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The mainstream media considers Alexei Navalny to be Vladimir Putin’s main opponent. However, a “Levada Center poll from November 2020 — three months after Navalny’s poisoning — found that only 2% of Russians would vote for Navalny if he were a presidential candidate. That is a number that has remained steady for years.” How is it possible that there can be such a divergence of views?
In the western media, Navalny has been portrayed as an indefatigable Russian patriot who is trying to expose corruption in Russian society and has been victimised by various criminal prosecutions.
To set the record straight, in 2014 Navalny was charged and convicted of fraud and embezzlement of a French cosmetic firm and a Russian state-owned timber firm, totalling about $1,000,000. For the first criminal offence he was given a 3½-year sentence and for the second, a 5-year sentence, but both sentences were suspended. On the other hand, his brother who was similarly charged did go to jail. During this probation period Alexei Navalny was to report at regular intervals to police officials.
Much has been written in the Western press about an “assassination attempt” on Navalny using a weapons grade nerve agent known as Novichok and Navalny’s accusation that “Putin was trying to poison me” has been taken at face value. However, little has been said about the many questions that have arisen around these important matters and they are worth airing
On August 20th, Navalny fell seriously ill while in mid-flight from Tomsk, Siberia to the Russian capital. The Moscow-bound plane was abruptly re-routed to make an emergency landing in the Siberian city of Omsk where the Navalny was hospitalized.
Somehow while Navalny was still on the plane bound for Omsk, Pyotr Verzilov, a member of the protest punk rock Pussy Riot group, was notified of Navalny’s illness. He then immediately managed to arrange for the Berlin-based NGO Cinema for Peace Foundation to send an aircraft to Omsk with a coma-specialised team on board. This plane arrived the next day, on August 21, and these German doctors were allowed to take part in the examination and treatment of Navalny. In fact, they were able to make tests and report these back to Berlin.
The Russian doctors have affirmed that despite comprehensive toxicology tests on his biological fluids and organs, they detected no traces of toxins. He was tested for many types of poisons, including organophosphorus compounds and narcotic substances. Moreover, the atropine treatment by Russian doctors was exactly the same as would later be done at the Berlin Charité medical university. And most importantly, no evidence was detected by the German doctors of a poison attack on Navalny in the Omsk hospital, as Navalny and the western media have recently alleged.
The chief toxicologist at the Omsk Emergency Hospital, Dr. Alexander Sabaev, stated that their doctors found no traces of toxic substances in the comatose Navalny’s kidneys, liver, or lungs, which led them to conclude that Navalny’s condition was caused by a metabolic disorder and an “internal trigger mechanism.” It appeared that Navalny had suffered a grand seizure due to hyperglycemia after going into diabetic shock in which a combination of alcohol, lithium and benzos taken by Navalny himself were involved. Sabaev also noted that tests were conducted in multiple laboratories at once.
By their skilled quick intervention, these doctors saved Navalny’s life. The Omsk doctors not only stabilized Navalny’s condition but also had demonstrated the effectiveness of the Russian antidote medication. The crucial point is that these Russian toxicology tests found no Novichok or any other such nerve poison in Navalny’s body. The Russian medics still possess the original body samples taken when Navalny was being treated in Russia.
On August 22 Navalny was flown in this German plane to Germany, along with his medical condition reports, which were to be given to the Charité Clinic in Berlin. His transport on a medically equipped plane with German specialists was permitted by the Russian authorities. In fact, it was Vladimir Putin who personally authorized this, afterwards saying, “I immediately asked the Prosecutor General’s office to allow that.”
Two days later, on August 24, a report on Navalny from the Charité hospital stated “Clinical findings indicate poisoning with a substance from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors. The specific substance involved remains unknown, and a further series of comprehensive testing has been initiated.”
This claim was signed by a press agent, not a doctor or head of the patient treatment team. However, German hospital protocol requires the treating doctor to take responsibility for the release of a patient’s medical record. There is no evidence that such permission was granted. In fact, Florian Roetzer of Telepolis, asked Manuela Zingl, the press agent who signed her name to this, to name the head of the Navalny’s treatment team and to provide details of the treatment. She refused. We will return to the question of why protocol was breached so seriously on such an important matter at a later point when we come to additional information that came out in December.
Notably, the Berlin doctors admit they did not detect organophosphate poisoning in Navalny’s blood, urine or on his skin; they tested no water bottle or clothing evidence which had been brought to Berlin by Navalny’s staff on the evacuation aircraft. They also acknowledge they did not know what might have caused “severe poisoning with a cholinesterase inhibitor” until the German armed forces laboratory in Munich reported the Novichok allegation two weeks later.
For an undisclosed reason, further research on Navalny was not done at the Charité hospital in Berlin. This was assigned to be done at the German army’s chemical warfare laboratory in Munich, the Institut fur Pharmakologie und Toxikologie der Bundeswehr (IPTB). On September 2 the IPTB issued a brief report, with no details, directly to Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin stating that on the basis of their toxicological investigation “definite proof of a chemical nerve agent of the Novitchok (sic) group was produced.”
However, there is a problem with IPTB’s entire report. There was no toxicology report from the IPTB, no name of the IPTB expert in charge of the testing and of the interpretation of the results, and there was no name of the chemical compound of the “Novichok group,” which IPTB should have explicitly reported on paper, according to the naming protocol of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry; or else the report fails to do that because it was inconclusive. The failure to compile a full report on these matters seems to indicate their analysis was inconclusive.
Immediately after receiving the report on Navalny from the IPTB, Chancellor Merkel met with her cabinet and issued a report saying, “The German federal government condemns this attack in the strongest possible terms. The Russian government is urged to explain itself regarding the incident.” A communiqué was sent to Russia saying that Germany now has “unequivocal proof” Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent and demanded that Russia conduct an investigation into this. The next day Russia rejected Merkel’s accusations and demanded documents and proof to support their case.
Germany’s announcement immediately led to a series of charges in the media that the Kremlin was responsible for the attempted murder of Navalny using the Soviet-era nerve poison. Without providing any supporting evidence to Moscow or the public, the German government demanded an explanation from the Kremlin. Amazingly, Germany refused to share their analytical data and samples with Russia, but in spite of this they demanded that Moscow launch a criminal investigation into the Navalny case.
Upon hearing these accusations, the scientists behind Novichok development – Leonid Rink and Vladimir Uglev – dismissed the German claims. They stated that Novichok is an extremely deadly nerve agent and there’s no way Navalny could have survived its application. Furthermore, Uglev pointed out that others who interacted with the Navalny after he fell ill – fellow plane passengers, ambulance crews, and others would also have been contaminated. Leonid Rink stated that Navalny’s symptoms are not consistent with poisoning by Novichok. According to him, if Novichok was used, Navalny would have had seizures, and he would have already died, instead of falling into a coma.
Russia then sent a formal request from the Prosecutor-General in Moscow to Germany to provide medical condition evidence on their Navalny findings. In response, the German authorities have not produced a single medical datum, pathology, toxicology or forensic report. In European protocols of patient care and in medical professional terms, this is unprecedented. As such it appears that German doctors were under government orders not to communicate with their Russian colleagues or to respond to an official Russian government request.
German doctors who treated Navalny wrote a report that became the basis for an article in The Lancet. This was published December 22 as a four-page clinical report on Navalny. In this report, the main editors Eckardt and Steindl say “severe poisoning with a cholinesterase inhibitor was subsequently diagnosed,” not at the Charité hospital in Berlin, but by a “laboratory of the German armed forces”, i.e., the IPTB.
British toxicologists have repeatedly cautioned there can be many causes and sources for the cholinesterase inhibition detected from metabolites in Navalny’s blood and urine, and they continue to ask the German doctors and the IPTB: “Name the compound. That would be a good start.” Writing in The Lancet, the doctor in charge of Navalny’s treatment at the Charité, Kai-Uwe Eckardt and a British colleague, David Steindl note that: “results of toxicology analyses conducted in a special laboratory of the armed forces [IPTB] are not included.”
