Both were controversial characters and critics of the governments that imprisoned them. Both died under suspicious circumstances (their families both maintain they were effectively murdered). And both died in the past six weeks, Navalny in February and Lira in January.

A crucial difference in their stories, however, is that Navalny perished in an Arctic penal colony after being arrested in Russia (an enemy state), while Lira’s life ended in a Ukrainian prison, abandoned by the pro-Kiev government in Washington, D.C.

The study compared the coverage of Navalny and Lira’s death in five leading outlets: The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC News, Fox News and CNN over six days. These outlets were chosen for their reach and influence and, together, could be said to reasonably represent the corporate media spectrum as a whole.

The data was compiled using the Dow Jones Factiva news database and searches on the websites of the news organizations. This study takes no position on the matter of Navalny, Lira or the Russia-Ukraine war.

In total, the five outlets collectively ran 731 articles or segments that discussed or mentioned Navalny’s death, including 151 from the Times, 75 from the Post, 177 from ABC, 215 from Fox, and 113 from CNN. This means that each organization studied ran more than one piece per hour.

This media storm stands in stark contrast to the Lira case, where the entire coverage of his death [by the five outlets in the study] boiled down to a single Fox News article.

Moreover, the article in question described him as “spreading pro-Russian propaganda” in its headline, did not inform readers that there was anything suspicious about his death, and appeared to be doing its best to justify his treatment in the body of the article.

Aside from that, there was radio silence.

It is perhaps understandable that Navalny’s death was covered in much greater detail than Lira’s. Navalny was a political leader known across Russia and the world who died just weeks before the country’s presidential elections.

Yet Lira was far from unknown. News anchor Tucker Carlson, for example, devoted an entire show to his imprisonment, while high-profile figures like Twitter owner Elon Musk took up his cause.

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller has been repeatedly asked about Lira’s case and has failed to offer concrete answers. As an American living in Ukraine who took a pro-Russian line on the invasion, Lira built up a following of hundreds of thousands of people across his social media platforms.

As an American citizen who died while in the custody of a government that the U.S. has provided with tens of billions of dollars in aid, it could be argued that Lira’s case is particularly noteworthy for an American audience and should be given special attention.

Moreover, Lira died more than one month before Navalny, meaning that the study compares more than 40 days of Lira coverage to just six days of coverage of Navalny’s death, making the disparity all the more glaring.

A Tale of Two Deaths

Alexey Navalny was a lawyer, activist and the leader of the opposition Russia of the Future Party. A fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin, for many, especially in the West, he became a symbol of the struggle for human rights and democracy in Russia.

In 2021, he released a documentary film alleging that Putin was building an enormous $1 billion palace on the Black Sea for himself.

Navalny made many enemies and was allegedly poisoned in 2020. Although most in the West believe the Kremlin was behind the incident, this is not a commonly held view in Russia.

After returning from Germany for medical treatment in January 2021, he was incarcerated. On Feb. 16 he died at the notorious Polar Wolf penal camp in Russia’s far north.

“Vladimir Putin killed my husband,” Navalny’s wife, Yulia, said in a statement, adding, “The most important thing we can do for Alexey and for ourselves is to keep fighting more desperately and more fiercely than before.”

Western leaders are largely of the same opinion. President Joe Biden said that, while the details are still unclear, “there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something Putin and his thugs did.”

Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics said that he was “brutally murdered by the Kremlin.” “That’s a fact, and that is something one should know about the true nature of Russia’s current regime,” he added. 

Other politicians were more cautious. “Why this hurry to accuse someone?” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) asked. “If the death is under suspicion, we must first carry out an investigation to find out why this person died,” he said.

[Ukraine’s intelligence chief rejected the Russian assassination stories, saying Navalny died of natural causes, from a blood clot.]

Despite this and Lula’s warning, Western nations are already taking action against Russia. Both the U.S. and the U.K. have announced new rounds of “major sanctions” against Moscow, although it is far from clear to what extent previous sanctions actually hurt Russia.

Although he enjoyed a good reputation in the West, in his homeland, Navalny was a controversial character.

Earlier in his political career, he was a prominent leader in xenophobic, far-right marches. He also appeared in a political video where he described the Muslim people of the Northern Caucasus as an “infestation of cockroaches.”

While bugs can be killed with a slipper, in the case of human infestations, “I recommend a pistol,” he said before mimicking shooting one. According to a 2023 poll, just 9 percent of Russians held a positive view of him, compared to 57 percent who disapproved of his activities.

