OPERATION NAVALNY: ANOTHER ATTEMPT TO BEND RUSSIA TO THE INTERESTS OF THE EMPIRE
26 Jan 2021 , 4:01 pm .
Alexei Navalny traveled from Berlin to Moscow on January 17. He was arrested upon arrival at the airport. (Photo: AFP / Getty Images)
Alexei Navalny could be said, in a few words, that he is a Russian lawyer and politician opposed to the government of Vladimir Putin with several years of experience, with little popularity among Russian citizens, but with considerable projection from the US and European media.
He started an online blog where he wrote to call for demonstrations in Moscow. He created the NGO Fundación Anticorrupción in 2011, a platform with which he began his apparent fight to expose corruption schemes in the Russian government. His name circulated in the news when he was arrested for participating in the protests that took place between 2011 and 2013 for alleged "electoral fraud" in the legislative elections of December 2011.
Russian writer Keith Gessen, who shares his rejection of Putin with him , profiled Navalny in 2013, when a judge in Russia found him guilty of embezzlement with the Kirovles logging company:
" Navalny is a right-winger . He is pro-market, pro-arms (a rare position in the Russian political arena) and anti-immigration. His electoral platform (he has announced his candidacy for mayor of Moscow) includes language on the creation of 'competitive' conditions for public services, hospitals and schools. This stems directly from the neoliberal playbook (...) and leads mainly to the closure of 'uncompetitive' schools, clinics, hospitals and high electricity prices " .
The Moon of Alabama portal exposes other dark aspects of the opponent. He explains that the liberal opposition party Yabloko expelled him from its ranks for "collusion with the Russian neo-Nazi movement." He adds that he is an " arch-nationalist " who advocates "Russia for the Russians", denying the multi-ethnic diversity of the Eurasian country.
Additionally, the Russian opponent was a member of the Yale World Fellow , an international scholarship program of Yale University. In 2010, Navalny spent several months in New Haven, Connecticut, as a fellow at the institution. "She was part of an extraordinary cohort that had several colleagues who decided after that experience that they were going to go into politics," said program director Emma Sky.
He is also a paid agent for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). In collaboration with the Russian Mariya Gaydar ("ardent promoter of democracy", in the words of the State Department) created a group in Russia that received money from the NED : the Democratic Alternative (AD!).
In a State Department article on youth movements in Russia, Gaydar admitted funding the NED, but said he was not disclosing it "for fear of appearing compromised by an American connection."
Alexei Navalny poses with his colleagues from the Yale University International Scholarship Program (Top row, fourth from the right) (Photo: File)
Returning to his trial for implication in acts of corruption, the Russian courts sentenced him to five years in prison. Navalny (and the foreign press) defended his innocence without presenting further evidence. Later his jail sentence was suspended, but on probation.
The case sparked some demonstrations in Moscow that were used to inflate his figure as that of a " political leader " capable of becoming a kind of threat or rival for President Putin.
Polls contradict that attempt to position Navalny. He obtained 27.5% of the votes when he ran for mayor of Moscow, despite the fact that the Russian prosecutor's office accused him of having received illegal donations from abroad for his campaign.
From then on, his "notoriety" took a nosedive. This was confirmed by the Russian NGO Centro Levada in a 2017 publication where it evaluated the recognition and attitude towards Navalny , just when he was showing the pretensions to run for the 2018 presidential elections, knowing that the sentence in the Kirovles case disabled him politically.
According to the institute, in 2017 only 1% of the Russian population said they were willing to support it "definitely" and 9% said it was "possible" for them to do so. That same indicator in 2011 was 5% and 28%, respectively. In total, the approval rate went from 33% to 10%.
In 2011 only 6% of Russians knew who Navalny was. After it began to get a boost from the Western media, the figure rose to 47% in 2017. If measured in absolute terms, support for Navalny doubled: it went from 2% of the Russian population to 4.6% in those countries. six years.