A British organo-phosphate expert adds: “I can’t stress enough the need for the German scientists to be specific. To speak of ‘Novichok family’ or ‘Novichok class or group” is just not good enough. There is no reason why the correct IUPAC chemical name should not be stipulated. Without this certainty, there is no analysis that can stand up as toxicologically defensible evidence of a crime.”
As cited in the December issue of The Lancet, German doctors reported that “based on clinical and laboratory findings, severe cholinesterase inhibition was diagnosed and the patient was started on atropine and obidoxime . . . cholinergic signs returned to normal within 1 hour after the onset of this antidotal therapy.” This report is in stark contrast to the Charité press agent’s report on August 24 which spoke of “poisoning with a substance from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors.” It also neglected to mention that the atropine treatment was effective within one hour and that the atropine treatment by Russian doctors at Omsk was the same as provided to Navalny by German doctors.
Thus, the August 24 announcement by Charité hospital’s press agent was not only inaccurate, it was overly alarmist. As we have seen, it was also released by a press agent, without the signature or the authorization of a doctor. Now we know why: it appears to be a purposeful misrepresentation of Navalny’s medical condition. But questions still remain . . . why was this done, who authorized it, and for what purpose?
At Germany’s request, on September 10 OPCW sent experts to collect biomedical samples from Navalny’s blood and urine. This was three weeks after Navalny became ill and by this time he was reasonably well recovered. Almost a month later, on October 5, the OPCW sent a report on its findings to Germany claiming that “The results of the analysis of biomedical samples conducted by the OPCW designated laboratories demonstrate that Mr Navalny was exposed to a toxic chemical acting as a cholinesterase inhibitor. The biomarkers of the cholinesterase inhibitor found in Mr Navalny’s blood and urine samples have similar structural characteristics to the toxic chemicals belonging to schedules 1.A.14 and 1.A.15, which were added to the Annex on Chemicals to the Convention at the Twenty-Fourth Session of the Conference of the States Parties in November 2019. This cholinesterase inhibitor is not listed in the Annex on Chemicals to the Convention.”
There was no further report to clarify what this actually meant. Despite this, it became accepted that OPCW claimed it was a variant of Novichok. Overall, OPCW’s remarkably late intervention in this matter is questionable and their report remains cryptic. The fact that immediately after Navalny became ill Russian and German doctors at Omsk were not able to find any traces of toxins in his blood and urine, three weeks later OPCW’s “experts” supposedly managed to do so stretches credulity.
The latest on this is that it is now reported, as of February 15, that on the day OPCW took samples of Navalny’s blood and urine, the German record shows his cholinesterase scores were so close to normal, it was impossible for the OPCW to claim they had evidence of a Novichok attack. This substantially undermines Germany’s claim that the Novichok attack was perpetrated by the Russians, on order of President Vladimir Putin.
It’s not that OPCW has an unblemished impartial record. Its reputation was seriously compromised in 2019 when the head office leadership altered the report of its own on-site investigators in Douma in Syria in an attempt to justify an unwarranted and illegal bombing raid in Syria by US and British aircraft. Because of this, the two top investigators quit their jobs, and one of them later presented a detailed report at the United Nations in which the true course of events was presented on what actually happened at Douma in 2018.
On December 22 the Charité clinic released some of its laboratory test results on Navalny. These reveal a surprising number of medical symptoms: acute pancreatitis, diabetes, liver failure, severe dehydration, muscular rigidity, as well as serious bacterial infection, and a possible heart attack associated with his kidney problems. According to the clinic’s experts, these are not recognizable symptoms of a nerve agent attack. Given this great variety of ailments, it is clear that Navalny is not in good health.
The Charité hospital’s doctors also revealed that Navalny had a medico-psychiatric problem and was a heavy user of lithium and benzodiazepine drugs. They reported this in a set of four data tables they attached as appendices to their case report on Navalny. Their data raises the question — what would happen if Navalny was forced to withdraw from his drugs quickly. Further on this later.
Navalny’s wife, Yulia, had refused to reveal or allow Navalny’s doctors to report on several of his prior illnesses and medical preconditions; these are known to cause sudden reduction in blood sugar and cholinesterase levels—diabetes, Quincke’s Disease, and allergies leading to anaphylactic shock. It is not known if Navalny afterwards allowed this.
The disclosure that in his Tomsk hotel on August 19, hours before he collapsed, Navalny had taken a large dose of lithium, diazepam, nordazepam, oxazepam, and temazepam, was first published on December 22 in The Lancet. The medico-psychiatric literature is clear on what happens to a habitual user of these drugs if rapid withdrawal is attempted: for lithium, read this; for the benzodiazepines, click to open.
European medical sources report that the lithium found in Navalny’s blood is commonly used to treat bipolar disorders. It is known to depress the butyryl cholinesterase which Navalny’s laboratory testing revealed at the
Charité hospital. Navalny was also being treated to stabilise his insulin level with Metformin, a drug that is known to be a cholinesterase inhibitor. From the combination of these drugs and the additional ones he took in the Tomsk hotel, Navalny would have suffered dramatic cholinesterase inhibition effects before his collapse on the plane from Tomsk to Moscow.
As such there is medical evidence provided by Russian and German doctors that Navalny may have collapsed because of the combination of drugs he was taking. The use of benzodiazepines is especially dangerous when used with alcohol or other drugs.
Independent western toxicologists, pharmacologists, and physicians believe that the Lancet evidence of Navalny’s drug intake shows that he had consumed a potentially lethal cocktail of drugs, which, if combined with alcohol and a pre-existing diabetic condition, could have triggered the cholinesterase inhibitor. An expert from the above-cited group adds that the 0.2 blood alcohol level reported from the Omsk hospital testing on August 20 “is an extremely high level.”
The mystery of what the Berlin doctors treating Navalny discovered in his bloodstream and urine tests has deepened after the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov publicly referred in mid-February to the clinical findings of a
Swiss-based neurologist, Vitaly Kozak. He revealed that Kozak has been reporting for several weeks that the biomedical data tables published in The Lancet in December reveal evidence of cholinesterase inhibition effects of poisoning by the drug lithium which Navalny was taking himself before his
collapse on August 20. Why is it that The Lancet has refused to publish a clinical commentary in the form of questions from Dr. Kozak?
Kozak has pointed out there is evidence that lithium inhibits cholinesterase activity in the blood. Also not explained was that 31 hours after Navalny collapsed from his illness “he had ‘wide pupils non-reactive to light’ which is contrary to cholinergic toxidrome.” He explained the significance of this, which was not reported by The Lancet. Dr . Kozak’s expert credentials as a neurologist are such that he is more qualified to comment on Navalny’s clinical data than the neurologists in the Charité hospital team who listed themselves as co-authors of December 22 Lancetreport. Despite this, Kozak’s observations and inferences from the data tables have been rejected for publication in The Lancet.
It is noteworthy that career diplomat Frank Elbe, who headed the office of German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher for five years and negotiated the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons as head of the German delegation in Geneva from 1983 to 1986, stated that “I am surprised that the Federal Ministry of Defence concludes that the nerve agent Novichok was used against Navalny.”
As he put it, Novichok belongs to a group of “super-lethal substances that cause immediate death” and that it “made no sense to modify a nerve poison that was supposed to kill instantly in such a way that it did not kill, but left traces behind allowing its identification.”
To sum up this issue, the case from Germany and the west is that Navalny was the target of an attempted murder, and that Novichok was the weapon used. The Russian government case is that the medical evidence is of a metabolic crisis caused by the combination of alcohol, lithium and benzodiazepines taken by Navalny himself.
The balance of evidence available and outlined here would suggest that the Russian assessment is more credible than the Western consensus.
Aside from all of the above, there is a further more sinister possibility that should be considered. It was the doctors at the Omsk hospital who first treated Navalny and saved his life from his strange ailment. Several German doctors were there at the time and fully approved of the tests and medical care that he received. The Russian doctors still have Navalny’s biological samples, which show no presence of toxins. Hence, because of such evidence, surely there is reasonable cause to suspect that the German version may be a fabrication. That could mean that the claimed detection of Novichok by the Germans was the result of deliberate contamination of his body fluids while he was being treated in the Berlin hospital, or that his was done later at the Munich military laboratory.