Lira, meanwhile, found success as an author and filmmaker earlier in life. He gained international notoriety, however, because of the 2022 Russian invasion.

As an American living in Ukraine at the time, his thoughts and perspectives traveled widely. He was far from a shrinking violet, often taking a strongly pro-Russian stance on the war, labeling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “cokehead,” and praising Putin’s move as “one of the most brilliant invasions in military history.”

It was this sort of content that angered both the Ukrainian government and many in the United States.

The Daily Beast, for instance, attacked him, describing him as a “pro-Putin shill,” and went so far as to contact the Ukrainian government to make them aware of Lira’s work.

Lira confirmed that, after The Daily Beast’s article, he was arrested by the Ukrainian secret police.

He was rearrested in May 2023 and would never see freedom again. Like with Navalny, Lira’s relatives claim he was badly mistreated in prison, and they blame the government for his death.

“I cannot accept the way my son has died. He was tortured, extorted, [held] incommunicado for 8 months and 11 days, and the U.S. Embassy did nothing to help my son,” Lira’s father wrote. “The responsibility of this tragedy is [with] the dictator Zelensky [and] with the concurrence of a senile American President, Joe Biden… My pain is unbearable. The world must know what is going on in Ukraine with that inhuman dictator Zelensky,” he added.

While Lira was undoubtedly far from neutral, neither was the Western press, which has largely taken a pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia stance. Like Navalny, Lira also had a controversial past.

Under the name “Coach Red Pill,” he made dating and relationship advice videos for the misogynistic manosphere community, where he reportedly offered sexist advice to men such as “never date a woman in her thirties.” [He also wrote in a Telegram post that Augusto Pinochet was the best leader Chile ever had. Lira was Chilean in origin.]

A Tireless Visionary vs. Human Trash

Not only was the coverage of Navalny’s death extensive, but it also portrayed the deceased political activist in a highly positive light and gave ample space to figures claiming he was effectively assassinated by the Russian government.

The New York Times, for example, published an op-ed by Nadya Tolokonnikova of the anti-Putin punk band Pussy Riot, in which she said Navalny gave “hope and inspiration to people around the world.” “For many of us in Russia, Alexey was like an older brother or a father figure,” she said, adding:

“He helped me and millions of Russians realize that our country doesn’t have to belong to K.G.B. agents and the Kremlin’s henchmen. He gave us something else, too: a vision he called the ‘beautiful Russia of the future.’ This vision is immortal, unlike us humans. President Vladimir Putin may have silenced Alexey, who died last week. But no matter how hard he tries, Mr. Putin won’t be able to kill Alexey’s beautiful dream.”

In contrast, the sparse coverage Lira’s death received in any outlet resembling a mainstream one was overwhelmingly negative. The Daily Beast, for example, [which was outside the study] ran with the headline “U.S. Finally Confirms American Dating Coach-Turned-Kremlin Shill Died in Ukraine.”

Its subheadline read, “Gonzalo Lira, a blogger who pushed Kremlin propaganda in Ukraine, died after apparently coming down with pneumonia,” meaning that there was no mention of his arrest or jailing in either title or subtitle.

Most media consumers (who do little more than browse headlines) would assume from that description that an awful person met a natural death. The article went on to tear down his credentials as a journalist (which The Daily Beast used only in “scare quotes” when discussing him) and accused him of making “hysterical” pronouncements about how the Ukrainian government was after him – even though he had just died in a Ukrainian prison.

This “good riddance to bad rubbish” framing encapsulated what little coverage of Lira’s death there was in the corporate press.

Worthy & Unworthy Victims

How to explain such an overwhelming disparity in coverage? That American media have so steadfastly ignored the death of Gonzalo Lira – an American citizen – cannot be boiled down to its lack of newsworthiness. Instead, Lira is a victim of the phenomenon that media scholars call worthy and unworthy victims.

In 1988, academics Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky developed the theory of worthy vs. unworthy victims in their book Manufacturing Consent. Together, they compared the media coverage of various violent actions around the world in order to ascertain why certain atrocities are ignored and why others become front-page news.

To Herman and Chomsky, whether the media would be interested in a violent story came down largely to two factors: who is the perpetrator, and who is the victim?

If the perpetrator is an enemy state or hostile actor, then media interest will be exponentially higher.

