On Thursday, the Russian Defense Ministry said that Russian air defense systems had destroyed 14 RM-70 Vampire multiple launch rocket system (MLRS) missiles over the Belgorod region fired by Ukraine. As a result of the attack, seven people, including a child, were killed, while 18 were injured.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, speaking at the conference Euromaidan: Ukraine's Lost Decade in Moscow, said that the EU has made recommendations to Ukraine that it is necessary to rely on the supply of long-range weapons to "reach the heart of Russia."

 

 

"According to our information, the European External Action Service has drawn up recommendations for Ukraine, which are based on the fact that it will not be possible to win and Ukraine will lose with the methods with which it is currently fighting. That is why it is necessary to bet on the transfer of even more long-range weapons to Ukraine, so that they can reach the 'heart of Russia,' as the EU describes it, and thus sow confusion, panic, and once again undermine people's confidence," Lavrov said at the conference.

 

 

UK Role in Ukraine Conflict

London's stance when it comes to the situation in Ukraine is even more aggressive than Washington's position, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday.

 

 

"The role that England plays in current events is even more aggressive, more sophisticated in its provocative assertiveness than any other participant, including even the United States," Lavrov said.

 

In November 2023, David Arakhamia, the head of Ukraine's ruling Servant of the People party in parliament and former chief negotiator with Russia, said ex-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson talked Kiev out of signing an agreement with Moscow to end the conflict in the spring of 2022. He also said Ukraine rejected the ceasefire deal due to it contradicting the constitution's clause on the country's Euro-Atlantic aspiration.

Russia and Ukraine held several rounds of talks in the early phase of the conflict, but the negotiations eventually stalled.

 

First Coup in Ukraine

Russia's top diplomat said that the first coup in Ukraine took place in 2004, after the West forced the Ukrainian Constitutional Court to rule on a third round of elections, something which was not provided for. This was because they didn't need Viktor Yanukovich, who was elected with votes from the south and southeast of the country, he added.

 

Donbass Conflict

Sergey Lavrov said that the original agreement was to solve the problems in Ukraine by federalizing the country, but Kiev decided to abandon this.

 

 

"The original agreement was to solve the problems in Ukraine through its federalization. But Kiev decided to abandon this and tried to solve the 'Donbass problem' by force, almost like the 'final solution to the Jewish question' in Nazi Germany," he said.

 

"Putin personally persuaded Donbass not to give up the possibility of negotiations. Thus, the Minsk talks became a possibility in principle. But, as we know, the West took advantage of this to arm Kiev. This is, in fact, an admission of guilt," the foreign minister noted.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240216/lavrov-eu-bets-on-long-range-missiles-to-ukraine-in-bid-to-strike-at-russias-heart-1116816972.html

 

THE DEATH OF NAVALNY WILL BE (IS) USED BY THE WESTERN BOFFINS TO DISTRACT FROM THE REALITY OF THE INEVITABLE WAR RESULT:

Ukrainian Elite Brigades SACRIFICED in Avdiivka Rescue Mission

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ8A95LpsRY

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOWWWWWWWWWW....................

 

https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/49833

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAOzLYWi3Zs

Scott Ritter: Putin is Done Negotiating with NATO and Ukraine will be DESTROYED

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPYrFstT3q8

INTEL Roundtable w/ John & McGovern: Intel Wrap Up

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orPgVI-P7eM

SnowStorm | Half Of Avdiivka Was Captured.1000s Of Soldiers Were Trapped. Military Summary 2024.2.16

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvLhpVRx-Dg

 

House Speaker Mike Johnson blocks $95 billion foreign aid bill over U.S. border | US Politics News

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcjX2TA4Uzo

Bombed in their tents

 

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https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/49833

Alexey Navalny has died – prison serviceThe jailed activist lost consciousness after a walk, and resuscitation efforts failed, authorities have said 

Jailed Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny has died, the prison service of the Yamalo-Nenets Region, where he had been serving his sentence, reported on Friday afternoon.

The 47-year-old began to feel unwell after a walk, and lost consciousness, according to a statement. Russian media outlets have indicated that doctors pronounced Navalny dead after 2pm local time.

“All the necessary resuscitation measures were carried out, but they failed to achieve a positive result,” the authorities outlined.

The cause of death is being established. However, according to an RT Russian service source, the opposition figure had a blood clot.

Navalny was jailed in early 2021, over a long-standing fraud case involving French retailer Yves Rocher. The previous summer he attracted major international attention after an alleged poisoning in Siberia, which led to his transfer to Germany. Upon returning, he was sentenced to the first of several prison terms.

Initially, he was placed in a high-security facility in Vladimir Region. In 2023 he was sentenced to 19 years “special regime” for “extremism.” Late last year he was transferred to the ‘Polar Wolf’ colony in Yamalo-Nenets, located 40km above the Arctic Circle. 

The Kremlin said that President Vladimir Putin has been informed of Navalny’s death. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov referred questions to the Federal Penitentiary Service, adding that the cause was currently unclear.

Navalny’s lawyer, Leonid Solovyov refused to comment, but explained that his client had held a meeting on Wednesday. “Everything was normal then,” he insisted. 

Navalny joined a court session via videolink on Thursday, TASS reported, citing the court press service.

A former Russian nationalist activist, Navalny first came to attention as one of the leaders of the “Russian march,” a far-right rally previously held annually. He subsequently took a prominent role in the liberal-driven 2011-12 protests in Russia, which centered on Moscow’s Bolotnaya square. In 2013, he won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral election.

Later, he established a broader movement – which produced reports on alleged corruption – and attempted to take part in the 2018 presidential contest.

Navalny, a native of Moscow, was married, with two children.

https://www.rt.com/russia/592537-opposition-figure-alexey-navalny-dead/

 

From Russian nationalist agitator to darling of Western liberals: Who was Alexey Navalny?The politically minded blogger wore many hats over a career that spanned two decades 

Alexey Navalny collapsed and died on Friday, in a prison colony north of the Arctic circle where he was serving a 19-year sentence for extremist activities. He was 47. In the West, he enjoyed the reputation of a Kremlin critic and Russian “opposition leader.” In Ukraine, he was denounced as a Russian nationalist. In Russia itself, his legacy is at best complicated.

Born in 1976, Navalny graduated from law school in 1998 and earned a degree in finance in 2001. He would go on to dabble in law, investments and activism during his career, but kept coming back to politics.

“I have always been obsessed with politics,” he told the outlet Kommersant-Money in 2009. 

The nationalist phase

Between 2000 and 2007, Navalny was a member of the liberal Yabloko party, before co-founding an ethnic nationalist movement called ‘Narod.’ He appeared in two notorious YouTube videos for the movement, one advocating for gun rights to fight “flies and cockroaches” (while showing Muslims), and another comparing immigrants to tooth decay.

In August 2008, Navalny spoke approvingly of the Russian intervention against Georgia on behalf of the beleaguered South Ossetia. He went on to participate in three annual ‘Russian March’ rallies with advocates for ethnic nationalism. Activist Evgenia Albats later said she had urged Navalny to join the marches as a way to leverage ethnic nationalism against the Kremlin. In 2010, Albats would co-sponsor Navalny’s six-month stay in the US through the Yale World Fellows program.

 

The anti-corruption blogger 

By that point, Navalny had already called on his finance expertise to launch an investment activist group called “Union of Minority Shareholders,” which tried to shake down major companies such as Rosneft, Gazprom, Lukoil, and others. His umbrella NGO network, the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), was registered in September 2011. Navalny would continue accusing the government in Moscow, regional governors and corporations of fraud, graft and corruption – often getting sued for defamation in the process.

‘Opposition leader’

By February 2011, Navalny was dabbling in politics as well. He attacked the ruling United Russia party as a collection of “crooks and thieves,” and in December claimed it had stolen the national elections. Western media dubbed him the “Russian opposition leader” after he gave a series of speeches at anti-government protests that followed.

The high point of Navalny’s political career was the July 2013 election for mayor of Moscow, when he won 27.24% of the vote but lost to Sergey Sobyanin. His attempt to run in the 2018 presidential election was blocked due to his criminal record.

The Kirovles and Yves Rocher cases

Navalny’s first criminal conviction was for embezzlement from Kirovles, a state forestry company. In 2013, he was sentenced to five years in prison, but this was later changed to probation. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) said in 2016 that his actions had been “indistinguishable from legitimate business activities.”

At the trial, Navalny denounced the charges as politically motivated and railed against the “disgusting feudal system” in which “one hundred families” were allegedly looting Russia.

Navalny and his brother Oleg – a postal employee – faced more charges of embezzlement in 2012, for defrauding the Russian branch of the French cosmetics giant Yves Rocher. The brothers were found guilty in December 2014, but Alexey once again received only probation.

In 2019, the Russian government labeled Navalny’s FBK a “foreign agent,” severely limiting its activities.

2020 ‘poisoning’ and arrest

In August 2020, Navalny fell ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow and was transported to Germany for treatment. Western doctors alleged he had been targeted with a ‘Novichok’ nerve agent, which Moscow rejected as a “provocation.” Upon returning to Russia, Navalny was arrested for breaching the terms of his probation and sent to a prison colony.

He was hit with additional charges of fraud and contempt of court, receiving an additional nine-year sentence in 2022. In August 2023, Navalny was sentenced to another 19 years behind bars on charges of fomenting, financing and carrying out extremist activities and “rehabilitating” Nazi ideology. The FBK was shuttered on government orders.

In December 2023, Navalny was transferred to a penal colony in the Yamalo-Nenets Region of northern Siberia. The cause of his death on Friday is still under investigation.

https://www.rt.com/russia/592561-alexey-navalny-blogger-opposition/

 

AS USUAL, THE WESTERN PRESS BLAMES PUTIN FOR NAVALNY'S DEATH THOUGH THERE A NO EVIDENCE OF ANYTHING — NOT EVEN THE CIA CAN CONCOCT A PLAUSIBLE STORY ON THIS..... I PERSONALLY BLAME THE WEST FOR NAVALNY'S TROUBLES.... BUT I DO NOT HAVE EVIDENCE EITHER EXCEPT WHEN THE WEST SHOWS LOVE FOR AN OPPONENT OF PUTIN, ONE CAN BE SURE (MAY BE NOT?) THIS LOVE COMES WITH SOME "HELP"...

 

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“Navalny was an opposition figure, but his investigative journalism exposed the corruption of the ruling elites in Russia,” said Stella Assange.

The wife of WikiLeaks founder and imprisoned journalist Julian Assange said Friday that the reported death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is “utterly devastating,” pointing to his work uncovering corruption at the highest levels of Russian society.