Russia has been transparent in all this from the outset. But strangely, the Germans rebuffed all Russian requests for reciprocal transparency from their side to back up their extraordinary claims that Navalny was poisoned with a military nerve agent. All efforts by Moscow for cooperation in investigating what happened when Navalny fell ill on August 20 have been stonewalled. However, the German lab did share some of their information with personnel from other countries.
There are additional questions. After Russian doctors saved his life and were prepared to deal with his recovery, why was there an urgent request from his family and his supporters to have him flown to Germany for further hospital care? Why was there an urgency to do so? Why did Moscow relent in allowing this strange foreign intervention in its internal affairs?
If, for argument’s sake, the Kremlin had in some way plotted to cause Navalny harm with Novichok or some other poison, why would Moscow permit his relocation to Berlin where toxicology tests would uncover the purported plot? That scenario is illogical.
A further point on this matter is that Novichok substances exist in at least twenty Western countries while Russia claims to have none. Furthermore, the Russian scientists who invented Novichok have stated categorically that if used, it would have killed Navalny almost instantly. Moreover, anyone who came in contact with him – his aides, doctors, fellow passengers – would inevitably have been contaminated, sickened and perhaps died, so deadly is this chemical weapon.
Recently a Russian doctor died at the Omsk hospital where Navalny was a treated six months ago. Immediately there was speculation that it was that this was somehow connected to Navalny. Upon inquiry it was reported that the doctor died of a heart attack and that this had nothing to do with Navalny.
When in Germany for treatment, a mysterious water bottle was produced by his family that the Bundeswehr labs are now claiming had traces of Novichok on its surface. If Novichok truly were on the bottle, Navalny and his assistants would have died, as well as the Bundeswehr technicians.
In addition to the water bottle, other purported methods were considered such as a bad tasting cocktail Navalny had in the hotel or perhaps it was the cup of tea while he was waiting for his plane in Tomsk. But the latest and the final idea is that Novichok was applied to Navalny’s underwear while he was staying at a hotel in the hours before his flight to Tomsk. Laughable, yes, but this is their latest idea.
This latest explanation is based on a claim that Navalny somehow through a phone call tricked a person from the Russian Federal Security Service to admit that they had applied Novichok to his underwear. Russia immediately denied such an accusation and showed that his claim was preposterous and a fake.
In all of this there was an astounding dereliction of legal process by the Europeans, as well as the flouting of diplomatic norms in their communications with Moscow . . . all unworthy of normal bilateral relations.
Despite all this, critics wonder why “the Russian regime has not yet even opened a criminal inquiry.” Why should Russia do this? The Russian doctors who saved Navalny’s life did not find any toxic substance in his body. The German investigators have not provided any evidence of their findings of Novichok in Navalny’s body. Without such evidence what would be the point of any such inquiry?
The timing of Navalny’s alleged assassination came as the Nord Stream-2 natural gas project between the European Union and Russia entered into a final phase for completion. Predictably, there have been vociferous calls from the EU and from some sectors in Germany for that project to be cancelled, in accordance with Washington’s long-held demands. The USA is involved in this because it wants to sell its own abundant gas (from fracking) to Europe, even though it would be far more expensive than Russian gas. Obviously, this is about trade and American financial interests. In response to this, Russia is considering an international court challenge against US actions.
This $11 billion pipeline is the likely reason why the Navalny issue has been handled in this manner in Germany. Strangely there are a number of pro-Washington German politicians who have been persistent in their opposition to the ambitious boost to energy trade between Russia and Europe. On the other hand, most German politicians realize that Germany needs Russian natural gas as it phases out dirty coal and nuclear power. Natural gas is a cleaner source of energy than coal or nuclear power. The completion of this line would double the supply of Russian gas to the EU.
Despite sanctions to disrupt construction over the past year, the Nord Stream-2 project resumed near the end of 2020. All that is needed is about 150 kilometers of pipe-laying to the German coastline in an overall 12,000-km route from Russia.
From a strategic political and commercial viewpoint, the Americans are crazed by this partnership between Europe and Russia. Navalny’s bizarre poison story and subsequent media agitation seems central to halting the Nord Stream-2 project.
So desperate is Washington to sabotage the pipeline that it is now throwing caution to the winds in its efforts at trying to incite a colour revolution in Russia. The hypocrisy is astounding considering the shrill and unfounded accusations the Americans have leveled at Russia about its supposed interference in US affairs.
But also astounding is the servility of European governments and media who entertain the American agenda. Germany wants and needs Russian gas, but Berlin has accepted the Navalny nonsense and has endangered its relationship with Russia.
In any case, under the laws of the Russian Federation, during Navalny’s five-month stay in Germany, he was on probation for a suspended jail sentence concerning his fraud conviction in 2014. For the last two months of 2020, according to his German doctors, he was fully recovered and in good health. Hence there were no grounds for him not to return to Russia and thereby to abide by Russian laws.
Near the end of December Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service warned Alexei Navalny to return immediately from Germany or else face a suspended sentence being made into jail time. He ignored this and returned on January 17. He was detained at the airport and placed in detention till February 2.
At the ensuing court case on February 2, seemingly because he had been unable to take his usual drugs, Navalny became unhinged during the proceedings. During the court hearing, he was asked to apologize to a 95-year-old World War II veteran for insulting and defaming him some months before because the veteran had supported an amendment to Russia’s constitution. Instead of doing this, Navalny proceeded to further ridicule and malign not only the veteran but his family as well, to the extent that it even appalled his supporters in court. As later reported “Navalny’s constant shift into shouting, rolling into hysterics, bickering with the court, and insulting other participants . . . the judge, unable to stand the circus, gave five minutes to the lawyers to ‘bring the defendant to his senses’, since ‘there is no longer any possibility to tolerate this.’” It’s fairly certain that if Navalny had done this in the USA he’d have been charged with contempt of court and given an additional sentence. At the end of the hearing, he was jailed for parole violations resulting from an earlier embezzlement conviction and sent to serve the remaining 2½ years in a penal colony.
Probably because of Navalny’s bizarre performance in court, his staff announced they have suspended their demonstration plans until the spring.
Russia has dismissed US and EU criticism of the jailing of Navalny as meddling in its domestic affairs and said Navalny’s current situation is a procedural matter for the court, not an issue for the government.
It should be noted that while he was in Germany “recuperating,” Navalny proceeded to accuse President Putin of personally ordering his alleged assassination. On the basis of these bizarre and totally unsubstantiated charges the European governments proceeded to impose further sanctions on Russia. The abdication by European governments of due process and of respect for Russian state laws, its government, and its president is astounding.
In a question directed at Putin regarding Navalny’s comments about him, Putin responded by saying that Navalny’s claims are merely “laundering of US intelligence” for which the dissident figure is an asset.
The notion that Russian President Vladimir Putin would try to assassinate an opposition person who holds a minuscule 2 to 4% support amongst the population is contrary to any reason or common sense. There is a reason Putin consistently polls about 60 to 70% in favorability with the Russian people. Such polling is done regularly by the Levada Center, an independent non-governmental polling association.
Russians are fully aware that it was Putin who directed the country away from Western domination under the ruinous neoliberal economic policies of his corrupt and inebriated predecessor Boris Yeltsin. Under Yeltsin in a matter of five years from 1990 to 1994 life expectancy dropped from age 69 to age 64, and economic output fell by 45 percent during 1989 – 1998. Under Putin the economy recovered and life expectancy in 2020 was 72.3.
After his arrest, Navalny’s supporters released a two-hour YouTube video about an opulent Black Sea residence allegedly built for Putin. It immediately got wide media attention, especially in the West, and it has been widely viewed in Russia. President Putin immediately denied having anything to do with this structure. Shortly afterwards, a Russian businessman, Arkady Rotenberg, provided proof that he owns this property and that this has nothing to do with the Russian president.
Navalny’s so-called Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) has a checkered history of shady financing, from allegations of foreign funding by the U.S. State Department to charges of embezzling millions of dollars. The FBK is registered as a ‘foreign agent’ by the Russian Ministry of Justice because they have evidence that it has received funding from abroad in the past.