But if it is valued in terms of proportion, the data from the Levada Center lead to the conclusion that the more notorious the name Navalny became, the less popularity it gained in the country.
THE CASE OF POISONING AND ITS EXPECTED END IN NORD STREAM 2
On August 20, 2020, the plane flying from Tomsk (Siberia) to Moscow had to make an emergency landing at the Moscow airport because Navalny, who was traveling there, fell ill. His press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, made the announcement, adding that he was unconscious.
Navalny fell into a coma, was hospitalized and treated by doctors in the intensive care unit, they connected him to a ventilator. The next day he was stable.
Yarmysh came forward to denounce that Navalny had been "poisoned with something mixed in his tea," which was the only thing he took before taking the flight, according to her . Doctors conducted tests and found no evidence of poisoning. They provisionally diagnosed a metabolic disorder that caused a very sharp drop in blood sugar, probably associated with intoxication due to the incorrect use of drugs.
The Russian government authorized his family's request for him to be transferred to Germany. Upon arrival in Berlin, he was admitted to the Charité hospital. German specialists subjected him to other tests that led to a completely different and hasty conclusion: that of intoxication caused by poisoning .
The chief doctor of the emergency hospital number 1 in Omsk offered to collaborate with the German doctors (Photo: TmBW UK)
Despite the fact that neither Russian nor German doctors were able to determine exactly which substance caused Navalny's symptoms, Berlin continued with the poison theory. The final statement cleared the suspicions of political triggers following interest in Navalny's diagnosis: "Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesperson, Steffen Seibert, said in a statement that tests carried out by a German special military laboratory showed evidence of Novichok."
German authorities rejected the Russian government's request to share the biological samples that tested positive for Novichok to verify their probative value.
The Novichok is a nerve agent that was developed in the Soviet Union during the Cold War to be used as a weapon of mass destruction. It is extremely lethal. Had it been used to eliminate Navalny, he would die "in less than ten minutes" without giving him time to even board the plane, said Leonid Rink, one of the researchers who participated in the creation of the weapon. He added that it would be almost impossible to detect its trace because the amount of that substance necessary to end a person's life is close to one thousandth of a milligram and because the weapon is designed to degrade immediately after use.
The media had prepared the ground on this theory in advance, as they did with the event of the alleged poisoning of British-Russian double agent Sergei Skripals and his daughter, who curiously were also not killed by exposure to the deadly substance.
What motive would Russia have for murdering a double agent whom it had previously released from prison and who had been living peacefully for eight years in Great Britain? What motives would Russia have for poisoning a guy with virtually zero political notoriety, allowing him to receive medical attention, and then letting him be transferred to a hospital in Germany?
The one that was able to take advantage of the situation, in the case of the British government blaming Moscow for the "attack" on the Skripals, was the established political power in Washington that increased the pressure to get more European countries to join the anti-Russian campaign. War correspondent Elijah Magnier also links the plot to the theater of operations in Southwest Asia, which at the time was having a Syrian army advance on al-Ghouta with the help of its Russian allies.
Everything points to the fact that Navalny is going in a similar direction. Journalist Finian Cunningham wrote early in the plot that it came " at an opportune time " for the US government.
Democrats and Republicans in the United States Congress, apparently discordant on other issues, agree on the harassment of the Russian-German project Nord Stream 2. At the end of 2019, congressmen approved sanctions against companies involved in construction, in an attempt to stop it. For his part, the then Secretary of State of the Trump Administration, Mike Pompeo, told congressmen, days before the Navalny event, that he would " do everything possible " so that Nord Stream 2 is not completed.
Estimated at 10.6 billion dollars, the purpose of this strategic gas pipeline is to transport natural gas from Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea. Nord Stream 1 was completed in 2011. Of the second, 2,300 km of the total 2,460 km have been placed, and it is expected to be inaugurated in 2021. Its stoppage would mean that the German country and other European countries stop receiving the hydrocarbon at a much cheaper price than they would pay to American companies.