“He was only 47. Had he not been imprisoned, he would be alive,” Stella Assange wrote on social media. “Navalny was an opposition figure, but his investigative journalism exposed the corruption of the ruling elites in Russia.”

“I feel for his wife Yulia and their two children, who will probably never really know what happened,” she added. “Condolences to his friends and family.”

Navalny’s past release of confidential documents from the Russian government and state-run energy companies had drawn comparisons to Assange’s work at WikiLeaks, which exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as international corruption.

Assange is currently languishing in a maximum-security prison in London, awaiting a hearing next week that will determine whether he can appeal his extradition to the United States.

Stella Assange warned Thursday that her husband “will die” if he’s extradited.

U.S. President Joe Biden, whose administration opted to run with the prosecution of Assange that began under former President Donald Trump, warned in 2021 that the consequences for Russia “would be devastating” if Navalny died in prison.

“They killed him. I am heartbroken.”

Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service said in a statement Friday that Navalny lost consciousness after taking a walk at the penal colony above the Arctic Circle to which he was relocated in December. Navalny’s health had badly deteriorated during his more than three years in prison on charges that he and human rights groups said were politically motivated.

Russia’s prison service said Friday that “all necessary resuscitation measures were taken” after Navalny fell unconscious but were not successful.

“The ambulance doctors confirmed the death of the convict,” the service added.

Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief of staff, said he could not confirm the truth of Russian authorities’ statement and that the opposition leader’s attorney is heading to the prison where he was held.

“We have no grounds to believe state propaganda,” Volkov wrote on social media. “If it’s true, then it’s not ‘Navalny died,’ but ‘Putin killed Navalny,’ nothing else. But I don’t believe them for a second.”

A spokesperson for Navalny said that “as soon as we have any information, we will report it.”

Agnès Callamard, secretary-general Amnesty International, said in a statement that Navalny “was a prisoner of conscience jailed only for speaking out against a repressive government.”

“He demanded political freedom for himself and his supporters. He called out corruption and challenged [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. His death is a devastating and dire indictment of life under the oppressive and stifling rule of the Kremlin,” said Callamard. “He paid the ultimate price for being a critical voice, and championing freedom of expression.”

“As the search for justice begins, it is clear, there are few avenues at our disposal,” she added. “That’s why it is crucial that the international community take concrete actions to hold all those responsible to account. We must urgently call upon the United Nations to employ its special procedures and mechanisms to address the death of Aleksei Navalny.”

The Peace and Justice Project, an organization founded by former U.K. Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, wrote Friday that “the world is watching an assault on political freedom.”

“From the death of Navalny in Russian custody, to Julian Assange’s U.K. imprisonment, to the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners in Israel, to Modi’s harassment of opponents in India, our duty is to speak up for justice,” the group said.

Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister and co-founder of Progressive International, agreed with that statement.

“Precisely,” he responded on social media. “From the genocide of Palestinians to the slow murder of Julian Assange to the eradication of Navalny… universal rights and freedoms are under fire.”

In separate posts about Navalny’s death, Varoufakis said progressives worldwide “need to fight for the right of all people not to be condemned to slow death in solitary confinement” and that his thoughts were with “all political prisoners languishing in jails.”

This story has been updated with a statement from Amnesty International.

 

Republished from Common Dreams, Feb 16, 2024.

https://johnmenadue.com/devastating-wife-of-imprisoned-journalist-julian-assange-mourns-death-of-alexei-navalny/

 

 

It’s horrific when a political opponent dies in jail. But it’s also never good to be caught on camera attempting a coup in your country with a foreign intel service. Navalny in this video is asking MI6 Officer James William Thomas Ford for $10-20 Million a year to start a color revolution in Russia. This is why he was arrested. And has major implications especially in light of the CIA and MI6 sabotaging the Trump administration. Russia and the U.S. are more alike than you think. Sadly.

As reported earlier by Kristinn Taylor, Russian democracy activist Alexei Navalny, 47, reportedly died in a Soviet era gulag located north of the Arctic Circle on Friday, according to the Russian prison authority. Navalny leaves behind his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and their two children.

Navalny organized anti-government demonstrations and ran for office to advocate reforms against corruption in Russia, and against President Vladimir Putin and his government.

...

Earlier today George Papadopoulos tweeted out the inconvenient video of Navalny plotting a revolution with the help of British spies through a top aide.

https://www.theinteldrop.org/2024/02/16/was-navalny-cia-or-mi-6-payoff-videos-unconfirmed-ask-some-hard-questions/

 

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https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/49833

Australian political leaders have labelled Alexei Navalny a “courageous force for democracy” and made clear who they hold responsible for the Russian opposition leader’s reported death. 

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Saturday shared his sadness after Russian authorities claimed Mr Navalny died at the “Polar Wolf” Arctic penal colony where he was serving a three-decade sentence.

“Australian mourns the tragic death of Alexei Navalny, a courageous force for democracy in Russia,” Mr Albanese wrote on the social media platform X.

https://michaelwest.com.au/australian-leaders-hail-navalny-as-hero-blame-putin/

 

https://www.theinteldrop.org/2024/02/16/was-navalny-cia-or-mi-6-payoff-videos-unconfirmed-ask-some-hard-questions/

 

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https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/49833

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ruv49PYBeds

SCOTT RITTER on NAVALNY's ROLE and on RUSSIA PLACING NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN SPACE.

 

https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171

 

 

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Navalny was an opposition figure, but his investigative journalism exposed the corruption of the ruling elites in Russia,” said Stella Assange.

The wife of WikiLeaks founder and imprisoned journalist Julian Assange said Friday that the reported death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is “utterly devastating,” pointing to his work uncovering corruption at the highest levels of Russian society.

https://johnmenadue.com/devastating-wife-of-imprisoned-journalist-julian-assange-mourns-death-of-alexei-navalny/

 

PLEASE STELLA, NAVALNY WAS NO JULIAN... JULIAN IS AN HONEST MAN. NAVALNY WAS CORRUPT AND DISHONEST...

PLEASE SEE THE REAL NAVALNY:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ruv49PYBeds

SCOTT RITTER on NAVALNY's ROLE and on RUSSIA PLACING NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN SPACE.

BUT WE UNDERSTAND YOUR VIEWS AND ANGST THOUGH... THE WEST HAS BEEN LAUDING NAVALNY — AND ASSANGE SHOULD BE LAUDED TOO, BY THE SAME PEOPLE... BUT AS YOU KNOW, THEY ARE HYPOCRITES. THEY ONLY LIKE THOSE WHO "EXPOSE" THE OTHER'S CACA, NOT THEIR OWN CACA...

 

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SEE ALSO: https://www.unz.com/aanglin/rat-bastard-alexi-navalny-finally-dead/

 

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 By Jeremy Kuzmarov -   February 20, 202 Media comparisons of Navalny to Nelson Mandela are totally off-base 

The death of Alexei Navalny at a remote Arctic penal colony is being used to try to sustain U.S. military aid to Ukraine at a time of growing congressional opposition and after the Russians have taken control of Avdiivka, a key battleground in eastern Ukraine.

The bias of the U.S. media was evident in The New York Times Sunday opinion section on February 18, which featured the following headlines on one page: “Florida’s Fraudster and Russia’s Killer,” “The Best Case for U.S. Aid to Ukraine,” and “What We Can Learn from Navalny.”

The “Florida Fraudster” piece, by Maureen Dowd, replicated an earlier accusation made by Dowd right out of the John Birch Society[1] playbook that Donald Trump was a Russian agent.[2] In a 2018 column, Dowd had inanely suggested that Trump gravitated to Vladimir Putin because “Putin reminded Trump of his authoritarian father.”[3]

In her latest piece, Dowd mocks Trump for having had a “bromance” with the “sociopathic Putin,” “unimpeded by Putin’s foul bid to swallow Ukraine.” Dowd said that this “bromance” had “grown ever more sickening with news that the Russian president’s most potent opponent, Alexei Navalny, 47, died mysteriously in an Arctic prison—very, very suddenly as high profile Putin critics often do.” “Make no mistake—Putin is responsible,” President Biden said.[4]

Well then, if Biden said it, then it must be true. Because Biden never lied before or embellished things for political purposes—ya right! And what about this alleged “bromance” between Trump and Putin? If it really existed, why did Trump escalate U.S. sanctions on Russia? And sell Ukraine Javelin anti-tank missiles the Obama administration refused to sell? Or pull out of a major arms control treaty with Putin (the INF Treaty), which Trump felt was bad for America?[5]

As far as Putin being a “sociopath” who wanted to “swallow Ukraine,” Dowd is obviously unaware that a) the U.S. had induced the Russian intervention in Ukraine by supporting the 2014 Maidan coup and ethnic cleansing operations in eastern Ukraine to which the Russian government was responsive; and b) the leading scholarly study of political assassination states emphatically that it has not been proven that Putin directly ordered anyone to be killed.[6]

And if Putin was indeed a sociopath, what about Volodymyr Zelensky? His administration has admitted to carrying out terrorist acts and killing dissidents, including the daughter of a prominent Russian philosopher, a pro-Russian blogger who was murdered in a café, the head of the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic and former Deputy of the Luhansk regional parliament, and the former leader of the socialist party in Ukraine’s parliament, Illia Kyva, who was assassinated mafia style while taking a walk in a park in Moscow where he had been exiled.[7]

Dowd’s biased analysis is echoed by her colleague Nicholas Kristof, a man about whom Edward S. Herman once called a “cruise missile leftist.” 

In his piece, “What We Can Learn from Navalny,” Kristof compared Navalny to Nelson Mandela, criticized Trump and Tucker Carlson[8] for “rolling over before the Russian president,” and quoted from Dick Durbin (D-IL) who asked why Trump and his congressional enablers “want to further appease this Russian tyrant?”[9]

Personally, I am sorry that Navalny died even if I disagreed with his political outlook.

However, the rush to blame Putin for Navalny’s death overlooks the fact that no evidence has so far emerged to prove this, and Putin had no motive to do so because Navalny was not a threat to his reelection since he had low poll ratings, and his death could easily be blamed on him, making him look bad. 

Now Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, who gave a blistering anti-Putin speech at the Munich Security conference on the day of Alexei’s death, is going to lead her husband’s organization and try to mobilize opposition to Putin using her husband’s status as a martyr.

As much as Navalnaya and her supporters want to present Alexei as a victim of political persecution, there is a strong evidence indicating that his arrest was not politically motivated, that he violated Russian law, and that he was legitimately imprisoned even if the terms of his sentence may have been unduly harsh.[10]

Former Swiss diplomat Jacques Baud reviews the evidence in his 2023 book, The Navalny Case: Conspiracy to Serve Foreign Policy (Paris: Max Milo, 2023).