Navalny is being used by the USA as a useful agent in its attempts to subvert the Russian state by fomenting social unrest. For example, upon Navalny’s return to Russia on January 17, the US embassy in Moscow published detailed street maps of planned protests. Just imagine the hue and cry if, for example, the Russian embassy in Washington had published maps of the Capitol buildings prior to the January 6 violent assault there by Trump supporters.
Navalny’s FBK on January 31 asked the White House to enact additional sanctions on Russia. Russia’s Foreign Affairs official, Vladimir Dzhabarov, denounced the organization, saying: “It smacks of treason. Can you imagine an American organization appealing to Vladimir Putin with a request to impose sanctions on the US president?”
Amnesty International has recently withdrawn its designation of Navalny as a “prisoner of conscience” due to past xenophobic statements he has never retracted. The group said it “is no longer able to consider” Navalny a prisoner of conscience because he “advocated violence and discrimination” and has never retracted any of such statements he made in the past. They noted that he has compared Muslims to cockroaches and flies and recommends shooting them with guns if swatters and shoes fail.
At a party in 2013, celebrating the anniversary of the newspaper The New Times, Navalny suggested that they “make the first toast for the Holocaust”; he referred to religious Jews in his blog as: “dandies in fox hats and rags.” Also, Navalny in 2013 supported the Biryulyovo race riots in which Russian skinheads attacked immigrants in a Moscow district. In 2017, in an interview with the Guardian, he said he has “no regrets” about his past statements and called it “artistic licence.”
Navalny’s world view was formed under the total dominance of the right-wing market liberal ideology in the 2000s, when he supported radical privatization and decreases in social guarantees as a member of the Yabloko Party.
Even though Navalny is now in prison he may still face an investigation for a newer fraud case, in which he and his Anti-Corruption Foundation have been accused of misusing donations from supporters. There is a possibility he may also be charged with treason. A recently released video reveals new evidence of links between MI6 and Navalny. The video exposes the role of the US and UK in helping Navalny to foment political discord in Russia and other countries. With respect to Navalny and his supporters, Russia’s media spokesperson, Maria Zakarova was even more direct, saying “stop calling them opposition, they are NATO agents.”
The case of Andrei Navalny is Russia’s problem, but because the Cold War has now been revived, in the West he is being used an instrument to try to undermine that country.
John Ryan, Ph.D., is a retired Professor of Geography and Senior Scholar at the University of Winnipeg.
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Alexei Navalny is a conman and a traitor. Unlike the US, Russia conducts free and fair elections, but the percentage of his fellow Russians who support him remains in the low single digits.
Gorbachev should have blocked the reunification of Germany, which the USSR was entitled to do by treaty. A large state in the heart of Europe supporting the American ideology of “diversity” and deranged liberalism is a disaster for all involved, including Germans.
Putin’s reply about about Navalny was great. He said that if Russia wanted him dead, he would be dead. They wouldn’t give him a weak poison in Russia and then allow an NGO to fly him to Germany so that he could claim Putin tried to kill him.
Why have the UK and Germany been pushing out these completely unbelievable tales of poisoning by Putin? They have the skills to put together totally realistic stories, but they don’t, they put out these delibertely weak stories, as if they are feeding the conspiracy theorists with winter hay. Very weird.
Thank you for this valuable information. Indeed his actions smack of treason, yet all we hear is that he is some kind of hero. Same script, different person – that is going on all over the world. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela was (and is still) pictured (by the US-supported press) as the hero who gave us “democracy”. Yet, what do we have here? The highest murder rate in the world, the most corrupt government in the world, decay of everything the white-led government put in place, potholes in almost every road, recurring blackouts in electricity called “power sharing”, armed robberies taking place on a daily basis, endless investigations about governement corruption without any results, violence at universities where blacks demand free education, lowering of standards in every sphere, etc. Yet the world is told that this is the “rainbow nation of God!” Mandela never denounced violence, hated whites and always was a terrorist who wanted to overthrow the governement with violence. He was not a saint as the rest of the world was told. He should have been hanged for treason. Our country is at the verge of total collapse and total chaos. Yet, they call it “democracy?” Good heavens! I admire president Putin for what he achieved in Russia over the last 20 years and wish him all the best, yet he should make sure that his successor must also defy America as I see Russia as the last bastion (bulwark) against the evil of the New World Order.
Navalny is traitor to Rodiny he should be put in front of Military court and sentenced and shot.
The precise timing of events clearly shows that it was a setup.
And, unlike the endless propaganda from the western MSM, that remark is completely credible. Navalny may be straight out of Central Casting but the fact that the so-called ‘prestige media’ in the USA and UK are in his corner–angrily and vociferously–tells me most of what I need to know about the man.
We’ll see how far they can ride this particular horse.
Should be interesting.
The Germans are smart, unlike the English and Americans. They did it all on purpose.
By saying that Navalny was poisoned by Novichock on a plane, exposing everyone on the plane to the same, they demonstrate to the world that THE MOST DANGEROUS POISON IN THE WORLD is nothing but a fabrication. It’s a secret way of telling the Brits and the Americans that the world knows the Skripal story is total BS.
I’m sure the Brits got the message. The Americans? Maybe not.
The stories are weak? How about the minds that believe them, lol.
Good article.
Unfortunately both the Skripal case, and this one are now embedded into the official narrative of the “west” with consequences. The damage is done and it worked.
Why the id won’t hook-up with an iot. ( Course 101 ).
• Putin’s a good guy, and knows that Navalny is not a political threat.
• Putin’s not a good guy, and knows death will make Navalny bigger than life ever will.
If there is any case of an obvious fake thing, is this Navalny stuff. I don’t know if he’s a German agent, an American agent, if the idea is to sabotage the Nordstream 2, whatever… But nothing about it is credible.
Saying Navalny has an approval rating of 2-4% is, shall we say, inaccurate. 0.2-0.4% is closer to the mark.
I have my own idea why Putin allowed Navalny to be sent to Germany, although he must have known that it would be used against Russia. Laying aside the idea that Putin is just incompetent, as an assassin as well as a politician, it is that Putin needs Navalny. A racist drug dependent would be genocidaire and Quisling might be the “greatest opponent of Putin” in the Amerikastani Empire propaganda, but in actual elections he’s guaranteed to vanish without a trace. He’s a safe outlet for the Moscow yuppie liberal Wall Street tool traitors. While they’re pouring all their energies into supporting this dead duck, they can’t find any actual competent candidate to put up against Putin, who therefore only has to contend with the genuine opposition (from Vladimir Zhirinovskii on the right to Maksim Suraikin on the left).
If Navalny – a symbol of the disgraceful Yeltsinite era when pensioners in Red Square rooted in dustbins for scraps to eat – did not exist, Putin would have had to invent him.
They do it because they have abysmal contempt for their own citizens. Those that believe the rubbish are brain dead, and those that don’t have either to pretend to believe it, keep their mouths shut, or be unpersoned as “Russian bots”. The very lack of a plausible tale is itself useful for that. It’s an in your face lie: “this is our story, we’re sticking to it, and what the hell are you going to do about it, anyway?”
It’s a very marked, but typical, example of the moral, intellectual and spiritual demise of the glorious West. Who in public life in the Atlanticist realm and the Five Eyes Plus one (Israel) racist regimes is not a psychopath or a malignant buffoon?
‘Minds’ is stretching it. The proles in the West are brainwashed from birth, and few have the nous or guts to break away from the lies, no matter how plainly ludicrous they are.
In fact it really appears that Navalny suffered multiple metabolic crises, owing to his heavy alcohol and benzos plus lithium use, his diabetes etc, and one of them, given his agonised cries of pain, was probably pancreatitis, notoriously painful. He deserved it.
As the New Russian Federation gains strength, the old Sovietized populace is awaking to more freedoms and one of those are – fact findings without interference. This Navalny drama has seriously opened some eyes. President Putin and his administration has done a great job for Russia and I guess you could say, that all the lies from the West, has also done a good job, for the Awakening. There is still more work to be done.