More than 90% of the Nord Stream 2 construction works have been completed (Photo: Deutsche Welle infographic)
"The most telling thing is that the biggest political repercussion (of the Navalny case) is the imperative demand that Merkel leave Nord Stream-2," says Cunningham.
The first position of the German Chancellor in the case of Navalny was to separate the issue from the Nord Stream 2 project. Days later the possibility of giving in to pressure from the German right arose and did not rule out that the gas pipeline would be canceled if "Russia does not is thoroughly investigating the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, "his spokesman said.
NAVALNY ARREST AND PROTESTS IN RUSSIA: A MINIMAL CHRONOLOGY
*On Monday, January 18 , after his arrival in Moscow from Germany, where he had been staying for the past five months, Navalny was arrested for violating his parole.
*That same day in the afternoon, Russian authorities transferred him to the second police department of the Ministry of the Interior for the district of the city of Khimki and began a judicial process with limited access to journalists for the preventive measures of the pandemic. The court handed down a 30-day arrest sentence .
*The reactions of uninvolved actors were swift: the German Foreign Minister called for his "immediate release"; the British chancellor showed "concern" and said that Russia should explain the "use of chemical weapons"; President Joe Biden's adviser Jake Sullivan noted that the arrest was "not only a violation of human rights, but also a challenge to the Russian people"; the European Parliament called for the construction of Nord Stream 2 to be stopped and sanctions against Russia to be issued.
*To all these clear acts of foreign interference in internal affairs, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared that it was "like a model (...) This apparently allows Western politicians to think that in this way they will be able to divert attention from the deeper crisis. in which the liberal development model is found ".
*Navalny's supporters and himself began to call online rallies that violated social distancing measures taken to control the covid-19 pandemic. The Ministry of the Interior and the Attorney General's Office warned the responsibility of both the organizers and the grassroots participants in these unauthorized protests.
*The Roskomnadzor (the Russian media regulatory body) prevented calls to demonstrate directed at minors from spreading on the internet.
*On Friday, January 22 , the US diplomatic mission in Moscow published a list of the places where the illegal protests were to take place in 12 Russian cities.
*On Saturday, January 23 , a few thousand people attended the protests in different cities of Russia. The groups were made up mostly of young people between 20 and 30 years old, and minors . The Moscow commissioner for children's rights, Olga Yaroslavskaya, spoke out against "involving children in political games."
*4,000 people participated in Moscow, according to data from police authorities. They were not massive crowds as the anti-Russian media wanted to present them.
*There were cases of targeted violence and 39 police officers were injured. The Moscow Department of Health reported that 29 civilians were victims of the uncoordinated protests, all of whom received the necessary medical assistance.
*Some organizers of the demonstrations and inciters to radicalism were arrested , including Yuli Naválnaya, Navalny's wife. A few hours later she was released. The arrests continued the following days in the cities where there were illegal actions (road blocks, riots, etc.).
The Russian government questioned the use of children in unauthorized demonstrations (Photo: RIA Nóvosti)
*US embassy spokeswoman Rebecca Ross said she was monitoring the illegal protests and accused Russia of suppressing the "right to peaceful protest and freedom of expression."
*When the situation was brought under control, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zajarova, declared that the Russian Foreign Ministry was going to summon diplomats from the United States Embassy to explain why they had printed route maps for the demonstrations and the reason behind a phrase about a supposed trip to the Kremlin. "This generally goes beyond any framework. Is this a motivation, is this a call, is this an instruction, is this an incitement? Well, let's talk," he said .
*Zajarova also questioned the role of social media in monitoring protest-promoting activities, since it was so efficient in detecting and suppressing messages that encouraged riot at Capitol events. "For some reason, despite the fact that there were a large number of forgeries and Moscow officially denied them and said they were false information, there was no such restraint," said the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry. He added that the technology giants are violating the rules they have imposed on their communities, "knowing what this threatens them."