Baud emphasizes that Navalny was a right-wing businessman given a five-year suspended prison sentence in the early 2000s because he was buying companies in order to illegally privatize their profits.[11]

Navalny was later given a three-year suspended sentence because of his involvement in an illicit business scheme spearheaded by his brother, Oleg, who used his position as manager of a sorting center at a post office to push the French cosmetics company Yves Rocher to use the services of a private logistics company owned by the Navalny family.[12]

The charges filed against the Navalny brothers were for embezzlement of more than 26 million rubles (nearly $850,000).

Under the terms of Navalny’s sentence, Alexei was prohibited from leaving Russian territory, which was the basis for his most recent arrest and imprisonment.[13]

After he was placed under judicial supervision, Navalny had been obligated to report twice a month to Russian prison authorities until the end of his probationary period, which Navalny did not do.[14]

In 2020, Navalny violated the latter rule six times but Russian authorities were then lenient—he was not actually being persecuted.

Some political observers even believed that Navalny was being used by the Kremlin to weaken the main opposition parties by splintering their vote.[15]

In December 2012, prosecutors in Russia accused Allekt, an advertising company headed by Navalny, of defrauding the liberal CIA-funded Union of Right Forces by taking $3.2 million for political PR in 2007 and doing nothing with the money. The charges were initiated by the party itself and not Russian government authorities.

Navalny’s checkered past renders as obscene Kristof’s comparison of Navalny to Nelson Mandela, who was arrested by South African authorities, with support from the CIA, because of his belonging to the Marxist wing of the anti-apartheid African National Congress (ANC).

Navalny, by contrast, was a marginal figure within Russia politically who, in 2007, was expelled from the center-right Yabloko Party because of his regular participation in the “Russian march,” an ultra-nationalist movement, and for his “nationalist activities,” with racist tendencies.[16]

In the video supporting the liberalization of handguns which made him famous, Navalny mimicked shooting Chechen migrants in Russia whom he compared to “cockroaches.”[17]

In 2013, Navalny supported and fanned the Biryulyovo riots, castigating the “hordes of legal and illegal immigrants.”

Salon magazine reported that, “if he were American, liberals would hate Navalny much more than they hate Trump or Steven Bannon.”

Jacobin called Navalny a “Russian Trump.”[18]

This is extremely ironic in light of the fawning depictions of Navalny by Trump-hating columnists whose articles do not actually provide much detail about Navalny and the political positions that he took.

One of these positions that endeared him to the West was his support for regionalist and separatist tendencies, which if successful, would contribute to the destabilization and weakening of Russia.[19] Navalny also advocated for sanctions that harm the Russian people.[20]

No wonder then that he has been accused of being a foreign agent.

In 2010, Navalny was a world fellow at Yale University, whose graduates played prominent roles in the 2014 anti-Russian coup in Ukraine and other U.S.-backed “color revolutions.”

He received more than $5 million in funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA cutout that specializes in regime-change operations.[21]

A Russia Today broadcast leaked surveillance footage from 2012, which appears to show Vladimir Ashurkov, the executive director of Navalny’s anti-corruption organization, seeking cash and intelligence from an alleged British spy, James William Thomas Ford, and suggesting Navalny’s anti-corruption work may benefit firms in London.

I previously detailed in CovertAction Magazinehow the fake poisoning of Navalny three and a half years ago appeared to have been generated as part of a color revolution/psychological warfare operation, whose main contours were laid out in a 2019 RAND Corporation report, “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia.” 

This report recommended an array of measures—from encouraging domestic protests to providing lethal aid to Ukraine to undermining Russia’s image abroad—to weaken and destabilize Russia. High priority was placed on administering sanctions, which Navalny’s alleged persecution justified expanding.

Today, Navalny’s death is being used to further this same operation. The convenient timing for the U.S.—which is losing the hot war and also the larger information/propaganda war—raises questions as to whether there was some kind of black operation involved that we are likely never to know about.

 

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/02/20/death-of-navalny-being-exploited-to-try-and-sustain-u-s-military-aid-to-ukraine/

 

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HERE COMES THE LEGEND....

https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/navalny/103513650

Why the death of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most formidable political opponent, is a loss for Russian journalism.

BUT NOT A PEEP ON JULIAN ASSANGE....

 

NOW TO THE TRUTH:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ruv49PYBeds

SCOTT RITTER on NAVALNY's ROLE and on RUSSIA PLACING NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN SPACE.

 

https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171

 

 

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PLEASE .....

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

 

 

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

 

EASY.

 

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

 

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The Tragic Death of a Traitor    Part One: Origins

 

   SCOTT RITTER    21 FEB 2024 

Alexei Navalny, a Russian political opposition figure whose popularity in the West far exceeded his support in Russia, died while incarcerated in a Russian prison. He was serving a combined 30-and-a-half-year sentence for fraud and political extremism, charges that Navalny and his supporters claim were little more than trumped up accusations designed to silence a man who had emerged in recent years as the most vocal Russian critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

According to a statement released by the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service, “On February 16, 2024, in penal colony number 3, convict Alexei Navalny felt unwell after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness. The medical staff of the institution arrived immediately, and an ambulance team was called. All necessary resuscitation measures were carried out, which did not yield positive results. Doctors of the ambulance stated the death of the convict. The causes of death are being established.”

Alexei Navalny was 47 at the time of his death. He left behind his wife, Yulia, and two children.

Navalny was serving out his sentence at the IK-3 prison colony in Kharp, a settlement in the Yamal-Nenets autonomous district some 2,000 kilometers northeast of Moscow, one of the most remote prisons in Russia with a reputation for austerity and—according to inmates who had served time there—brutality.

Navalny’s death has been widely condemned in the West, with President Joe Biden weighing in with a lengthy statement issued from the White House’s Roosevelt Room. Navalny, Biden said, “bravely stood up to the corruption, the violence and…all the bad things that the Putin government was doing. In response, Putin had him poisoned. He had him arrested. He had him prosecuted for fabricated crimes. He sentenced him to prison. He was held in isolation. Even all that didn’t stop him from calling out Putin’s lies.”

Biden noted that “Even in prison he [Navalny] was a powerful voice for the truth, which is kind of amazing when you think about it. And he could have lived safely in exile after the assassination attempt on him in 2020, which nearly killed him, I might add. And -- but he -- he was traveling outside the country at the time. Instead, he returned to Russia. He returned to Russia knowing he’d likely be imprisoned or even killed if he continued his work, but he did it anyway because he believed so deeply in his country, in Russia.”

Biden cast the blame for Navalny’s death squarely at the feet of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Make no mistake. Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death. Putin is responsible. What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality. No one should be fooled, not in Russia, not at home, not anywhere in the world.” Navalny, Biden said, “was so many things that Putin was not. He was brave. He was principled. He was dedicated to building a Russia where the rule of law existed and of where it applied to everybody. Navalny believed in that Russia, that Russia. He knew it was a cause worth fighting for, and obviously even dying for.”

Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, addressed his death before the Munich Security Conference, with Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in attendance. “I want Putin and his entire surrounding…Putin’s friends, his government [to] know – that they will have to pay for what they’ve done with our country, with my family, and my husband. And that day will come very soon," she declared, adding that “Vladimir Putin must be held accountable for all the horrors they are doing to my country, to our country – to Russia.”

Similar outpourings of grief and support have emerged from the leaders and media of nations that have historically been aligned against Russia. Navalny, it seems, has been able to rally more support to his cause in death than he could while alive.

Navalny has been elevated into near mythical status as the idealized symbol of “Russian democracy.”

But the truth is far different.

Navalny was born on June 4, 1976. His father was a career Soviet Army officer. According to Navalny’s mother, her son was radicalized by listening to the conversations her husband had with other Soviet officers about the deteriorating conditions in the Soviet Union. Navalny earned a law degree from People’s Friendship University in Moscow in 1998, before earning his master’s in economics from State Finance Academy in 2001. While studying, Navalny became involved in politics, joining the liberal opposition association, Yabloko, in 1999.

Yabloko (which means “apple” in Russian) began its life 1993 as a voting bloc in the Russian Duma that viewed itself as the political opposition to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. In 1995 Yabloko became an association of political parties which continued to oppose Yeltsin’s presidency—indeed, in May 1999 (the year Navalny joined) the Yabloko association voted in favor of the impeachment of Yeltsin (ironically, given its future political orientation, the bloc also voted, in August 1999, in favor of the selection of Vladimir Putin as Prime Minister.) Navalny went on to cut his political teeth as a local organizer at a time when life in Russia had hit nearly rock bottom—the decade of the 1990’s was marked by massive deterioration in Russian living conditions, and corruption marked nearly every aspect of Russian political, economic, and social existence. In December 2001, Yabloko applied for and was given permission to register as a political party.

Navalny’s political maturation came at a time when Russian democratic institutions were almost exclusively organized and funded by western institutions. The US State Department, for example, conducted what it called the “democracy assistance program,” whose mission was “to capitalize on the historic opportunity to build democracy in place of a centralized Communist system” by creating and nurturing “the full range of democratic institutions, processes, and values” so that the “responsiveness and effectiveness of the Russian government” would be increased. The program provided financial and managerial support to “prodemocracy political activists and political parties, proreform trade unions, court systems, legal academies, officials throughout the government, and members of the media.” US-funded political party development programs in Russia were implemented through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) grants to the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI).

In 2005, Navalny started working with another political activist, Maria Gaidar (the daughter of former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, and a member of the Union of Right Forces political party) to form a coalition known as the Democratic Alternative, or DA. In a statement made to US government officials in 2005, Maria Gaidar admitted that most of her funding came from the NED, although she did not publicize this fact out of fear of the political and legal consequences of being openly affiliated with the United States. Another recipient of NED funding was Gary Kasparov, the former chess champion-turned-political activist, who in 2005 formed the United Civil Front, an organization dedicated to dismantling the current electoral system in Russia so that new leadership could be elected to the Duma and presidency in the 2007-2008 election cycle.

The 2007–2008 time frame was critical. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was appointed President by Boris Yeltsin on New Years Eve 1999, and elected President in March 2000, was coming to the end of his second term as President. The Russian Constitution only permitted two consecutive terms as President, so Putin was unable to run for reelection. However, Putin and his United Russia Party had come up with a solution—if the United Russia Party could hold on to its majority in the Russian Duma, then Putin would be appointed as Prime Minister. The current Prime Minister, Dmitri Medvedev, would then run for president.