Heading West, we see the hammer come down on the freedoms of the populace, in order to make them into a Bolshevik/pre Soviet society. Will the Zionists, Globalists, and Traitors within, bring the populace to its knees ? The Zionists and Globalists not only destroy/loot the countries, but take out the society, that is a definite threat to them in the future – as we saw in Russia, Germany, Britain etc.
I don’t know about the pole shift , but it sure looks like their has been a major Societal shift – for sure. Great Article Doc Ryan !
Are you any relation of John Cheney? Our “governement” never tires of regime change in the ME. And the methods used aren’t exactly peaceful ones, else they wouldn’t have sent over a million to their happy hunting grounds.
It was a mistake to divert the plane. If they had continued to Moscow, these 3 hours might have killed him. The autopsy would have provided incontrovertible proof that he did it to himself. There would have been a little shouting and screaming in the media but the story would have died very quickly. No one in the West knows where Omsk is. 🙂
Just one look at the guy’s face and you would know that he is untrustworthy. I bet he got beaten up as a kid at school.
Compare the orchestrated version of the Navalny hysteria over a fake poisoning claim and the free pass given Saudi Arabia’s MBS who ordered the brutal murder and dismemberment of the Saudi WaPo journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. But wait! Saudi Arabia is our puppet and cash cow with an insatiable appetite for our arms raking in billions of dollars into the coffers of the MIC.
Not telling me any more than I know already, but I am one of the minority. For the rest of UR readers, who may be new to it, this is an excellent resumee of this ridiculous hoax perpetrated by the Western Deep State and MSM.
How these buffoons thought they could foist a nonce like Navalny on the Russian people is beyond me. True, they foisted a nonce like Biden onto the American people. But here they control the domestic MSM and the electoral machinery which altered the result to ensure Biden’s election. They don’t control the turf in Russia. Any attempts at Color Revolution will be futile.
Gorbachev should have blocked the reunification of Germany
Margaret Thatcher, British prime minister, and François Mitterrand, French president, were totally against reunification. The Americans wanted NATO to move east so they were all in favour. They knew that they would integrate the Stasi into their own apparatus. Merkel was a Stasi in her youth and merely changed employer.
They are not the USSR, way to crude, unnecessary and self defeating.
Being put in a cell with a couple of 20 stone sex offenders who are partial to some man love. Who have been paid with extra cigarettes and better treatment to make his life “uncomfortable”
After 2 years of that if he makes it out he’d be a psychological train wreak, incapable of anything other than drinking himself to death or suicide.
He’s such an idiot anyway since he had money and a private jet, he could have stayed in the west sought political safety and enjoyed the trappings of his ill gotten wealth like all the other ex pat Russian oligarchs in exile.
While he’s been held facedown against the concrete and gang raped in a Siberian jail the thought of what an idiot he was will undoubtedly flow through his mind
Anthony Blanken doesn’t care about free and fair elections. If Putin was the thug the US claims him to be, the US could care less…..as long as he was a puppet of the US.
US support for Navalany is an act war against Russia…way more serious than election interference which support for Navalny is. He is a CIA puppet.
The US wants to go back to the days of rape, plunder, and population collapse during the Clinton era.
America is in a state of collapse…Russia and China waiting patiently for the collapse of the corpse governed by the FUNGUS Joe Biden. (((Blanken)))…his allegiance is only to Israel.
BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!!!
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Voltaire.
When West beat up Russia over the shootdown of Malaysian Air, the non-existent ‘invasion’ of Crimea and other imaginary offenses, Russia had little choice but to endure the attacks.
At the other end of the World Island, the Chinese are boycotting 400 H&M stores and de-platforming it, while threatening to treat Nike similarly for embargoing Xinjiang cotton. Local brands are licking their lips..
My immediate thought was, well the presstitues in the west, created narrative in advance. The mouthpieces dance to the tunes of their paymasters.
Of course, it is a simple matter for the owned press to create divergent narrative – they do it all the time. Constantly.
Then the article by John Ryan proves exactly that:
Demonize Putin – he has no soul – he is a killer, etc. He kills with poison, aren’t you horrified?
Propaganda of this sort was refined by (((Bernays))) and really took off during WW2. Much of the wartime atrocity attributions are really propaganda that never was refuted, and hence became legend. Once propaganda is lodged in peoples minds, then it becomes almost impossible to dislodge it. You see that effect here at UNZ, with many commentators repeating false narratives, and even when confronted with facts, they continue to repeat. German people made lampshades out of Jew’s skin, and used masturbation machines to masturbate Jews to death. Credulous fools exist in the population, along with less foolish people, with even the less foolish capable of being gas-lighted.
The Western presstitutes have now consolidated into a few owned companies, where said companies speak with one voice. Those who consume this media become clowns for clownworld. It doesn’t help that social media is now an echo chamber.
China was correct to build their own social media organs. Russia is correct to go after color revolution organs such as NED, and force color revolution operatives to register as spies.
It is a hard thing for a Westerner (I’m American) to look in the mirror and say, I am part of a civilization that uses narrative control to dupe people, and we are being gas-lighted on a daily basis. This is not good and we are not a force for good.
He’s an economic criminal who should be marched to the stadium through crowds of hecklers and shot.
i actually thought navalny maybe have something going regarding fighting corruption in russia. people need to have some sense of balance and not go all in for russia just because the empire is against it, russia still has issues when it comes to corruption although not the outright banditry that went on during yeltsin era fully supported by the west. west simply sees the russians as inferior slavs who can and need to be used like the africans and that’s why russian elite with white identity hangups finally turned east after their rubicon aka maidan but navalny behaviour showed him up as either a tool or just a man with average intelligence who simply has no clue about anything and will only usher in an era just like the yeltsin one if given the chance and this time there will be no putin to wrest back control.
Just look at his behavior when they put him behind the glass cage doing love signs and other inane s..t. can anyone imagine mandela doing something like this? this is a man without conviction without intellectual depth who just wants attention and power
So, the bottom line – Navalny, his handlers and the German doctors are lying through their teeth.
Navalny = Guaido = ?? = ??
The West always seem to embrace these posers and losers and pimps them even though the people in their own countries barely know them. I always get off on Navalny, the stern face, the Macho look, the tough dude, dressed in black. the don’t mess with me act. Yet some of the most unpleasant people I have met are always smiling and so friendly.
In Russia, we can look at Stalin and Putin as example of this deceptive air of gentlemanly behaviour.
Navalny is a bitch with Pussy Riot his biggest fan. Why would Putin even bother or give credence to this drug addict worm’s self importance when he has only a 2% level of support.
The stupidity of Western politicians and the Media is another mystery. According to them Putin is always poisoning somebody. Few people believe this bullshit but the modus operandi gets pedalled in the hope that while no one believed poisoning 1 to 4, they may believe 5.
I like Vlad but I have to say I might believe some of these poisoning stories. Sine he occupied the Krelmin not a single mouse has been found in the whole place. Perhaps Vlad poisoned them all !! He wanted them dead and that was all there was to it.
The intel agencies don’t seem to pick appealing stooges these days. Navalny looks like a Bond villain, and Russians don’t care for him. Guess as long as those gated inside the “Capital City” buy it, it is all that matters.
yes, evidence for the theory that the nation state system serves only the corrupt is everywhere. Design of the nation state system provides the corrupt with a structural defense and a political system that serves only the corrupt. Corruption of State or of those who are the governed is a crime against humanity, it is not a criminal offense, because only the state can make the law that criminalizes corruption, and no state I know of has yet to done so. This is because the owners of the state appoint the politicians that make and enforce the rules.
The political system is fully supported by the privately owned MSM. The MSM tells the ducks where the ponds are and how to land on them. The political system advertises to ducks everywhere the false benefits of landing on the ponds(political system). . The two (political system (ponds) and duck hunters association (MSM) go hand and glove each seeking to attract all ducks.
From the top the political system delivers rules of law, police, use of force and regulatory requirements but from the bottom the privately owned MSM delivers false narratives designed to convince the governed ducks, that they can safely land on the duck pond. The message is that the politicians within the political system will fix things for the governed. Meanwhile, the owners of the Nation State itself are loading their guns and talking with their bankers.