On Monday, January 25 , China expressed its rejection of any external interference in the affairs of a sovereign state. This was reported by the spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Zhao Lijian, during a briefing , when he commented on the interference of the United States in the illegal protests in Moscow and other Russian cities.
*On that day, Zajarova reported that Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov spoke with the US envoy in Moscow, John Sullivan, about the diplomats' posts on social media about the demonstrations. "The Russian side vigorously protested its support for the uncoordinated rallies that were held in some Russian cities on January 23," says a Russian news agency note .
WHAT TO EXPECT FROM RUSSIA-US RELATIONS WITH THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION
Was it the Russian people who, unhappy with the decisions the government made regarding Navalny, who spontaneously went out to protest in the streets of various cities on January 23? The involvement of the State Department, the US embassy and the corporate media indicate no.
It seems rather the return of a model that started in 2010 from Egypt to Tunisia, financed and promoted by the ambitions of Wall Street in the Obama administration "progressive" and that, eventually, caused the assassination of Gaddafi, the bombing of Libya, the war in Syria and the violent Euromaidan in Ukraine.
In those days, the division and dispossession of the Russian nation (Navalny participated) was also unsuccessfully attempted under the banners of democracy and freedom, to return it to the state of the 90s. Russia responded by applying measures that turned off the tap to funding US NGOs and expelling the NED from the country.
Russian analyst Dmitriv Sedov argues that the new United States administration must manage to distract from the internal political crisis that his country is suffering by drawing attention to foreign policy. The point of view, however, cannot be China, because that globalist government will protect the businesses that the corporate groups that support it have in the Asian country.
"The United States does not do business with Russia," says Sedov. The analyst considers that there are a series of elements that make that nation an "easy prey" for the globalist ruling class anchored in Washington, among them, the enthusiasm that some sectors of Russian society have about "democratic values", the existence of pro-Western factors between the intelligentsia and "the clumsiness of official bodies in the new and more complex stage of the information war."
In this scenario, what he calls "Operation Navalny" has appeared. He acknowledges that it is "painstakingly elaborated", but has shortcomings. For example, Berlin's scandalous refusal to share Navalny's samples that tested positive for Novichok.
He also mentions a detail from the movie Palace , anti-Putin propaganda disguised as recycled research from other years on a $ 1.4 billion palace that President Putin allegedly bought off the coast of the Russian city of Gelendzhik. Sedov claims that anyone who knows both languages (Russian and English) would know that the texts that appear in the video have "traces of machine translation from English." Did the opponent forget to give credit for the script to the State Department as he forgot to mention that he created an NGO that received money from the NED?
The Konstantinovsky Palace, in Saint Petersburg, is one of the 8 official residences of President Putin. Why would he want to buy a palace where he would have to live hidden? (Photo: File)
The spokesman for the Russian Presidency, Dmitri Peskov, noted that the video seeks to destabilize the situation in Russia. "We have known for a long time that pseudo disclosures and information attacks against the president were being prepared," he said.
"What does Putin have to do with it?" Is the question he asked all who saw these "false" materials to ask themselves. Peskov made the comment in an interview with Rossiya 1 channel . There he ratified Moscow's desire to "foster dialogue" with the new US government.
"Of course, we hope to establish a dialogue. A dialogue in which points of divergence will have to be recorded, of course, although dialogue at the same time always provides the opportunity to find certain rational elements, those small areas of convergence in our relationship, "stressed Peskov.
He added that his government can become flexible, since "flexibility is the indispensable element in international relations." However, there are "red lines" that should not be crossed.
"Flexibility is welcome, but not dictation or rudeness. We are not prepared for them to cross the red lines. Elsewhere the necessary flexibility has been manifested, but it cannot be infinite," he said.
Only a constructive disposition from Washington will have a positive response from Moscow. It seems that the White House is not yet ready for that conversation.
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