This scheme, however, opened the door in the minds of the Russian political opposition (and their western masters) for sweeping political change. If United Russia could be denied its Duma majority, then Putin would not be able to serve as Prime Minister. And a United Russia defeat in the Duma elections in December 2007 could pave the way for a similar defeat in the presidential election in March 2008. For Kasparov, Gaidar, Navalny, and other leaders of the opposition, this was an opportunity to bring an end to what they viewed as the autocratic rule of Vladimir Putin.

The promoters of “democratic reform” (i.e., regime change) in the State Department likewise believed this to be a unique opportunity for change. Already, US-funded “color revolutions” had swept aside autocratic governments in Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia. The hope was that a similar “revolution” could be organized in Russia. One of the key elements for making this happen was making sure that the opposition groups received the funding necessary to enable their training and organization. In addition to the NED and its two affiliates, the NDI and IRI, money was dispatched to various NGOs and Russian individuals covertly, using the CIA and British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

The CIA was also involved in identifying, grooming, recruiting and managing Russian political dissidents who could help implement the American regime change strategy which targeted Putin and his United Russia Party for the 2007-2008 election cycle. One such dissident was a Russian journalist named Yevgenia Albats.

Albats graduated from Moscow State University in 1980 with a degree in journalism. She was the recipient of an Alfred Friendly fellowship which saw her assigned to the Chicago Tribune as a visiting journalist in 1990. Albats spent 1993 at Harvard University after winning a prestigious Nieman Fellowship, where she spent two semesters “auditing classes with some of the university’s greatest thinkers, participating in Nieman events and collaborating with peers.”

The CIA’s Directorate of Operations, responsible for clandestine intelligence collection, operates what is known as the National Resources Division (NRD). The NRD is responsible for the CIA’s human intelligence collection activities inside the United States. The NRD has two major programs. The first involves the voluntary debriefing of US citizens—primarily businessmen—who travel to destinations of interest that the CIA might otherwise have difficulty gaining access to.

The second involves the assessment and development of foreigners on US soil—students, visiting professors, businessmen, etc.—for possible recruitment by the CIA. NRD maintains relationships with major universities—such as Harvard—that host prestigious fellowships and conferences capable of attracting up and rising foreign talent. Albats had been placed on the CIA’s radar through her Alfred Friendly fellowship. While at Harvard there is little doubt that she was further groomed—perhaps without her being cognizant that it was happening.

Albats was to return to Cambridge in 2000, where she studied for her PhD. One of her areas of specialty was what she called “grassroots organizations.” Albats spent the 2003-2004 academic year teaching at Yale University, where she became familiar with the Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellows Program, a four-month, full-time residential program based out of Yale’s International Leadership Center and housed within the Jackson School of Global Affairs. The Program runs annually from mid-August to mid-December and brings together up and rising leaders from around the world—in short, the perfect targets for assessment and grooming by the NRD case officers.

Her thesis advisor at Harvard was Timothy Colton, a professor of government and Russian studies. Colton specialized in the intricacies of Russian elections. The year Albats arrived at Harvard, Colton published a book, Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them in the New Russia, and while Albats was preparing her thesis, Colton, together with Michael McFaul, a Stanford professor who had helped bring Boris Yeltsin to power in the 1990’s (and who would go on to serve as President Barack Obama’s principle Russian expert, first in the National Security Council, and later as the US Ambassador to Russia), collaborated on a second book, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000.

Working with Colton, whose research had been heavily subsidized by the Department of State through the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, Albats focused on ways to exploit nationalism in Russia from an electoral perspective. She differentiated between what she termed imperial nationalism and ethnic nationalism, with imperial nationalism being the purview of the state and as such something to be opposed. Ethnic nationalism, on the other hand, wasn’t deemed by Albats to be dangerous, especially in a politically unstructured society such as Russia, where there was a natural tendency to unite on an ethnic basis.

Albats returned to Russia in 2004, after successfully defending her PhD thesis in political science. One of the first things Albats did was to turn her Moscow apartment into a political science parlor where she gathered young activists together for the purpose of organizing them into politically viable entities capable of impacting the upcoming Russian elections in 2007-2008.

One of these young activists she attracted was Alexei Navalny.

The Albats-run political parlor sessions, which began in 2004, helped bring Navalny together with Maria Gaidar, and led to the creation of the Democratic Alternative organization, as well as Gary Kasparov (another member of the Albats parlor scene) and his United Civil Front movement. One of the goals of the parlor was to try and find a way to recreate in Russia the kind of youth movement that was created in 2004 in Ukraine that helped bring about the so-called Orange Revolution that prevented Viktor Yanukovich from becoming president. This movement, Pora, played an essential role in mobilizing opposition to Yanukovich. Albats and her team of aspiring political scientists conceived a Russian equivalent, which was called Oborona, or “defense.” The hope of Albats, Gaidar, Kasparov, and Navalny was that Oborona could serve as the impetus for the mobilization of the Russian youth to oust Vladimir Putin from power.

As Albats worked to organize political dissent in Russia, the foundation of western support upon which Russian political opposition was built, namely the funding provided by non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) such as the NED, was exposed as being little more than a vehicle for the channeling of illicit foreign intelligence services. In the winter of 2005-2006, the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, broke up a sophisticated ring run out of the British Embassy involving a so-called “spy rock”—a sophisticated digital communications platform disguised as a rock—which enabled British spies to communicate with their Russian agents without ever having to meet with them.

The Russian agent would pass near the rock and, using a hand-held communication device like a Blackberry, download an electronic message onto a server contained inside the rock. The British spies would then approach the rock and, using the same kind of device, upload the message to their own device. The scheme was discovered when a British spy, unable to retrieve the message, approached the rock and gave it a few kicks to see if the system would work. This attracted the attention of the FSB officers following him, which led to the rock being seized and evaluated. One Russian citizen, said to be employed by a sensitive military industrial facility, was arrested.

But the most surprising aspect of the data retrieved from the “spy rock” was the fact that at least one of the British spies was using the device to transmit information about how various NGOs could access covert funds being provided by the British government. Persons from the NGOs in question, who had been issued similar devices to those used by their British masters, would download these instructions from the “rock.” Based upon the intelligence gathered from the captured server, the FSB was able to inform the Russian leadership about the specific NGOs involved in these illicit transactions. All in all, 12 Russian NGOs—including the Committee Against Torture, the Center for Development of Democracy, the Eurasia Foundation, and the Moscow Helsinki Group—were identified as receiving the illicit funds, which were administered as part of the British Foreign Office’s Global Opportunities Fund.

In the aftermath of the “spy rock” scandal, the Russian government moved to create a new law on NGOs that imposed harsh conditions on the registration and operation of NGOs, effectively banning any NGO involved in politics from receiving foreign funding. While the NGOs impacted by this new law, which took effect in April 2006, denied any wrongdoing, they acknowledged that the impact of the law would be to stifle dissent before the 2007 Duma elections and the 2008 presidential race.

Despite the crackdown on the British-affiliated NGOs, the Albats-run “political parlor” continued to aggressively try to coalesce a viable opposition effort in Russia. Egged on by Albats and her theories about the political potential of ethnic nationalism, in 2007 Navalny co-founded the democratic nationalist National Russian Liberation Movement, an umbrella organization which attracted far-right, ultranationalist movements. The ideology of these groups is perhaps best explained by Navalny’s efforts in coopting them to his cause. Navalny made two videos during this time as a means of introducing the new party to a larger Russian public. The first video had Navalny comparing Muslims in Russia to pests and ended with Navalny shooting a Muslim with a handgun, then declaring that pistols were to Muslims like flyswatters and slippers were to flies and cockroaches. The second video had Navalny comparing interethnic conflict to dental cavities, implying that the only solution was extraction.

Navalny was kicked out of Yabloko in the summer of 2007, his affiliation with far-right wing Russian nationalism a bridge too far for the neo-liberal political party. But before his falling out, Navalny was able to make an impression on his underwriters. In March 2007 Navalny participated in the so-called “Dissenter’s March,” walking side-by-side with one of the major organizers of the protest, Gary Kasparov.

In the aftermath of the Russian crackdown on foreign funding for NGOs, Kasparov had turned to a network of Russian oligarchs operating out of London, where they colluded with the British Secret Intelligence Service to fund political opposition in Russia. The leader of this effort was the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who had founded a non-profit organization, the International Foundation for Civil Liberties, which served as a front to accomplish Berezovsky’s publicly stated mission of bringing down Putin “by force” or by bloodless revolution. Berezovsky was assisted in this venture by a number of Russian oligarchs, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil tycoon who was imprisoned on corruption charges in 2005, but whose foundation, Open Russia, continued to provide funding to Russian political opposition groups such as Kasparov’s United Civil Front; the Governor of Saint Petersburg at the time, Valentina Matviyenko, singled out Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky as the source of the money used to put on the “Dissenter’s March.”

Gary Kasparov likewise noted that the bulk of the media support for the march was provided by Yevgenia Albats through her “Echo of Saint Petersburg” broadcasts.

Albats’ influence on Navalny was discernable. Later, when explaining why he had embraced right-wing nationalism, Navalny’s response sounded like it could have been lifted from Albats’ Harvard doctoral thesis. “My idea is that you have to communicate with nationalists and educate them,” Navalny said. “Many Russian nationalists have no clear ideology. What they have is a sense of general injustice to which they respond with aggression against people with a different skin color or eyes of a different shape. I think it’s extremely important to explain to them that beating up migrants is not the solution to the problem of illegal immigration; the solution is a return to competitive elections that would allow us to get rid of the thieves and crooks who are getting rich off of illegal immigration.”

Despite the direction provided by the State Department and CIA through proxies (witting or unwitting) such as Albats, and the covert funding provided via the British intelligence services, the goal of generating a Russian “Color Revolution” that could sweep Vladimir Putin and his United Russia Party from power failed. United Russia dominated the 2007 Duma elections, winning 65% of the vote and securing 315 of 450 seats; in March 2008, Dmitri Medvedev won the presidential race, securing 71.25% of the vote. Medvedev then followed up on his promise to appoint Vladimir Putin as Prime Minister.

The 2007-2008 election cycle represented a devastating defeat for the political opponents of Vladimir Putin and their western supporters. For Navalny, however, it was liberating—he had grown weary of the constant infighting and jostling for power within the ranks of Russia’s political opposition. Instead, Navalny began to pour himself into his new passion—"shareholder activism.” In 2008, Navalny bought 300,000 rubles worth of stock in five Russian oil and gas companies with the goal of becoming an activist shareholder. He founded the Minority Shareholders Association, through which he used his status as a shareholder to push for transparency regarding the financial assets of these companies, as required by law.