However, if the United States or its allies are at fault, then the media is likely to ignore the story. Likewise, if the victim is the U.S. or an ally, they will receive a great deal of attention.

However, the media have little interest in presenting enemy actors or states as victims, so those cases will be overlooked.

That is why Herman and Chomsky found, for example, that the coverage of one single murdered priest in an enemy nation (Communist Poland) drew more air time and column inches than the assassinations of over 100 churchmen in massacres committed by U.S.-backed groups in Latin America.

In short, your death will only be covered extensively if there is political capital to be made out of it – if the incident allows media to present enemy parties as barbarous and the U.S. or friendly parties as virtuous or worthy of sympathy.

Navalny was a Western-backed political figure attempting to unseat Putin from power. His death, therefore, checks both boxes of the Worthy Victims checklist, hence the 24-hour coverage across the press.

Lira, on the other hand, was a pro-Russian journalist and commentator who relentlessly critiqued and attacked the Ukrainian government. He is neither a sympathetic character in the corporate media’s eyes, nor does it make any political sense to present the Zelensky administration (whom the U.S. is steadfastly supporting) as responsible for killing an American citizen.

Hence, his story is dropped and does not pass through the filters to make it onto our screens and into public consciousness.

This study is certainly not arguing that Navalny’s death is not a newsworthy event, nor that Lira deserves equal or more coverage. Nor does it take any stance on Navalny or Lira as individuals or on the wider geopolitical tussle between the United States, Russia and Ukraine.

It merely uses these stories as case studies to show that what makes it as “news” in establishment media is not random but the result of an intensely politicized process. In other words, when it comes to deaths, murders or assassinations, the media will likely only cover yours if there is something to be gained from it.

Alan MacLeodis senior staff writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

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.

Scott Ritter will discuss this article on Ep. 136 of Ask the Inspector.

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.

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 playbook that Donald Trump was a Russian agent. In a 2018 column, Dowd had inanely suggested that Trump gravitated to Vladimir Putin because “Putin reminded Trump of his authoritarian father.”

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.”

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. Navalny also advocated for sanctions that harm the Russian people.

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.

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 Magazine how 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.