The ducks have learned to avoid the ponds, they now attack the duck blinds instead of landing in the political system ponds. The duck have learned no matter their effort, the political system within each nation state, is not there to redress the grievances of the governed. Only surprise direct duck contact with the hunter allows the duck to obtain relief and to disarm the hunters.
The duck hunter owns the nation state and the MSM. The nation state host the political system (the duck pond and its decoy ducks) and serves as camouflage to protect the duck hunter.
A camouflaged duck blind is erected in clear line of sight shot of a duck pond in which wooden decoy ducks have been placed. The idea is to attract live ducks to the ponds, so the heavily armed hunter [hidden in the duck blind] can shoot the landing ducks without doing much more than pull the trigger.
The political system in most nation states is the duck pond. The pond is there to allow the nation state owners ( (hunters) to build their duck blinds and to arrange decoy laden duck ponds capable to make laws that keep the landing ducks in clear line of sight to the hidden duck hunter. As the governed ducks arrive to feed and complain the pond maintenance crew (elected politicals) listen and ignore as the duck blind hidden hunter waits to get a clear shot at the dissatisfied governed class duck. The politician is there to hear, but ignore, the grievance and to make whatever adjustments the hidden duck hunters want.
The duck hunter industry rules. no duck will be allowed out of line of site view. The decoy duck, duck ponds, appointed politicians and MSM are in high demand within every nation state in the world.
Did you read Quiet Don?
The author of the article we are commenting on?
Seemingly not.
One of Germany’s problems is that the Americans and Brits are Germany’s friends, allies and protectors and the Russians are Germany’s arch-enemies. To reconcile this state of affairs with reality traditionally overwhelms German diplomacy. Luckily President Putin seems to understand. At least I hope so.
Ryan, as an academic, is a thorough researcher and an objective analyst. That said, he skewers the Evil Empire, headquartered on Wall $treet (dominated by the Rottenfeller controlled “Federal” Reserve Bank of New York) and in the Di$trict of Corruption, whose pro$titicians are also controlled by the Bank$ter owned “Fed”.
In turn, the Evil Empire is out to protect their fracking interests in the declining oil-patch, by attempting to cut off Nordstream at the foot in order to sell Europe their overpriced LNG, sourced from that declining fracking industry, a major employer of “Deplorables” and remaining as a financial powerhouse despite the production decline.
So with the cooperation of the German Bundeswehr, itself controlled via NATO and American occupation forces which have sat on Germany since 1945 AND by British intelligence, via MI6, who take their orders from the center of world banking under the Rottenchild Crime Clan, as headquartered on the square mile constituting City of London; the Evil Empire, as the designated pitbull attack dog, is determined to clear the primary major obstacle to their neferious designs, the Russian republic.
Russia has become, under this era’s equivalent of Furst Otto von Bismarck, Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin, the world’s outstanding national leader, THE major pain in the ass for those interests who have concocted the Great Reset, with its Covid Plandemic and its targeted destruction of independent, entrepreneurial businesses in their masterplan of Neo-serfdom and elimination of “useless eaters” via Mrna vaccines and persistent lockdowns.
This brief analysis is my attempt to explain the underlying basis for the Navalny affair, a totally concocted assault on international harmony and cooperation by the ruling Bank$ter elite.
You are sick in the head. If England and US would be friends of Germany they would stay out from WW2.
Germany has no friend. Everybody is using Germany as men are using a silly girl.
US and England using Germany particularly, and Russians are using Germany to the certain extent also.l
Excellent summary
You got me thinking. I recall how leftists were peeing themselves with joy when the reunification of Germany took place but at the time I never made the connection.
Navalny, Boris Johnson, Biden all read from the same script, all are drunk on power and all are utterly corrupt. Add Guido to that list. Add Macron. Add Merkel. They are all fascist useful idiots used by Bill Gates, Claus Schwab and the Rothschild banking family.
Putin returned (Navalny) to sender. It was clear that the buffoons at MI6 and the CIA would hang themselves if given enough rope, and voila, they hung themselves with the added bonus Navalny was arrogant enough to think his corrupt friends at MI6 and CIA could protect him from being incarcerated on his return to Russia.
Navalny’s release under Putin’s instructions was pure Judo black belt, let the aggressive arrogance of his enemies trip themselves up.
The whole of Europe and Scandinavia plus the Five Eyes are skivvies to the Zionists.
Perhaps because the Skripal poisoning narrative by Novichok was falling apart and needed some timely reinforcment. Or obfuscation.
Merkel seemed to be a reluctant participant in the accusations, so I doubt she ordered them. She made a few noises about canceling Nord Stream 2 but never pushed them hard. So I suspect MI6 meddling had a lot to do with it. Maybe Boris wanted to put Miss Angela into the hot seat for her lukewarm support in the Skripal narrative.
Excellent and meticulous analysis, John Ryan. Thank you.
Ideas promising. Needs to review lesson on capitalizing first letters of sentences.
Nah. He shipped them all to Sidney and New South Wales.
LOL
Video Link
Alfred, had (Navalny) died in Russia, the cries of “Putin the Killer” would sound 20 times more credible, blaring 24 / 7 from the CNN, Fox, NYT crowd.
If the S.O.B is alive, the alleged crime is not a big deal and he’ll learn not to pick up soap for the Americans.
I disagree. He may enjoy this sort of thing.
Sep 8, 2020 Merkel flirts with pull out from Nord Stream 2 due to Navalny incident
All eyes are on the chancellor as calls for Germany to end the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline grow louder. By pulling the plug on the pipeline, Angela Merkel could make history all over again.
Video Link
It is fortunate that Ryan has retired, otherwise the University of Winnipeg would be after his sorry ass, just as they were for Henry Makow and climate “denier” Tim Ball.
I agree that Germany has no friends. It is still under occupation, and, as the German Constitutional Court has ruled on at least two occasions, has an occupation government.
No I never did – being a North-sider Chicago I guess I should have – was his mother Jewish ? lol I was interested in the mafia connections, when I heard the the Italians/Sicilians got taken out by Jewliani in NY, and the Jewish Russian mob took over – for good. Crazy country.
Your video is from 2011. Here is a version that is only a few days old. 🙂
Video Link
And here are the spiders and insects trying to escape the floods of NSW. Don’t watch if you are sensitive.
Video Link
Video Link
Or are we talking about the River Don in the Anapa/ Krasnodar area, which I’ve been close to or on one of the tributaries ? Been on a couple river boat runs , in that area and ya the History is rich. I also spent time in Pennsylvania working – lol
Did you read Quiet Don?
Are you sure your don’t mean this book? 🙂
This case illustrates just how deeply drenched in bullshit the American public is. Though not the same “fake news” that Trump attempted to use to cover up his mistakes and misdeeds.
I should have put in a sarcasm alert for the likes of you.
I thought listing the perfidious albion as friend ally and protector should have given you the hint.
Or perhaps mentioning that there was a need to reconcile the official view of British and Americans as friends with reality …
This is a brilliant article and let’s hope it brings some sanity into the whole debate. In particular it explains the different medical diagnoses more clearly than anyone has done so far. As the author of ‘The Novichok Chronicles, a Tale of Two Hoaxes’ I fully endorse it!
There is a lot in common between the Skripal and Navalny alleged poisonings. They probably have the same scriptwriters.
LOL. I had a good chuckle. That is why I like Vlad. When you fuck with him he smiles and then…………kaboom ???
It was like Castro. everyone complained about Cuban prisons and human rights violations. So Castro and his cabal reasoned, hey, we dont want the US to be mad at us, so since they are upset at our penal system we will empty the jails and send the animals to………….Miami.
Oh and while we are at it, clean out the mental asylums too., destination Florida .
“Now you’re happy ?” asked Castro , also with a smile !
Nobody can understand Russians who did not read Quiet Don.
The book is in every larger library. (in every country.)
……………………………………………………….
Wide is the Russian land, still wider is the Russian soul……………
Thank you very much!