Navalny began attending shareholders meetings of some of the wealthiest companies, demanding answers to uncomfortable questions he was able to formulate by reviewing company paperwork legally available to shareholders. One of his first targets was SurgutNeftGas, or Surgut oil and gas company. Navalny had purchased $2,000 in stock and used his status as a minority shareholder to crash a meeting of shareholders in the Siberian city of Surgut. When the shareholders were asked if there were any questions, Navalny took the microphone and proceeded to ask the senior management of the company about the small size of their dividends and the opaque nature of the company’s ownership. His questions made the management uncomfortable and drew applause from many of the 300 shareholders in attendance.

Navalny was riding on the coattails of the newly minted president, Dmitri Medvedev, and his stated goal of stamping out corruption. In addition to SurgutNeftGas, Navalny had placed his sights on such giants as Gazprom and Rosneft, and in doing so was peripherally attacking Medvedev, the former chairman of Gazprom, and Vladmir Putin, whose close associate, Igor Sechin, served as both chairman of Rosneft and deputy Prime Minister.

Navalny wrote about his various campaigns online, through his LiveJournal blog. Hundreds of thousands of Russians followed his work, and the comments were mostly favorable (although several subscribers questioned Navalny’s motives, accusing him of running an extortion racket designed to make money, a charge Navalny dismissed without denying.)

By tying his anti-corruption campaign in with the anti-corruption platform of Medvedev, Navalny not only shielded himself from direct retaliation, but was able to attract the attention—and support—of the Russian mainstream. Sergei Guriev, the Dean of Moscow’s New Economic School, and his deputy, Alexei Sitnikov, began supporting Navalny’s work.

The main problem for Navalny, however, was income. He had yet to master the art of online fundraising, and he wasn’t yet established as one of the designated political opposition for whom western financing would be made available. In December 2008, an offer came in from Nikita Belykh, the Governor of Kirov, which, given his dire financial situation, he could not refuse.

Nikita Belykh, a native of the Perm Region, had served in local government in multiple capacities, including Deputy Governor, up until May 2005, when he was elected as the leader of the Union of Right Forces, a leading opposition party, succeeding Boris Nemtsov, a noted critic of President Vladimir Putin. Belykh assumed the role of opposition leader, and in October 2005 helped form a coalition with the Yabloko Party, known as the Yabloko-United Democrats, to run in the Moscow City Duma elections, held on December 4, 2005. While the coalition won 11% of the vote and was able to be represented in the Moscow City Duma and became one of only three parties (along with United Russia and the Communist Party) to enter the new Moscow legislature, it was not to prove lasting; plans to merge with Yabloko were shelved in late 2006.

The Union of Right Forces, like all opposition parties, was demoralized by the results of the 2007-2008 election cycle. Following the presidential election, in March 2008, the president-elect, Dmitri Medvedev, reached out to Belykh and offered him the post of Governor of the Kirov Region. Belykh, to the surprise of nearly everyone, accepted the job. His former political allies, like Maria Gaidar and Alexei Navalny, condemned Belykh for what they viewed as a betrayal—while they continued to struggle against the deeply entrenched pro-Putin apparatchiks who governed Russia, Belykh had jumped ship, and was now part of the establishment they so despised.

Back in Moscow, Alexei Navalny and Maria Gaidar were trapped in a political post-apocalyptic nightmare. Money had dried up along with their political fortunes, and no one was in the mood for renewed political mischief. While Belykh had departed the Moscow political scene, he was still a friend. On November 18, 2008, Belykh reached out to Navalny to see if he was interested in serving as a volunteer consultant, advising the new governor on ways to enhance the transparency of the Kirov Region’s property management.

Navalny accepted.

(Maria Gaidar likewise followed Navalny to the Kirov Region, accepting an appointment in February 2009 as a deputy Governor.)

The capital of the Kirov Region is the city of Kirov, located some 560 miles northeast of Moscow. While Kirov is known for its heavy industry, the Kirov region is also a leading producer of lumber. In 2007, the Kirov Region undertook a reorganization of the region’s timber industry, consolidating control over thirty-six timber mills under a single roof, a State unitary enterprise known as Kirovles. One of the problems confronting Kirovles was curtailing the practice of selling lumber for cash undertaken by many of the timber mills. The managers of the timber mills made a pretty profit, but this money was not registered as income for Kirovles, and as such the enterprise was operating at a deficit.

One of Navalny’s first projects was to meet with the director of Kirovles. During this meeting, Navalny suggested that the best way to stop the unauthorized direct sale of timber by the managers of the timber mills would be for Kirovles to work with an intermediary timber trading company that would be responsible for finding clients for the timber produced by Kirovles. It just so happened that Navalny had coordinated with a friend, Petr Ofitserov, who had formed a timber trading company, the Vyatskaya Forest Company, or VLK, for this purpose. On April 15, 2009, Kirovles signed the first of several contracts for the purchase of timber from Kirovles by VLK worth, in their aggregate, around 330,000 Euros. VLK was then responsible for selling this timber to customers and would collect a commission of 7% for these sales.

In July, Navalny undertook an audit of Kirovles. As a part of the audit, Belykh set up a working group for the purpose of restructuring Kirovles. Navalny was appointed the head of this working group. Based upon the findings of the audit, on August 17 the director of Kirovles was suspended from his position for mismanagement.

On September 1, Kirovles terminated its contracts with VLK.

Navalny finished his work in Kirov on September 11, 2009, and returned to Moscow.

For the better part of the next year, Alexei Navalny focused on his work with the Minority Shareholders Association, which he publicly chronicled through his LiveJournal blog. Navalny was still a relatively unknown person in Russia, but his David versus Goliath approach toward uncovering corruption was starting to attract the attention of government officials and political junkies alike. Some people accused Navalny, through his shareholder activism, of simply running a giant grift, exposing corruption to extort payouts from the targeted entities. Others questioned how he was able to pay for all of his work, suggesting that he was being underwritten by entities who did not have the best interests of the Russian government in mind.

Others worried about his security. Navalny spoke about this aspect of his life with a journalist in the winter of 2009, noting that his fears revolved around being arrested “or in the worst-case scenario with someone quietly having me killed.”

Before he had left Kirov, Alexei Navalny met with Maria Gaidar to discuss his future. Gaidar had been a part of the political science parlor run by Yevgenia Albats, and shared the opinion expressed by Albats and Gary Kasparov that Navalny had potential as an activist but lacked the kind of political refinement needed to break out on the national stage. Gaidar was aware of the Yale World Fellows Program, and strongly encouraged Navalny to apply.

Back in Moscow, Navalny took Gaidar’s suggestion to heart. Navalny consulted with Sergey Guriev, the Dean of the New Economic School, who agreed to nominate Navalny for the fellowship. Guriev wrote a recommendation, and turned to Yevgenia Albats and Gary Kasparov, who likewise agreed to write recommendations for Navalny. Albats turned to her Yale connections, and put Navalny in touch with Oleg Tsyvinsky, a Yale economics professor, who helped guide Navalny through the application process. Navalny was put in touch with Maxim Trudolyubov, an editor with the well-regarded Vedomosti business daily and an alumni of the Yale World Fellow Program, Class of 2009. Trudolyubov used his connections to have Vedomosti name Navalny its “Private Individual of the Year” for 2009, helping firm up his resumé.

The Yale World Fellows program requires that its applicants be “five and twenty-five years into their professional careers, with demonstrated and significant accomplishments at a regional, national, or international level.” Alexei Navalny’s “job description” at Yale was “Founder, Minority Shareholders Association,” a position he had held for less than a year at the time of his application. Navalny was also listed as being the “co-founder of the Democratic Alternative movement.” Left unsaid was that while he was, in fact, a co-founder of this movement in 2005, he did so in the capacity of a member of the Yabloko Party, which kicked Navalny out in 2007 because of his links to right-wing nationalists.

On April 28, 2010, Alexei Navalny made the following announcement in his LiveJournal blog:

“Girls and Boys, I was lucky enough to get into the Yale World fellows program at Yale University. It was not easy, the competition was something like 1000 people for 15 places. Therefore, I will spend the second half of 2010 in the city of New Haven, Connecticut.”

Navalny laid out his expectations from this experience. “I want to seriously expand the tools of our work and learn/understand how to use all sorts of laws on foreign corruption, US/EU anti-money laundering legislation, exchange rules, etc. against Effective Managers [EM]. We must be able to destroy EM where they will not be protected by greedy swindlers from the General Prosecutors Office and Russian courts. Therefore,” Navalny concluded, “our activities will only expand…soon we will hit EM in all time zones and jurisdictions.”

In early August, Navalny, his wife Yulia, and their two children left Moscow for New Haven. There, a new world order beckoned that would forever change, and eventually cost, Navalny’s life.

https://www.scottritterextra.com/p/the-tragic-death-of-a-traitor

 

 

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Alexei Navalny, 1976-2024

   17 February 2024 | John Laughland

 

When the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up in September 2022, the media rushed to say that Russia did it.  We now know that the Americans did it, attacking their main European ally, Germany, and with it, the whole of Europe.

When Alexei Navalny’s death was announced on 16 February, Western media immediately said it was a political assassination (something even the most virulent Western governments have not maintained). But how can we know with certainty what happened in a prison cell somewhere in Siberia, when we hardly even know which prison Navalny was in?

Will we discover in a year or so that this is untrue, as we did with Nord Stream (although some of us knew the truth immediately)? Certainly, many untrue things have been said about Navalny since he rose to prominence about 15 years ago.

It was alleged, for instance, that he had been poisoned with Novichok in an attempted assassination in 2020.  Yet this was obvious nonsense.  Two years previously, two Russians in Britain had allegedly been targeted with the same Novichok in Salisbury.  The UK government peddled the line that Russia had used a secret chemical weapon to try to murder Sergei Skripal, an MI6 agent and Russian traitor who had done time in prison and then been exchanged for other spies many years previously. 

The Skripal story itself was impossible to believe.  However if one did hold that the Russian plot to use a secret weapon had been uncovered and had failed – Skripal and his daughter did not die, they have been since whisked away from public view by the British secret services and nobody knows where they are now - then it is literally impossible to claim that the Russians would try the same failed tactic again, two years later, against an even more famous opponent, Navalny. 

In any case, when Navalny fell ill on a domestic flight in Russia, the plane made an emergency landing and Navalny was rushed to hospital.  He was treated there before being sent to a hospital in Germany on his wife’s request.  Is this what you do when you are trying to kill someone?  If Navalny had had an illegal chemical weapon in his blood, why would the Russians send him to Germany where it would be discovered?