1. This was an extreme right-wing anti-communist group that accused Dwight Eisenhower, along with other prominent government officials, of being a communist.
2. Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano, The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), 18.
3. Maureen Dowd, “Why Does Trump Insist on Hugging Putin the Menace,” The New York Times, July 16, 2018,  Maureen Dowd: Why does Trump insist on hugging Putin the menace? – The Irish Times. Dowd in this column referred to Putin as a killer, a designation she never applied to Barack Obama who actually bragged about his killing prowess—in the drone war.
4. Maureen Dowd, “Florida’s Fraudster and Russia’s Killer,” The New York Times, February 18, 2024, 3. Alternative media outlets sadly were little better in some cases than their mainstream counterparts. Democracy Now, for example, echoed the flattery of The New York Times about Navalny and interviewed anti-Putin writer Masha Gessen who told host Amy Goodman: “I have no doubt … that he was killed. Putin was determined to see Navalny die in prison.” These claims, however, which Goodman did not question Gessen on, have not been substantiated and an investigation into Navalny’s death is pending. Goodman later did not question Gessen when she repeated the official narrative about Navalny’s alleged poisoning when evidence has come to light challenging this story.
5. See Kuzmarov and Marciano, The Russians are Coming, Again. Navalny’s supporters claim that Navalny was confined to brutally cold isolation cells in prison and subjected to torture resulting in his death, while Russian authorities reported that Navalny died in prison of a blood clot. Previously, there was indication that Navalny had been in poor health, which mainstream U.S. media has not reported. A Russian investigation into the cause of death is pending.
6. Amy Knight, Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2017). Knight wrote: “I do not claim to have definitive proof of the complicity of Putin and his allies in these crimes [assassinations discussed in the book].” Independent investigations have found that people whose deaths were attributed to Putin by Western media were killed by Russian mafia figures and oligarchs who hated Putin and wanted to set him up, or possibly by Western intelligence agencies for the same purpose.
7. See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Zelensky’s White House Visit Comes Amidst Escalation of Mafia Style Assassination Campaign Resulting in Murder of Ukrainian Socialist Party Leader,” CovertAction Magazine, December 25, 2023, Zelensky’s White House Visit Comes Amidst Escalation of Mafia Style Assassination Campaign Resulting in Murder of Ukrainian Socialist Party Leader – CovertAction Magazine
8. Carlson interviewed Putin in Moscow on February 6.
9. Nicholas Kirstof, “What We Can Learn from Navalny,” The New York Times, February 18, 2024, 3. ↑
10. In August 2023, Navalny was given a 19-year sentence to add to his existing 9-year sentence after a court found that he had retroactively financed and incited “extremist activities” through his now-defunct Anti-Corruption Foundation. Judges also found the opposition leader guilty of “rehabilitating Nazi ideology.”
11. Navalny was also convicted for the theft of $500,000 from a state-owned timber company, Kirovles, for which he was fined 500,000 rubles ($8,500).
12. Jacques Baud, The Navalny Case: Conspiracy to Serve Foreign Policy (Paris: Max Milo, 2023), 17, 18. ↑
13. Baud, The Navalny Case, 17, 18.
14. Baud, The Navalny Case, 85.
15. Baud, The Navalny Case, 86.
16. Baud, The Navalny Case, 21. After the verdict was announced, Yves Rocher issued a statement saying, “Suspicions of fraud on the part of the Navalny brothers against private companies have been confirmed by three judgments and this case is therefore closed and it is no longer possible to reverse it.”
17. In February 2021, Amnesty International stripped Navalny of “prisoner of conscience status” due to a history of hate speech. In one video clip, he is featured behind a table with a pistol, shoe and fly swatter and states that “everyone knows we can use a fly swatter against flies and a shoe against cockroaches.” Navalny then asks, “But what happens if the cockroaches are too great and the flies too aggressive?” When a person dressed in black comes screaming toward him, Navalny shoots the man point-blank. A dead body appears. “In that case, I recommend a pistol.” See video here. Another video has Navalny dressed up as a dentist who says his job is to “root out cavities [immigrants].” When neo-Nazi skinheads come on the screen, Nazis giving the Hitler salute, and war criminals hanged at Nuremberg, Navalny states: “These aren’t real specialists. You need to precisely and firmly deport.” Frightened, Central Asians are subsequently shown being rounded up as a yanked cavity rolls across the screen. Then an airplane appears. Only blockheads think that “nationalism is violence,” tempers Navalny, adding that “we have the right to be Russians in Russia, and we are defending this right.”
18. Baud, The Navalny Case, 22.
19. Putin has long attempted to subordinate regional elites to the federal government, sometimes through strong-armed methods, in an attempt to strengthen the Russian state and economy. Navalny publicly advocated for “letting the Caucasus go,” while calling for the reintroduction of direct elections of regional governments. Since 2016/17, his campaign established regional offices far outside of Moscow and helped organize demonstrations in Yekaterinburg, a city in the Urals, in solidarity with separatist leaders who called for a “Urals Republic.” Navalny and his staff also supported protests in the far-eastern city of Khabarovsk over the arrest of the regional governor, Sergei Furgal, a member of the far-right Liberal Democratic Party, on murder charges. ↑
20. Baud, The Navalny Case, 87.
21. According to investigative journalist Lucy Komisar, Navalny became a player in America’s Russiagate operation. He published a video in 2018 claiming that Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska acted as a messenger between President Donald Trump’s ex-campaign chief Paul Manafort and a top Kremlin foreign policy official. Despite the release of the Mueller Report and other evidence that Russia Gate was a fraud, Navalny never corrected his anti-Trump video. According to Komisar, this confirms “not only [Navalny’s] standard for truthfulness in documentary work, but also what allies he has made in the U.S.”

Let’s say that even if the West is really trying to establish contacts with Russian civil society, bypassing the state, the choice is strange at least. This is clear to anyone who lives in Russia or can analyze the most superficial sociological data on the political preferences of Russians. Unfortunately, European and American diplomacy step on the same rake from year to year: they invent convenient Russian “public opinion leaders”, rely on them, inflate them in the media and show them as the main opponents of the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, for Russians, Alexei Navalny is a well-known personality, but hardly as popular and authoritative as it is customary to judge outside Russia. He made a name for himself as an instigator of mass protests. After last year’s high-profile events, his fame increased only in the Western media. After voluntarily returning from Germany in February 2021, Navalny was sentenced to almost three years in prison.