I really don’t care about this con.
Could one of you Unz writers cover Craig Murray’s imminent judgment?
Something closer to your own front door?
The man is one of the most read journalists in the UK, exposed British crimes, and is standing for Scottish Parliament – and is about to get squashed by the British state.
This honourable man and his treatment deserve public exposure and discourse.
Such retired, emeritus academics as Ryan also include Dr. James Fetzer, who while professing philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Duluth (UMD) published over 20 books on the philosophy of science while also penning the definitive volume of the aircraft assassination of Minnesota’s rebel, populist Democrat Senator Paul Wellstone, who was the primary antagonist against the looming aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan following the 911 Inside Job and also a possible Democrat nominee to run against Bu$h the $hrub.
On retirement, with a host of colleagues, Fetzer (website) has published probably the definitive volume on the JFK takedown by the CIA (and accomplices); also, arguably the best treatment of the 911 enabling precursor for aggression abroad and repression in the “Homeland”; the Boston Marathon false flag incident patsying the Tsarnaev brothers; the alleged mass shooting at the school in Connecticut and other books of interest to “conspiracy theorist”/ truth-seekers.
For a Westerner, perhaps it’s enough for blackout, but for a run of the mill Russian, the party’s just getting started.
” feeding the conspiracy theorists with winter hay”…thus marginalizing two enemies at once….conspiracy theorist being those that see thru the bull-crap.
He’s trying to look sincere and victimised, but comes across shifty and duplicitous, coldly calculating and a little contemptuous I would say. A poor choice of photo. The local presstitutes constantly declare him ‘handsome’, for some bizarre reason.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts (an American Economist is back at it, again. Here’s his latest report:
https://www.unz.com/article/the-case-of-alexei-navalny/
Anyone with any knowledge of nerve agents knew that his agonised cries, as heard on vids from the plane, were those of someone poisoned with strychnine or the like, or suffering innate pain, probably from some abdominal condition. Such pain in a neurological condition, like cerebral haemorrhage, is usually brief, before one becomes comatose, and otherwise you have to think of trauma, amputation and the like. Acute pancreatitis fits the bill nicely.
Yeltsin was a perpetually-drunk Western stooge, who, similar to to the tactile, Senile Joe, had no idea what decade we were in. I remember Bill Clinton openly laughing in his face.
He soon allowed Reaganist advisors to come in, and summarily almost all Russian state assets where in the hands a tiny minority. An oligarchical mafia of whom a disproportionate number were, well, I think you know…
Russia was a pathetic, crumbling has-been, close to being absorbed into the (post-unification) wholly German-controlled globalist project that is the EU.
And then Putin came along and put Russia back on its feet. The historical parallels with a certain other populist leader are obvious.
You can understand Putin’s unwavering support and popularity in Russia given the circumstances.
And the transformation in that country has been extraordinary.
It’s nice to see China wield economic power against the Western hypocrites. I’d dearly like to see them concentrate more on exposing Australia’s revolting racist abuse of its Indigenous people, too. Here the world’s worst incarceration rates, deaths in custody, manipulation of race hatred for political advantage, destruction of culture, including a 46,000 year old cave blown up deliberately to mine iron ore etc, etc, continue unabated. It’s about time the world grew to understand the true nature of the ruling power in the country.
This morning the ABC ‘correspondent’ for China, now no longer lying IN China, but outside it, after a farcical ‘flight’ from the CCP Hell-hole, declared China’s reference to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous children (a history that the Right still dispute, calling the children ‘Saved’)as historical and irrelevant, yet the number of children removed from their Indigenous families is today even greater than during the Stolen Generations, and Indigenous women, mothers, aunties and grans, are still locked up for non-payment of traffic fines. I really wish China would finally take the gloves off in attacking the Five Eyes racists, the only States that voted against the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.
This is something of a tempest in a teapot. The vast majority of Americans have no idea who this man is except that, being low information folks who care little about such exotic things, he’s some Russian guy who got poisoned by Putin. Policy is made despite what the average person thinks or what is good for them. Consent is engineered and falsified, polls are phony. The US government only cares about Navalny as a tool, expendable at any moment just as it views the mass of American citizens as tools and expendables. It’s an infinitesimal percent of the population that seeks out information independently on websites such as UNZ. There’s probably more viewers at sites giving tips on hairstyling and other weighty subjects. This is really just about sabotaging the oil pipeline to Germany and the evolvement of closer economic ties which might ease out the Americans in the long term. After all, they’re on the same landmass there whereas the US is a continent away and thus has to keep itself in by fomenting crisis and even war in places such as Ukraine. We’re all Navalny now, they’ll be saying. Yeah, sure.
The US under Biden have so far, in terms of geopolitical dyplomacy, have been both ultra-agressive, in the hypocritical and condescending way we’ve come to expect from America, and utterly outplayed and outwitted in both their confrontation with China – who’ve recently reaffirmed their support for their allies, DPRK – and with Russia; Putin swiping away blustering Dementia Joe’s stupid provocations with class and the consummate ease of a true statesman.
In the decadent and decaying US I see the desperate and flailing actions of a pathetic failing state, desperate and vainly attempting to preserve it’s preeminence. The era of American exceptionalism is coming to an end.
It’s at both times embarrassing and frightening.
So who is behind this farce? Jews at CIA? Some Jewish Russian billionaire fugitive? The entire story is so laughable on its face. Utterly illogical. To believe this one would need to be a child. It’s even more obviously fake than the “gas attacks” in Syria.
Remember that old Monty Python sketch about the weaponised joke that caused the enemy to laugh themselves to death?
That’s the only way Dementia Joe and Ho Harris would we able to win any sort of conflict with Russia/China/Iran/DPRK given it’s entirely demoralised LBGTQ+ CRT-brainwashed excuse for a military.
The sabre-rattling we’re seeing is both ridiculous, and dangerous.
America is a deeply-divided and failing entity entering its last throes.
You get white people in Britain and Ireland complaining about immigration and ‘foreign invaders’ etc, but at least those people are in large part native or from countries close by, on the same continent.
When I hear about Australian and American people of European extraction saying the same thing I can’t quite believe they have the gall. They are invaders from thousands of miles away on a separate continent.
Weren’t Aboriginal people in Australia officially considered ‘fauna’ until the 1960s?
No different to ‘Israel’ in my book.
Navalny is a joke, parody of the potential opposition .
Entertainment fot the West.
Allowing German reunification was a colossal Russian blunder
Merkel, the hidden Russia-hater, is searching a way, any way, to appease her US bosses & find a pretext to stop the North Stream pipeline. Then, I hope, Putin will expel the 6000 German companies working in the Russian Federation.
“It is a hard thing for a Westerner (I’m American) to look in the mirror and say, I am part of a civilization that uses narrative control to dupe people, and we are being gas-lighted on a daily basis.”
More like you are a slave to confirmation bias.
In both the Skripals’ and Navalny’s cases, the MSM’s “righteous” accusations against the “Putin regime” have led to greater attention towards the most important political prisoner of our times, and this political prisoner has been kept in the UK, in a high-security prison.
Every time the usual suspects were bleating about “western democracy and values “as compared to “Russian authoritarianism,” they were bringing into focus the name of Julian Assange, punished for his truthful reports exposing the ZUSA’s crimes against humanity.
The presstitutes affiliated with “Integrity Initiative,” the “Atlantic Council,” and similar nests of Bernays’ pupils have made their presstituting too obvious to ignore. Good.
Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence. Please explain yourself.
The post Bretton Woods system morphed into the TBill/Petrodollar system, which world finance uses to take their rake-off. Even a ship’s bill of lading can be hypothecated into new dollar bank credits.
If Russia supplies oil to Europe and Saudi Arabia is cut-off as a supplier (and America) then the petrodollar/Tbill system loses out.
Oil must be priced in dollars. Sadam was attacked in part because he was pricing oil in Euros. Ghadaffy was attacked in part because of pricing oil in the Gold Dinar.
The 1973 secret agreement between Kissinger and the Saudi Kingdom is key to understanding the petrodollar system.