Other untruths of a similar nature have circulated in the know-all Western media – media which rush to embrace conspiracy theories when they support their chosen narrative, but which dismiss them as nutty and even dangerous when they do not.  The more gruesome these stories, the better – whether it is the alleged but unproven murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London with radioactive material, or the absurd fantasy that  Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin in 2004.  Russian assassins, it seems, never use guns or knives, preferring instead to use toxins which leave plenty of trace and often do not work.  If they tried less baroque ways to eliminate their opponents, that would not fit in with the James Bond / SMERSH narrative which Western elites have imbibed with their mother’s milk.

The best known case, elevated to the status of law in the United States, is the death in a Russian prison of Sergei Magnitsky in 2009.  It was immediately alleged by his associate Bill Browder that he had been murdered for denouncing corruption.  But as the film maker Andrei Nekrasov and the German weekly Der Spiegel have shown conclusively – Nekrasov’s superb documentary, ‘Magnitsky: Behind the Scenes,’ has once again been taken down from Youtube - not one element of this story stands up to scrutiny.  The European Court of Human Rights, for what it is worth, agrees.  It ruled in 2019 that Magnitsky’s arrest had been perfectly reasonable – far from denouncing corruption, he was himself accused of it – and that there was no evidence to say he was murdered. 

Another untruth told about Navalny was that he was a or the leader of the Russian opposition. Navalny was not the leader of anything. His finest hour came in 2013 when he garnered 670,000 votes in a Moscow mayoral election.  He never had any national party structure or any national support outside the liberal capital city.  Just over half a million votes in a country of 140 million needs to be against the 12 million votes which went in the 2012 presidential election to the Communist Party candidate, 6 million to the ephemeral liberal candidate, Mikhail Prokhorov, and 4.5 million to the nationalist, Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

Finally, his troubles with the law were not initially political.  His initial convictions date from a corruption case brought against him and his brother by the French cosmetics company Yves Rocher in 2012.  He repeatedly broke his travel ban and this led to house arrest.  Later, after his stay in a Berlin hospital, he was convicted for contempt of court for having refused to obey various court orders. 

The notion that Navalny had support in Russia which only repression stymied is not credible.  In 2021 the Levada Centre found that he had a 62% disapproval rating, up from 50% the previous year, with approval ratings of 20% in 2020 and 14% in 2021.

Instead, Navalny prefigured Vladimir Zelensky.  A creation of his American advisors and a minor corrupt figure, Navalny’s initial plan, when he first came to prominence in the second decade of the 21st century, was to unite nationalists and liberals against Putin.  He tried to appeal to the extreme right, for instance in this video to trail a party called ‘Narod’ (People), for National Russian Liberation Movement which describes Muslims as cockroaches and advocates murdering them.  His earliest foray into politics, with Maria Gaidar, daughter of a prominent liberal former Prime Minister, was supported financially by the USA’s regime change operation, the National Endowment for Democracy, as Wikileaks revealed in 2006.

No doubt conditions in Siberian prisons are not conducive to good health.  But Navalny himself was a sick man.  The events of 2020, when he collapsed on a plane and his life was then saved by Russian doctors, were an indication of severe problems with his blood sugar.  If he had been poisoned, he would have died.  It is therefore perfectly feasible that his death is innocuous – but of course that truth, if it is truth, is far less interesting than another grisly tale about Dr. Evil in the Kremlin.

Cui bono?  Even if you believe that Navalny was a political force who threatened Putin, his allegedly political imprisonment had solved the supposed problem.  What is the possible motive for taking the extra step of murdering him ?

On the contrary Russia and Putin have just had their biggest publicity coup for years, with the Tucker Carlson interview having been viewed by hundreds of millions of viewers.  His shorts about the Moscow Metro and the cost of living in Russia are also doing the rounds.  For Navalny to die in the very same week is surely very bad publicity for the Kremlin – especially when, by an astonishing coincidence, his wife Yulia is today attending the Munich Security Conference together with the Ukrainian president and the collective West.

Come to think of it, maybe there is a conspiracy theory worth pondering here …

 

https://fvdinternational.com/article/alexei-navalny-1976-2024

 

 

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THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS WHY I DON'T READ THE NEW DAILY ANYMORE... 

Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny was close to being freed in a prisoner swap at the time of his death, but President Vladimir Putin could not tolerate the thought of him being released and had him killed, a close ally has claimed.

Navalny, 47, died at an Arctic penal colony on February 16.

The Kremlin, which casts Navalny and his supporters as US-backed extremists, has denied state involvement in his death.

Navalny’s death certificate said he died of natural causes, according to supporters.

There was no immediate comment from the Kremlin and Navalny ally Maria Pevchikh, who is based outside Russia, did not present documentary evidence for her assertion.

https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/2024/02/27/navalny-prisoner-swap

 

FROM WHAT I UNDERSTAND FROM SCOTT RITTER — A FAR MORE INFORMED DUDE THAN THE DAILY — NAVALNY COULD NOT BE EXCHANGED IN A PRISONER SWAP WITH THE USA. THE SWAPS ARE USUALLY DONE SPY FOR SPY. NAVALNY WAS NEVER CHARGED FOR SPYING, THOUGH HE WAS TECHNICALLY A CIA/MI6 AGENT/ASSET — ONLY CORRUPTION AND THREATENING THE STATE WITH VIOLENCE. READ THE ARTICLE BY SCOTT, AND YOU MIGHT LEARN SOMETHING, BUT I'M NOT HOLDING MY BREATH... THE WESTERN MEDIA, INCLUDING THE NEW DAILY, IS APPALLING AND BLIND...

 

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From Navalny to Aaron Bushnell: the stuttering of history    by Guy Mettan*

 

The truth always comes to light over time. But this time it came to light surprisingly quickly. After just two weeks of media and political hysteria, we learned from the mouth of Ukrainian intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov that Navalny had actually died of a blood clot, a common stroke, and not as a result of “Putin’s poisoning”, as the most obsequious barkers and parrots of NATO repeated in an endless loop (“Chief Budanov Says Seems Navalny Died of Detached Blood Clot” [kyivpost.com]).
  At the same time, Navalny’s relatives announced urbi et orbi that their protégé was to be exchanged for a Russian spy imprisoned in Germany, whom “Putin wanted released at all costs”, according to the same Western media.
  This second report confirms the first. An exchange would have allowed the Russian president to kill two birds with one stone by getting rid of a troublesome prisoner and at the same time getting back a much-desired spy ...
  In any case, both refute the theory that the Russian president wanted to get rid of his opponent. They also allow us to understand why Navalny’s death was instrumentalized so quickly and so loudly: The aim was to make new sanctions against Russia (decided by the US immediately after Navalny’s widow’s visit to Washington) and new war measures on the part of the European Union (decided at the last Ukraine summit in Paris) palatable to the stunned Western public as quickly as possible. Measures that concerned the delivery of long- and medium-range missiles and the possible direct deployment of NATO soldiers on Ukrainian soil (launched by President Macron in a statement that was as worrying as it was nonsensical in terms of its military consequences).
  As icing on the cake, Navalny’s unexpected death also came just in time to make the fall of Avdiivka and the setbacks of the Ukrainian army disappear and to try to restart the stalled mechanics of American military aid to Ukraine and once again grant European billions while withholding them from farmers impoverished by the crisis and the rise in energy prices due to the disruption of Russian gas imports (the European Parliament has just approved 50 billion in aid for Kiev).
  If there is one area in which the genius of the West cannot be disputed, it is the area of propaganda and opinion manipulation. As in the case of Bucha, MH 17 or the Skripals, Navalny’s death served as a pretext for an escalation of tensions and warmongering. In a word: to extend the war, to the detriment of those in favour of negotiations, de-escalation or a ceasefire.
  But the bizarre revelations go even further. In one fell swoop, we learned from the “New York Times”, also based on information from Budanov, that the CIA had opened no fewer than twelve spy centres in Ukraine, even before the Maidan coup in February 2014. Why are they doing this? To spy on the best places to pick mushrooms? That is unlikely. 
  This confirms that Ukraine had been under American control since at least 2013 and that the anti-Russian escalation had been planned for many years.
  Zelensky, for his part, admitted that the plans for the Ukrainian counter-offensive had been passed on to the Russians last summer before it began, which would explain its failure.
  Why is this information coming out at this time? Who is it aimed at? What are they trying to tell us? Why are Ukrainian officials starting to dismantle theories spread by their Western friends? There is never a coincidence in this kind of communication, which at first glance appears erratic, but is in fact carefully calibrated.
  At this point, three explanations are possible. It could be internal settlements in which Kiev is trying to discredit political opponents (for example, the clan of the dismissed general Salushni), or an attempt to increase pressure on its allies in order to wring more support from them, or backfire intended to defuse future revelations that would be very embarrassing for Joe Biden’s election campaign. The article in “Le Temps” on Wednesday, 28 February, which – despite the flop of Russiagate in 2017–2019 – revives the thesis of Russian interference in the presidential campaign by relying on the “revelations” of a mysterious hacker group, reinforces this thesis. It’s about armouring the Democrats’ campaign with a pre-emptive shot.
  Incidentally, the three theories are not mutually exclusive. It shouldn’t be long before we know more.
  In the meantime, amidst this wild media howl, one may wonder whether the most sensible person is not that US Air Force intelligence officer, Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated in front of the White House last Monday as a sign of protest against the Israeli massacre of Palestinians and called for the “liberation of Palestine”. This fact is deliberately ignored by the European media, but it is strangely reminiscent of the sacrifice of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, who burned himself to death in a square in Saigon in 1963 in protest against the Diem government (see Caitlin Johnstone: “He Burned Himself Alive to Turn Eyes to Gaza” [consortiumnews.com]).
  History seems to stutter once again. In any case, this desperate act, which is just a repetition of a cascade of suicides of the same kind, reveals the deep psychological unease that afflicts soldiers when they have to fulfill orders without any moral sense.  •

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2024/nr-5-5-maerz-2024/von-nawalny-bis-aaron-bushnell-das-stottern-der-geschichte

 

GUSNOTE: FROM WHAT I UNDERSTAND FROM SCOTT RITTER — A FAR MORE INFORMED DUDE THAN THE DAILY — NAVALNY COULD NOT BE EXCHANGED IN A PRISONER SWAP WITH THE USA. THE SWAPS ARE USUALLY DONE SPY FOR SPY. NAVALNY WAS NEVER CHARGED FOR SPYING, THOUGH HE WAS TECHNICALLY A CIA/MI6 AGENT/ASSET — BUT ONLY FOR CORRUPTION AND THREATENING THE STATE WITH VIOLENCE. READ THE ARTICLE BY SCOTT, AND YOU MIGHT LEARN SOMETHING, BUT I'M NOT HOLDING MY BREATH... THE WESTERN MEDIA, INCLUDING THE NEW DAILY, IS APPALLING AND BLIND...