Did the imprisonment of Navalny add political points, did mass protests occur throughout Russia over his detention, does the Russian population support this “prisoner of conscience”? All of these questions can be answered unequivocally – no. At a certain stage, the leaders of the regional cells of the Navalny Anti-Corruption Foundation called for open street violence and illegal actions, for which, quite reasonably, the entire network of cells was declared extremist. However, most of the leaders eventually fled abroad. After that, instead of students, specially trained activists began to participate in the protests, and sticks, stones and special equipment began to be used against the rather tolerant police. This may have played a key role in the loss of popular support by the liberal opposition.

Instead of mass protests, information campaigns on social networks, boycotts and non-violent actions, which are quite possible and acceptable in Russia, we see support for Navalny only by those who, for one reason or another, are outside Russia: the fugitive oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, American and European NGOs, by supporters of Navalny who fled to the United States, in foreign media, and now also at the official level. Inside the European Parliament, the daughter of an oppositionist, Darya, was awarded with the prestigious Andrey Sakharov human rights award “For Freedom of Thought” just a month ago. The award was presented personally by the head of the European Parliament, David Sassoli, and was accepted by her colleague Leonid Volkov and daughter Daria. Without hinting at anything, let’s imagine for a second that in the Kremlin, in a solemn atmosphere, an award is presented to one of the organizers of the “yellow vests” protests in France or relatives of the detained American Republicans who stormed the Capitol a year ago. This is hardly imaginable even given that the support of the Yellow Vests or the Republicans is far greater than the support of Alexei Navalny in Russia.

Despite everything, protests in support of Navalny will be held in many cities. Here is the complete list. In the United States, in January of this year, actions in support of Navalny and against the “dictatorial regime of the Kremlin” will be held in seven metropolitan areas: Denver, Boston, New York, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago. In Europe – in Norway, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Czech Republic, Switzerland and Spain, as well as in five other cities in Australia and Georgia.

You do not need to be an international expert and specialist on Russia to understand that one of the main political lines that is massively supported in Russian society is the strengthening of sovereignty, the return to the global geopolitical arena and the desire for a parity dialogue with Western countries. Will foreign actions in support of Navalny give him more credibility in the eyes of Russian society? Of course not, and Western leaders have begun to understand this too. Therefore, already now they are looking for a worthy replacement for Navalny, who is of little interest in Russia itself, and various awards are rather an international human rights courtesy. Over the past twenty years, the West has not been able to feed its own or support a loyal pro-Western opposition leader in Russia. Russian society, after the difficult 90s, seems to have developed a strong immunity to the means of information warfare and Western “soft power” in general.

We can see same rake again and again: they invent “heroes” for themselves, invest in their support, and as a result we get the complete opposite. Looking, as they say in Russia, at “support from across the ocean,” the Russians will rally even more strongly around Vladimir Putin, and ordinary Europeans will, as always, reap the economic and political consequences of the break with Moscow. Mr. Navalny himself probably does not realize, but foreign curators have already sent him into retirement. He might be glad to play some kind of adventure, to play the main opponent of the authorities, but for Washington and Brussels he is already a waste material. They are already looking for a replacement for him, most likely – the same in quality and level of support in society, because there are simply no other liberal oppositionists in Russia.

It seems absurd, but the consequences of American adventures and demonstrative hostility of the European Union will in any case reap ordinary European taxpayers. The continuation of the policy of ultimatums, sanctions and support for imaginary heroes will hit EU exports, the hydrocarbon market and the positions of European business in general in equal measure.

Is it in our interests? Isn’t it time to somehow reconsider the vector of public diplomacy of the European Union and replace the record of the requiem for the Russian opposition with something more cheerful?

