalny-corpse-cherchez-les-femmes/), regarding Navalny’s wife, it appears someone did a Dan Rather. You may recall the story where Rather reported on improprieties regarding GW Bush’s service in the Texas National Guard. The genius here was that the actual underlying misconduct was true. BUT…..Rather was given and ran the story based on fabricated documents! Rather and the story were discredited based on the bad sourcing. So when later sourcing confirmed the underlying account to be correct, it got no traction due to the story getting national coverage as being fake, when only the sourcing turned out to be bad.
Here, a fake tape was constructed from the mother’s voice recordings complaining of her daughter-in-law’s conduct. But as Helmer’s post indicates, the Russia press, in pointing out that the recording was bogus, nevertheless notes that the wife could not refute it (not did not but could not), which is tantamount to saying that the depiction is accurate. Consistent with that, as Helmer documented in excruciating detail, is that Navalny cut his wife entirely out of his will.
Ritter explains with extensive detail how Navalny was a CIA asset. That has been confirmed by former CIA officers Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson.
https://www.scottritterextra.com/p/the-tragic-death-of-a-traitor
The Kyiv Independent wrote today that Ukraine intel confirmed the Russia autopsy findings, that Navalny died of a blood clot. The timing was nevertheless very auspicious for the West.
A note about the videos of Navalny: Not only do they exist, they are even still literally on his own YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@navalny (“НАРОД за легализацию оружия” is the title of the cockroaches video, for example).
Like Epstein, right? :))))
I blame the Brits.
What surprises me is that the CIA can’t knock heads and tell its puppets to make nicey with each other, while in public.
Now, while Putin had no motive to kill Navalnyii at this time, he is still blamed. No evidence needed. Because Putin.
Meanwhile, Aaron Bushnell had barely finished dying before the europress started to claim that he had mental health issues, no diagnosis needed. Because badthink or something.
At the same time, anyone who points out Biden’s obvious drooling senility is chided for unauthorized practice of neurology and anyone who notes the farcical circumstances surrounding the death of Jeffrey Epstein is branded a looney.
Local media ran a personal interest story recently from a reporter with a family connection who traveled in the Kiev region and spoke to locals. It was the usual thing, with general optimism around war prospects (all the Western talking points) contrasted against the generally bleak reality and stream of ongoing news.
The general opinion of Navalny there was not high. If he gained power by some miracle, nobody was convinced he’d be any better than Putin, and possibly worse (and this was in a population that seemed to largely subscribe to the “Putin as megalomaniac who won’t stop at Ukraine” thesis). He apparently supported the annexation of Crimea, and they were conscious that the story around him was being carefully managed to airbrush his far-right roots among other things.
Could someone explain the logic of this: Yarmysh followed Pevchikh with a 3-line tweet: “We know why Alexei was killed right now. He should have been exchanged literally these days. An offer was made to Putin.”
So Navalny was killed because an offer for a prisoner exchange was made to Putin???? Ummm couldn’t Putin have simply said no and left him to rot in Siberia?? Objectively, the timing was bad for Putin and convenient for the US and its lackeys.
Obviously if this is true, which it very well may be, the Brits killed him because it was the last chance for him to die in russian custody and for Putin to believably blamed
It would be a confession on the West’s part that they knew that Navalny was politically finished and without any hope of ever challenging Putin, thus dead worth more than alive.
From Russia’s side letting Navalny go the West indeed would have been sort of a sign that they didn’t worry or care about him one way or another and getting rid of him via a prisoner exchange would only further put him on the level of a western intelligence asset (which of course is appropriate).
The most recent Warnerd podcast was focussed on Navalny. Mark Ames read from a piece written by Navalny from jail in which he excoriated the kind of Russian liberals that he had allied with over the years as traitors and hypocrites. It was actually quite a powerful piece of writing. It must have got zero attention in the West because I had never heard of it before, probably because it comes from a man obviously having a massive crisis of faith. If you’re looking for another reason for the West to knock Navalny off, add that to the list. Did the man know secrets the West would prefer not to get out, and left to rot in prison for the rest of his life was he thinking of talking ?
Ames and Dolan have graciously unlocked their podcast on Navalny — listen here for free.
Thanks guys!
Mark Ames shared his recollections of Navalny from his days in Moscow before 2008 in the latest (paywalled) Radio War Nerd podcast. Ames situates Navalny in the opposition milieu and describes political relations within it, and gives an idea what moves Navalny made and why, including the move to racist nationalism.
The War Nerds give links to recent statements by Navalny accusing the liberals of creating the authoritarian state to push through shock therapy against popular opposition, and recruiting Putin to continue the project, only to have that blow up in their faces. Many members of the current opposition claimed the statement was a fraud. Navalny answered their attack.
It appears to Ames that Navalny ended up accepting the National Boshevik deprivatization program put forward in the 90s. The discussion, coming from someone who moved in Russian opposition circles, gives a perspective you won’t find anywhere else.
Fascinating.
So, might Budanov have started to suddenly insist that Navalny died of natural causes after all because he and especially the people behind him (Budanov being more thug than grand strategist, of course) are worried that things like this getting wider traction could lead to Navalny “accidentally’ becoming considered a martyr for the wrong side?
With the serious considerations about the situation well handled by readers much better informed about the background than I’ll ever be, if no one minds, I’ll attempt humor to make a comment about contemporary American society and the journalism industry that covers it by taking a stab at predicting future outcomes based on the information provided and my own research.
Whether it’s Pevchikh or Yarmysh, whenever the news cycle on Navalny’s demise ends (in months, weeks or hours), it won’t be more than a month or two before a magazine such as Vogue or People takes a political bend and delves into a retrospect on the Navalny affair with the aim of bashing Putin and one of those two babes will be on the cover with provocative photos on the inside pages.
And if any one of the two speak English fluently enough for a broadcast stint, then the only remaining unanswered question for me is whether Pevchikh and/or Yarmysh will be considered more Fox News-type hot or CNN hot? Or for the dark horse, CNBC?
That’s the the sole mystery I see in the future of all this. Please discuss amongst yourselves.