 

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SEE ALSO PART 2

What Happened to Alexei Navalny This Time

By John Helmer

February 20, 2024 

 

Since a pack of lies about Alexei Navalny won last year’s Oscar for the best documentary film of the year when he was alive, there is little doubt he can win another Oscar when he is dead.

But alive or dead, the prize-winning propaganda surrounding Navalny’s story bears no resemblance to the truth. This is what happens in wartime, especially when the side which is losing the war on the battlefield—that is the U.S., NATO and Ukraine—claims to be winning the war of words against Russia.

The Navalny story is now in two parts: Part 1, the alleged Novichok in his airport cup of tea, in his hotel water bottle, and then in his underpants which causes Navalny’s collapse, but fails to be detected by Russian doctors in Omsk, by German doctors in Berlin and Munich, and then by Swedish and French state laboratories.

Part 2, Navalny’s sudden death after he had taken a walk in the IK-3 penal colony in the village of Kharp, in the Russian Arctic region of Yamalo-Nenets.

The first part took 62 reports in this archive to expose the faking: The most telling evidence of this came from Navalny himself in the documented tests of his blood, urine and hair. According to these data, Navalny’s collapse was the outcome of an overdose of lithium, benzodiazepines, and other drugs.

Part 2 of the Navalny story began last Friday, February 16, with the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) announcement, followed by an official telegram to his mother in Moscow, that he had died just after two in the afternoon, Yamalo-Nenets time; that was just after noon Moscow time.

Two hours later the Russian media began carrying the official announcement. The wording of the last line of the announcement is significant: “The causes of death are being established,” the FSIN statement said. Causes, plural.

In the UK coroner’s court practice, what this means is that there is likely to have been a sequence of causation, medically speaking, with the first or proximate cause of death identified as heart, brain, or lung injury or failure; and the second, intervening or contributory cause of death, such as biochemical factors, including prescription drugs in lethal combination; mRNA anti-Covid vaccination triggering fatal blood clots; or homicidal poisons.

For example, in the case of the alleged Russian Novichok death of Dawn Sturgess in England in 2018, the evidence is of British government tampering with the post-mortem reports to add Novichok when it was not identified at first.

In Navalny’s case, poisoning on the order of President Vladimir Putin has already been announced as the cause of Navalny’s death without evidence at all. The delay time required for the complicated processes of forensic pathology and toxicology to establish the evidence has been reported in the Anglo-American media to signify cover-up and body snatching.

Meduza, an oppositionist publication in Riga, reports that “a doctor who advised Navalny’s associates” has said that blood clotting was “an unlikely cause of death.” This is medically false.

In speculation of poisoning as a cause of death, there is at least as much likelihood that Navalny, his team, and their CIA and MI6 handlers devised a repeat of the August 2020 Tomsk operation, decided when Navalny met with his lawyer at the prison on February 14, but implemented two days later without the resuscitation Navalny himself was expecting.

The Anglo-American propaganda warfare army is already pronouncing the contributory Cause 2—Putin did it—as the cause of Navalny’s death.

If the Russians announce the proximate Cause 1 as cardiac arrest or brain aneurism, without a Cause 2, they will not be believed. In the short term, Cause 2 cannot be established with credibility in Russia since it took the British government ten years—2006-2016—to fabricate their story of Russian polonium poisoning in the case of Alexander Litvinenko.

In the Russian Novichok cases in England, it has so far taken six years of court, police and pathologist proceedings, 2018-2024, without outcome, and another two years will follow.

The problem for readers to interpret what has happened is that the Anglo-American propaganda warfare machine is better at what it does than the Russian side.

But when it comes to war with guns, not words, the Russian side is far superior, as can be seen in Ukraine right now.

Accordingly, the Kremlin has decided to concentrate on the main fight.

Inside Russia, it has been obvious for a long time that, in or out of prison, Navalny alive was politically insignificant, now even less. The new Western propaganda is as ineffectual for Russians as Navalny was himself.

So the purpose of the propaganda is different.

President Joseph Biden’s statement on Navalny’s death makes this clear: “This tragedy reminds us of the stakes of this moment. We have to provide the funding so Ukraine can keep defending itself against Putin’s vicious onslaughts and war crimes. You know, there was a bipartisan Senate vote that passed overwhelmingly in the United States Senate to fund Ukraine. Now, as I’ve said before, and I mean this in the literal sense: History is watching. History is watching the House of Representatives. The failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten. It’s going to go down in the pages of history. It really is. It’s consequential.”

For the German blood and urine proof of Navalny’s lithium and benzodiazepine addiction, start here and here.

For the evidence from testing of Navalny’s hair, click here.

 

The scientific research indicating the blood-clot risk from the coronavirus mRNA vaccines is summarized in many places, for example, here.

The medical consensus on the risk of combining benzodiazepines with other drugs through liver enzyme failure and fatal tachycardia has been documented here.

Russian doctors typically prescribe a benzodiazepine called Grandaxin (Tofisopam in the West) for reducing bipolar mood swings, diffuse anxiety, and panic attacks. If combined with a sedative also commonly prescribed in Russia for sleeplessness and branded as Teraligen (Alimemazine), the risk of liver enzyme failure leading to heart attack is not as well known as it is in the U.S. and UK, and not monitored by regular liver testing.

Navalny, his family, and his organization have never acknowledged his prior medical conditions, nor the medications he had been taking. To date, however, they have made no complaints against the Federal Penitentiary Service for depriving Navalny of the medicines he had requested.

It remains to be seen whether the family or the prison service releases these personal data now.

Listen to the Gorilla Radio discussion with Chris Cook, recorded over 60 minutes on Sunday morning, Moscow time, February 18...

There is a notable difference between the U.S. and NATO leaders on what happened to Navalny.

In the wording Biden read out in his press conference, he said: “Make no mistake—make no mistake, Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death. Putin is responsible.” When pressed by a reporter to clarify “was this an assassination?” the President said: “The answer is, I—we don’t know exactly what happened, but there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something that Putin and his—and his thugs did.”

The innuendo of murder does not (repeat not) appear in the statements by the French, German and British leaders.

The most loyal among the smaller allies of the U.S. were also reluctant to repeat Biden’s claim, following the French and British lead instead. Their remarks indicate the U.S. is failing to hold its front against the Russians.

Canadian government leaders were circumspect on the cause of Navalny’s death. The one exception was Bob Rae, the former Ontario premier and current Canadian representative at the United Nations. Rae tweeted: “Putin murdered #Navalny just as surely as if he’d strangled him with his bare hands.”

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong stopped short of charging homicide, but imitated Biden: “We hold the Russian Government solely responsible for his treatment and death in prison.”

The New Zealand government was more cautious. Foreign Minister Winston Peters told reporters that Navalny’s death was “untimely…Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones.”

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon tweeted he was “saddened to hear of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death. He was a fierce advocate of freedom and anti-corruption.” When pressed by a reporter, Luxon added that he might talk to the Russian ambassador.

 

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/02/20/what-happened-to-alexei-navalny-this-time/

 

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it's time for being earnest.....

 

NOTE: 

John Helmer is 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. He first set up his bureau in 1989, making him today the doyen of the foreign press corps in Russia.

His family has many links to Russia. The founding father was a soldier from Denmark in Napoleon’s Grande Armée, who in 1806 decided his chances of survival were greater if he didn’t try to keep Napoleon company on the return home. Other family members were killed by the Germans during the invasion of the Soviet Union of 1941.

Born and educated in Australia, then at Harvard University, Helmer has also been a professor of political science, of sociology, and of journalism, and an advisor to government heads in Australia, Greece, the United States, and Sri Lanka.

He is a regular presenter on Russian topics in China, Western Europe, and the United States, and at conferences organized by CRU, Center for Management Technologies, the Vicenza (Italy) Fair, and other industry conventions.

Before Russia, Helmer published several books in the US on military and political topics. Essays on the American presidency and on urban policy in the US followed in book compilations in 1981 and 1982; essays on Greek and Middle Eastern politics between 1986 and 1989. Since 1989 he has published almost exclusively on Russian topics.

Today Helmer is one of the most widely read Russian specialists in the business world for his news-breaking stories on Russian base and precious metals, diamonds, mining, shipping, insurance, food trade, and business policy.

 

ONE OF HIS LATEST WORK IS DANCES WITH BEARS....

 

 

 

Moscow’s Basmanny Court has issued an arrest warrant for Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the late opposition figure Alexey Navalny, the city courts’ press service revealed on Tuesday. She has been charged with being part of an extremist group, it said.

The court “upheld a motion [submitted] by investigators and ordered [Navalnaya] to be put into custody for two months,” the statement published on Telegram said. This would begin from the moment of her extradition to Russia or if she is detained within the country, it added.

The court said Navalnaya had “evaded” law enforcement authorities. Under Russian law, membership in an extremist organization is punishable with a fine of between 300,000 and 600,000 rubles ($3,450 and $6,900) or up to six years behind bars.

The court’s official statement did not elaborate on which specific actions taken by Navalnaya had led to the charges, only that she had participated in an “extremist community.” The Russian news agency Interfax reported, citing sources, that her case is related to her participation in structures founded by her late husband.

Several organizations created by Navalny, including his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), have been designated extremist in Russia in recent years. The opposition figure was imprisoned in 2021 for violating the terms of an earlier suspended sentence.

He was handed an additional nine-year sentence in early 2022 for contempt of court and a second fraud conviction. In August 2023, he was sentenced to an additional 19 years on multiple extremism-related charges including creating an extremist group, endorsing extremism, financing such activities, and luring minors into them, as well as rehabilitating Nazi ideology.

Russian courts had previously issued similar arrest warrants against a number of Navalny’s allies, including his former right-hand man, Leonid Volkov, who had earlier headed the FBK, as well as the organization’s current head, Maria Pevchikh. None of them are currently in Russia.

Navalnaya herself also left Russia back in 2021 together with her children after the arrest of her husband. She has lived abroad ever since. In March 2024, she pledged to continue her husband’s work.