Saudis are to sell oil priced in dollars and to then recycle the dollars into western bourses and banks. They often buy TBills, which tend to be stored in Panama. See the Panama papers. Saudis are forbidden from owning and controlling an international finance sector.
Saudis in turn get front line military gear, and naval protection from the fifth fleet in Bahrain. Saudis in effect are a proxy of finance international. Petrodollars also recycle into Madrassas and the MIC, to then fund the U.S. air force as air cover for the Takfiris. The good Muslim terrorists are our terrorists um— mercenary foot soldiers.
The U.S. has been a golem of finance international (finance capitalist) since 1912, but has become more usurped as time has progressed. The founding fathers would not recognize the country.
That is a shame, and a sign of the times.
But not to those who are manipulating the facts to demonize Russia and its president. They just LOVE that folks are so uninformed. They rely on it.
I think your statement is quite accurate, unfortunately. Articles such as these should receive mainstream coverage, but we both know that won’t happen.
China take on Canada? Think twice –Trudeau is brilliant and Freeland has a Nazi past. Again remember it was Stephen Harper in Australia who told Putin to his face “Get out of Crimea !”
Things today are not good in the Clinton household. Old Bill sits and watches TV all day and Hillary preparing to assume Presidency after Amtrak Joe has a relapse and Kamala meets with a very “mysterious” accident. Hillary Clinton indeed will be President but the Lolita Express thing never seems to leave the newsprint–even Bill can not remember being there —seeing IT—doing it.
Vulva Mumbo Jumbo Brain is always on about China this and China that ! This dunce wastes a lot of time convincing himself of China’s greatness (and hence his superiority). Outside of their own culture, Chinese are boring !
China is great ! China is great ! China is great !
For all his blather this shit bird does not even live in China and if he repeats his mantra every night before he dozes off he believes his dream will come true and he will live happily every after.
His handle says it all. Worse yet he does not have the balls to use a Chinese handle. No pride in his own race and he expects they are going to rule.
Good luck Jumble Brains !
It wouldn’t surprise me to see soon-to-be President Harris assassinated by a lone nut ‘White supremacist’ in a staged event, allowing Killary to finally ascend to the throne.
No No NO China is not great. China is boring. The explanation of calamity goes back all the way to what Lenin did say.
Lenin did say this.
Capitalist will sell you the rope on which you will hang him if he makes a profit.
Now US did sell that rope to China. (By moving production to China)
And now US is on the gallows with Rope around its neck.
China are an ancient civilisation. US ‘culture’ and Chinese culture simply don’t compare.
America’s been around, in relative terms, a mere nanosecond in comparison.
How dare Blinken finger-wag and lecture China – especially on issues of morality.
“Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence. Please explain yourself.”
That’s rich, coming from you. “I am part of a civilization that uses narrative control to dupe people, and we are being gas-lighted on a daily basis” is merely an opinion. But you say it so matter of fact that, from your vantage point, it is self-evident. So anyone who dares cross you with counter evidence, well, it’s easy to be dismissive. In that way, there is no need to think critically.
Here is the advice of Ron Unz…
So, Biden gets removed as president by means of the 25th amendment and President Harris then makes the suicidal choice of Hillary as her VP. Only way that Mrs. Clinton can achieve her dream.
Would Obama be happy with that scenario? I don’t think so.
You might want to step away from the crack.
The media organs in the West were consolidated after Clinton’s telecommunication act of 1996.
This consolidation is so well known by people that are aware, it is not even debatable. Yet, you somehow think it is some sort of confirmation bias? It is an easily provable fact.
I’m not even going to swamp you with data to prove my point, because you have already shown to me that you are a knuckle head, impervious to drawing new connections or insights.
Who? I don’t know of anyone. Albo? Don’t think so. All mentally out in the mulga.
Russians as well as its govt/ (hopefully not connected at the hip with its own dark govt) needs to snap out of it’s trust of the west big time and FAST.
“You might want to step away from the crack. I’m not even going to swamp you with data to prove my point, because you have already shown to me that you are a knuckle head, impervious to drawing new connections or insights.”
Impugning one’s character is an ad-hominem attack, and is a low form of debate; it means you automatically lose.
“The media organs in the West were consolidated after Clinton’s telecommunication act of 1996. This consolidation is so well known by people that are aware, it is not even debatable. Yet, you somehow think it is some sort of confirmation bias? It is an easily provable fact.”
Congratulations on your strawman AND red herring. I never directly nor indirectly made that claim.
Now, I will assume, for the sake of argument, that you are a “Fake News”/”the media always lies” advocate? IF YOU ARE NOT, PLEASE INFORM ME.
Again, ASSUMING this premise to be an accurate representation, it is virtually impossible to argue with those people who cling on to viewpoint. Any facts or statistics submitted as evidence that counters the narrative, they immediately attack the SOURCE, rather than the substance. Thus, it is easy to deny there is ANY evidence at all. This phenomenon has been brewing for a long time, and it has reached a critical mass at our point in world history. Unfortunately, this increasingly leads more people to become ignorant by facilitating echo chambers and confirmation bias. A person who desires to be informed delves into the matter by perusing several sources and by astutely investigating their preconceived notions. Hence, the purpose of offering the Unz quotation into the discussion.
So here is an exercise. Please demonstrate with specific counter evidence how and why this firsthand account by a German soldier is “Fake News”/”the media always lies” regarding treatment of Jews at Auschwitz.
https://www.politico.eu/article/auschwitz-guard-germany-holocaust-history-world-war
Furthermore, let us focus on something that you left hanging from another thread.
1. What seemingly gives you the authority to unilaterally make the decision that anyone who does not meet your prescribed criteria as to what constitutes “civilized people” ought to be rounded up and propagandized?
2. Citizens have liberties as defined by that civilization. They give consent to be free from physical harm. Why are you denigrating a person’s fundamental right to exist?
3. Do not people have the liberty to directly challenge your line of thinking, or must everyone adhere to everything you believe in, lest they receive the consequence of being forced into a “boot camp”?
4. Have you no shame and decency regarding the treatment of innocent children at the hands of Nazi Germany merely because they were labeled a “danger”?
5. Ask a group of people what option they would take: 1) being physically sent to a camp against their will, with absolute no choice in the matter, because they need to be “reeducated” or 2) being able to live in their own community, with the liberty to make their own decisions as to who they see, how they work, and where they want to go?
Canada could do with a good leader such as Navalny. Does he speak French or English?
Blinken and Albright know the score—birds of a feather–same gene pool – satan’s choice for eternal rewards.
Good reasoning. Although…
look, there is a pretty good chance that Navalny was poisoned – I believe he was, the Russians are not saints and it is a very corrupt country
Navalny made an incredibly naive error when he allowed himself to be weaponized by western interests while recuperating in Germany
The Skripals were probably poisoned by Russia as well – however, the Brits had foreknowledge (their head Nurse was on site for chrisssakes) and allowed it to go through to weaponize the incident
The lesson? stay away from the keystone cop wannabes of international intrigue . they will f#$k you up
further to the possible motives (UK & Russia) behind the Skripal situatiion (4 March 2018). You can bet that there was a lot more money involved than what is being reported
“On March 20, 2017, the British paper The Guardian reported that hundreds of banks had helped launder KGB-related funds out of Russia, as uncovered by an investigation named Global Laundromat. The Royal Bank of Scotland was listed among the 17 banks in the UK that were “facing questions over what they knew about the international scheme and why they did not turn away suspicious money transfers,” as the bank “handled $113.1 million” in Laundromat cash. Other banks facing scrutiny under the investigation included HSBC, NatWest, Lloyds, Barclays and Coutts. Coutts, owned by RBS, had “accepted $32.8m worth of payments via its office in Zurich, Switzerland.” NatWest, also owned by RBS, was named for allowing through $1.1 million in related funds.[25] ” – wikipedia
https://www.reportingproject.net/therussianlaundromat/
You are correct—-Joe falls off the train –Kamala meets with most unusual accident and then –BINGO —-she’s back and Bill is chosen as Vice President and Obama chosen as Secretary of War.
Do you have a source for the blood alcohol level?