Philipp Jacoby, the only German doctor treating Alexei Navalny for alleged poisoning to have testified publicly, has given a new press interview to alter the interpretation of the evidence he gave last week. “People close to Navalny”, he now says, “warned me about John Helmer”.
In two telephone interviews on September 6, Jacoby revealed that the planning of his medical evacuation flight to Russia began in Shannon, Ireland, on August 19, 2020, the day before Navalny fell ill on a flight between Tomsk and Moscow on the morning of August 20, 2020.
Jacoby also testified that Maria Pevchikh, one of Navalny’s staff, had been the first to mention Novichok when they were talking together at the intensive care unit of Omsk Emergency Hospital Number 1, where Navalny was being treated, after his flight had been diverted for an emergency landing at Omsk. Later, Jacoby added, Pevchikh and Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s wife, had asked him — and he had agreed with them — to conceal their backpack containing water bottles from Navalny’s hotel room in Tomsk on to the German medevac aircraft, making it appear to be his own luggage and thereby avoid Russian detection at Omsk airport.
In a fresh interview for almost ninety minutes on Thursday evening, September 9, conducted in German, Jacoby did not claim his earlier interviews had been misquoted or misinterpreted. Instead, he revealed how close he has been to Navalnaya, corresponding by email with her after Navalny arrived in Germany for treatment.
Jacoby also issued the first personal attack by a German doctor or German government official on the medical expertise and truthfulness of the Russian doctors treating Navalny at Omsk. “The doctors in Omsk told us a cock and bull story [die Ärzte in Omsk haben mir einen Bären aufgebunden],” Jacoby now says, claiming they didn’t tell him the full truth. He adds that handwritten records of Navalny’s clinical tests he was shown by the Omsk hospital doctors “were unprofessional and could easily have been faked.” Jacoby did not acknowledge the papers he was shown were handwritten in English because the Omsk Hospital doctors believed Jacoby could not understand computer printouts in Russian.
On the evidence of the German clinical test records, published last December by Jacoby with thirteen of the treating doctors at the Charité hospital in Berlin, Jacoby confirms that lithium and several benzodiazepine drugs were found in Navalny’s blood and urine. In his first interview, Jacoby said he “had no idea where the lithium or benzodiazepines came from. Maybe he took it on a daily basis.”
In his new interview Jacoby said “either he took it regularly himself or the doctors in Omsk gave it to him to distract from the poisoning.”
Jacoby agreed by email to talk about his involvement in the Navalny case on the telephone. His first interview, conducted in English last Monday afternoon, September 6, ran for 27 minutes 43 seconds; seven hours later on the same day, his second interview lasted 14 minutes 31 seconds. For the record of Jacoby’s remarks, click to read.
After the first report of his evidence was published on Tuesday, September 7, Jacoby was asked by email: “In the event that you believe you have been misquoted or misinterpreted, or you detect errors of evidence, please let me know.” He did not reply. In his third interview two days later, he confirmed he had read the article, but did not comment on it.
Jacoby said last week he has eight years of experience as a doctor; his Facebook page says he graduated from the medical faculty at the University of Heidelberg in 2015 [3].
In his latest interview, Jacoby reveals he has been questioned as a material witness in the Navalny case by the European Commission on Human Rights, and by Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA). The BKA also asked him about Pevchikh’s water bottles. Later, the German government responded to questions from members of parliament, claiming they do not know how the water bottles got to Germany and they do not know a person named Maria Pevchikh.
Jacoby says that on August 20, 2020, when he was first briefed on the Navalny medevac mission at his aircraft base in Nuremberg, before takeoff to Omsk, he was told Navalny had been poisoned. “Yes, that was assumed from the start,” Jacoby now claims.
In a discussion of Navalny’s symptoms as he witnessed them in Omsk in his earlier interview, Jacoby admitted he and the two German paramedics with him were carrying only 6 milligrams of atropine, the standard antidote used for treating overdose and poison cases. He also said that from Omsk he had telephoned the Charité hospital in Berlin to discuss whether he should administer this atropine on the flight back to Berlin. He was told not to do that, he said. According Jacoby, he was told that for a poisoning case 750 mgs would be required.