Navalny died at a penal colony in February while serving his sentence. The prison authorities said the 47-year-old suddenly fell ill after a walk and collapsed, and efforts to resuscitate him were unsuccessful. The FBK stated that the death certificate provided to Navalny’s mother said he had died of natural causes.

https://www.rt.com/russia/600773-arrest-warrant-navalny-widow/

 

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A hit man, a shock death, and 18 months of secrecy: How the Russia-prisoner swap unfolded behind the scenes

 

By Rebecca Armitage

 

The top-secret prisoner swap involving six countries, dozens of prisoners, and 18 months of diplomacy was like an intricate puzzle box.

If the West didn't get the sequence of twists and turns exactly right, it would never be solved.

Somehow, they had to persuade Russia to give up 16 of its highest profile prisoners — including foreigners and local dissidents — who were serving lengthy sentences in the country's penal colonies. 

In exchange, the West said they would be willing to free several Russians in their custody. 

Everyone involved in the painstaking process knew it would ultimately come down to the decision of one mercurial and isolated man: Vladimir Putin. 

And it soon became clear that there was one prisoner Putin wanted to bring home the most. 

Vadim Krasikov, a much-feared professional hit man, was serving a life sentence in Germany.

If he could be included in the exchange, the Kremlin said, the deal would be done. 

What followed was one of the largest and most complex prisoner swaps since the Cold War, one that relied on hundreds of diplomats, spies and heads of states to operate under a cloak of secrecy. 

The exchange was almost derailed by a shock death, competing global agendas, and a US president's fading political ambitions [JOE'S BRAIN WAS FADING MUCH FASTER THAN HIS AMBITIONS]. 

But this week, 24 people arrived at Ankara Airport as prisoners, and then flew to their respective homes as free men and women. 

This is how the deal was done. 

The journalists, the dissidents and the hit man

The prisoners released by Russia are a mix of battle-weary local dissidents who have risked death to resist the Kremlin, as well as foreigners who found themselves pawns in Putin's game of global chess.

Among the 16 prisoners were three American citizens that the Biden administration was determined to bring home. 

Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal's Russia correspondent, was eating in a steakhouse in the Ural mountains in early 2023 when the restaurant was stormed by security agents.

The young reporter spent almost 500 days in captivity on charges of espionage, a claim the US government described as ludicrous.

Alsu Kurmasheva, an American-Russian journalist was also detained in 2023, accused of "spreading false information" about the country's military. 

And former US marine Paul Whelan was arrested on espionage charges during a visit to Moscow in 2018.

"Russia says it caught James Bond on a spy mission. In reality, they abducted Mr Bean on holiday," Whelan told the court in 2019.

The 54-year-old, who has previously complained of feeling "abandoned" by the US after missing out on previous prisoner swaps, was top of America's priority list. 

In 2022, the US first tried to broker a deal that would see Slovenia free two suspected Russian spies in exchange for Whelan. 

But Russia wanted more. 

They would settle for nothing less than Krasikov's freedom. 

"He was certainly the biggest fish that the Russians wanted back," said a US administration official, who asked not to be named so he could discuss the negotiations freely. 

"Nobody is turning a blind eye to his crimes and to his connection to Russian intelligence services."

In 2019, Krasikov rode his bicycle through a Berlin park, before stopping to assassinate a former Chechen separatist fighter [GUS: A TERRORIST SPONSORED BY THE USA].

The brazen murder in broad daylight saw Krasikov praised by Putin as a patriot. It also saw him jailed for life in Germany. 

The country's leader, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, was uncomfortable about setting a precedent that might further encourage Russia to take more hostages as bargaining chips. 

"The demands the [Russians] were making of me required me to get some significant concessions from Germany which they originally concluded they could not do," US President Joe Biden explained in a press conference.

But in February 2024, Scholz made a counter offer. 

He would consider releasing Krasikov — but only if the Kremlin gave up one of its biggest enemies in return. 

The plot to rescue Navalny ends in tragedy 

Putin's arch-nemesis, Alexei Navalny [PLEASE ABC, NAVALNY WAS NEVER PUTIN'S ARCH ENEMY. NAVALNY WAS A CIA/MI6 ASSET — SEE ABOVE ARTICLE, BY SCOTT RITTER], was languishing in a penal colony in the Arctic Circle when he was suddenly given a glimmer of hope. 

The Russian opposition politician was serving a lengthy prison sentence for embezzlement and extremism — charges that human rights groups say were invented to crush dissent. [BULLSHIT. NAVALNY HAD BEEN WARNED THAT SHOULD HE RETURN TO RUSSIA HE WOULD BE CHARGED WITH BEING A CROOK (WHICH HE WAS—AS WELL AS BEING A RACIST)]

But Navalny had always enjoyed strong links to Germany. 

In 2020, after he was poisoned with a nerve-agent, German officials arranged for him to be transferred to Berlin for life-saving treatment.

"I know it sounds a bit over the top, but Germany has become a special country for me," Navalny said after he recovered.

He was arrested almost as soon as he returned to Russia, something that alarmed Germany.

During a visit to the White House in February, Scholz told Biden he wanted to secure Nalvany's freedom once and for all. 

"It was two guys actually trying to figure out a solution," US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said in a press conference. 

"That was the nature of all of the conversations, and ultimately, the chancellor was able to say to the president, 'let's do this'."

A week later, Navalny was found dead. 

The circumstances remain shrouded in mystery, with Russian officials claiming he complained of feeling "unwell" before collapsing at the penal colony. 

"There is no doubt that the death of Navalny was the consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did," a furious Biden said.[BIDEN WOULD NOT ANY MORE CLUES ABOUT NAVALNY'S DEMISE THAN A COCKROACH ON PLANET SATURN...]

It was a devastating turn of events, not only for the Russian dissident's loved ones and supporters, but for the fledgling prisoner exchange. 

"At the time, on that day — honestly, to be frank with you — the team felt like the wind had been taken out of our sails," the US official said. 

However, Scholz eventually decided to go through with the swap, even if he was unable to save Navalny. 

"Nobody took the decision lightly to let go a murderer serving a life sentence after only a few years," Scholz told reporters this week.

But he ultimately decided that Germany's solidarity with the US mattered more. 

'Their brutal ordeal is over' 

On July 24, Biden was on the brink of two huge moments in his presidency. 

First, he called the Slovenian prime minister to put the finishing touches on the prisoner exchange. 

Then, an hour later, he announced that he would not be running for a second term, bowing to pressure from his party to step aside for Vice-President Kamala Harris. 

While America was gripped by political drama, the deal was quietly being carried out behind the scenes. 

In late June, reporters and activists began to notice that several foreign prisoners in Russian custody were being tried in court with remarkable speed. 

Both Gershkovich and Kurmasheva went through the courts in just a couple of days. 

Then, other prisoners in Russian penal colonies suddenly went missing. 

Detainees are moved around often, but activists found it strange that so many were being transferred at once. 

"We all hope that these are good signs," Ivan Pavlov, a prominent human rights lawyer, told Reuters. 

On August 1, as the prisoners were ferried to Türkiye for the exchange, the US finally revealed its long-held secret. 

"Their brutal ordeal is over," Biden said. 

"They're free." 

Fears remain the exchange will only reinforce to Russia the value of arresting foreigners and using them as leverage. 

After all, it's not only journalists and activists who are free, but a convicted assassin as well. 

But the alliance of countries that put this deal together say they're convinced it was the right decision. 

"To secure the release of innocent people overseas and innocent Americans, you have to make some tough decisions," said the US administration official. 

"You have to make some tough calls."

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-03/how-the-russia-prisoner-swap-unfolded/104176200

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, says she will one day run for president of Russia when Vladimir Putin is no longer in power.

In an interview with the BBC on Monday, local time, Ms Navalnaya, who now lives abroad in an undisclosed location, said she would return to Russia and contend for Kremlin chief when the time was right: "I will participate in the elections … as a candidate."

"My political opponent is Vladimir Putin. And I will do everything to make his regime fall as soon as possible," she told the BBC's Katie Razzall.

Ms Navalnaya also expressed her desire to see Mr Putin behind bars, saying her return was impossible while he remained leader.

"I would love [if] Putin will be in prison. I want him to be in prison, in Russian prison," she said.

"And it's not just about [the fact that] I want him to be in [the] same conditions like Alexei [Navalny] was, but it's very important for me [he go to jail]."

In July, a Russian court ordered Ms Navalnaya's arrest in absentia.

The charges against her were not specified, but appeared to relate to authorities designation of Mr Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation as an extremist organisation.

Putin unchallenged

Mr Putin has been Russia's paramount leader since the last day of 1999, and is currently 72 years of age.

Since the sudden death of Mr Navalny in a Russian prison in the Arctic Circle in February, no single leader has emerged to unite the country's disparate opposition, and there has been significant infighting between different Russian dissident groups abroad.

Mr Navalny died aged 47, depriving the Russian opposition of its most charismatic and popular leader. He had been serving sentences totalling more than 30 years on charges including "terrorism and extremism" he said were rigged in order to silence his criticism of Mr Putin.

The Kremlin casts Mr Navalny's political allies as dangerous extremists out to destabilise the country on behalf of the West.

It says Mr Putin enjoys overwhelming support among ordinary Russians, pointing to opinion polls which put his approval rating above 80 per cent.

Mr Navalny described Mr Putin's Russia as a brittle criminal state run by thieves, sycophants and spies who care only about money. 

He had long forecast Russia could face seismic political turmoil, including revolution.

In one of his last major essays in 2023, Mr Navalny admonished the Russian elite for its venality, expressing hatred for those who squandered a historic opportunity to reform the country after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Ms Navalnaya has accused Mr Putin of ordering the killing of her husband, a claim the Kremlin has repeatedly dismissed.

US intelligence agencies have determined Mr Putin did not order Mr Navalny killed, according to the AP and the Wall Street Journal.

In August, Ms Navalnaya dismissed information from investigators her husband died from "a combination of diseases".

She told the BBC the Anti-Corruption Foundation she now leads in her husband's place has evidence which she will reveal when they have "the whole picture".

Reuters/ABC

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-22/yulia-navalnaya-says-will-stand-for-russia-president-after-putin/104504472

 

NAVALNY WAS NO HERO, BUT AN ASSET OF THE WESTERN INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES... HE WAS A RACIST, A THUG AND A SPY.... READ FROM TOP. SEE SCOTT RITTER ARTICLE ABOVE...

WESTERN NEWS OUTLET LIKE THE ABC WILL CARRY ON PARROTTING THAT NAVALNY WAS A SAINT... THE CIA IS DOING ITS JOB VIA THE MEDIA...

 

 

READ FROM TOP

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.