ALEXEI NAVALNY’S DRUG PROFILE ON ARRIVAL IN BERLIN, AUGUST 22, 2020

Dr. Alexander Sabayev, the chief toxicologist at the Omsk Hospital, has revealed in a Russian interview that Navalny was given 1 mg of atropine when an intubation tube was inserted into his trachea. Sabayev confirmed that he received 2 additional doses of 1 mg each, for a total of 3 mg of atropine. Jacoby is critical of the Omsk doctors. “Administration of atropine for intubation is an outdated practice that is unusual in the west. But it could be that the atropine was given to increase the heart rate. Atropine is used to accelerate the heart rate, to reduce perspiration and to reduce saliva production.” Jacoby believes these were the reasons the Omsk doctors gave atropine.
Jacoby was asked why he had not given Navalny atropine on the flight to Berlin. He could have asked the doctors in Omsk for a sufficient amount. He replied that the doctors at the Charité had asked him not to administer atropine. The reason they gave him was that they wanted to be able to determine whether Navalny had received atropine in Russia.
Sabayev, has mentioned in his Russian press interviews that when initially tested in Omsk hospital, Navalny had a high blood sugar level. Two days later, glucose and insulin levels were back to normal by the time Navalny was tested on arrival at the Charité hospital.
Jacoby said in his latest interview that at Omsk hospital he saw equipment for injecting insulin on Navalny’s bed. He added he does not know whether Navalny was actually given insulin. The Russian doctors have said publicly, and Jacoby confirms they told him at the hospital, that they diagnosed Navalny’s condition as the result of a “metabolic disorder”. This general term includes the type of diabetic collapse which has been reported [7]in the past for Navalny.
In his professional opinion, Jacoby believes the condition in which he found Navalny “did not correspond to a metabolic disorder. The clinical picture would then have been different.”
Comparing Jacoby’s new disclosures and medical assessments with the clinical test results on Navalny’s admission to the Berlin hospital, independent medical sources report puzzlement that for the six hours Navalny was under treatment by Jacoby in the aircraft on the tarmac at Omsk airport, then for the flight to Berlin and his transportation to hospital, he was not treated to prevent the severe dehydration evident in the first German clinical record; and that atropine was withheld.
Jacoby said that the fentanyl in Navalny’s blood and urine when first tested in Berlin he had injected “to relieve any pain.” He explained also that this enabled him to reduce the amount of propofol “because long-term administration of propofol carries risks.” Jacoby said he also had given Navalny propofol. The testing in Berlin revealed sufentanil, not propofol.
A British specialist in organophosphate poisoning commented on the pain-killer mixture first recorded in Berlin: “With fentanyl and sufentanil both being administered, this is a very dangerous cocktail. Obviously for pain management. But why was Navalny in pain? Pain is not an OP [organophosphate] symptom.”
After reviewing the full clinical case report signed by Jacoby and the Charité hospital doctors, the British source adds: “I have realised that Salisbury District Hospital [SDH] were not mentioned as a contact resource for the treatment. That must be a strange fact, if true. SDH treated five patients [Sergei Skripal, Yulia Skripal, Nicholas Bailey, Dawn Sturgess, Charles Rowley], and of course were aware of what worked, or did not work in the case of Dawn Sturgess who died. It seems inconceivable that after OP nerve agent was suspected, the German medical team did not draw on the experience of the Salisbury team.”
“I do not believe, ”the British expert went on, “the UK have ever commented on the treatment regime of the UK victims, so this would need to be a direct [German] approach and not a literature referral. Whereas the Germans have gone into minute detail with Navalny, the Brits have said nothing.”
He said: “The Germans gave their patient 6 units of plasma in order to ‘mop up’ any residual nerve agent that remained in Navalny’s blood. This means the butyrylcholinesterase from the dispensed plasma was used by (reacted with) the nerve agent. Once they had dealt with the residual nerve agent, then Navalny’s own metabolism was able to generate and maintain normal levels. This then begs the question. Did the SDH patients receive blood plasma transfusions also? In Navalny’s case. this protocol was fundamental in his recovery. If Salisbury knew this was important, would they not have informed the Jacoby team? This [plasma transfusion] was on Day 6 in the treatment, so eight days after collapse on the [Tomsk-Moscow] plane. Conversely, if SDH were not transfusing fresh plasma to the Skripals and Bailey, then why did they not need it?”
Jacoby confirms he understands the significance of the water bottles as evidence in the Navalny case. He reconfirmed in his third interview that he had received the bottles from Pevchikh in Omsk and agreed to her request to smuggle them on to the medevac aircraft in his own personal luggage. “Maria [Pevchikh]”, he adds, “is a very smart girl.” On the flight to Berlin, according to Jacoby, “Yulia [Navalnaya] was a little more alert than Maria.”
Jacoby is also aware of the significance of Navalnaya’s underpants as evidence of the Novichok poisoning which Navalny, the German and NATO governments are alleging. Asked what he saw of Navalny’s clothing or in the luggage loaded on to the medevac aircraft, Jacoby said that in Omsk hospital he found Navalny in the usual hospital gown; otherwise he said he was naked. He does not know, he says, whether the clothes were handed over to Navalnaya. Nor does he know what was in the luggage that Navalnaya took to Berlin.
Jacoby also reveals that when he accompanied Navalny as his patient into the Charité hospital for the formal handover, this took place “in the presence of around 30 doctors and officials at the Charité. There were also representatives from abroad.” Jacoby says now he does not know who the foreigners were or where they came from.