Alexei Navalny appears to have been manhandled if not murdered in the custody of Vladimir Putin. The Daily Mail updates the story here. The tyrant couldn’t stand Navalny’s dissent from his rule or his mockery of it and Navalny has paid the ultimate price.
Putin thus finished the job he started with the poisoning of Navalny in the 2020 underpants operation. Paul Gregory set forth the background and the details in his January 2021 Hill column “The Kremlin, FSB, and the ‘Berlin patient’s’ underpants.”
Gregory told how Navalny extracted an account of the underpants operation from the failed FSB assassin Konstantin Kudryavtsev himself. At this link in Gregory’s column one can find the video below in which Navalny exposed the perpetrators of his unsuccessful poisoning.
In a four-hour December 2020 press conference, Putin referred to Navalny only as the “Berlin patient.” Gregory’s account followed Putin’s reference:
Unbeknownst to Putin, three days earlier, the “Berlin patient” waked purported assassination-team member Konstantin Kudryavtsev (“Konstantin”) with a 7 a.m. telephone call using a fake FSB caller-ID. Navalny, playing a harried assistant, informed Konstantin ominously that the director of the National Security Council that manages the FSB, Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev, was demanding a report on why the operation failed. Navalny’s subtle message to Konstantin: Heads are going to roll… Here is your chance to protect yourself; stop worrying that the call is not on a secure line.
By cajoling, pleading, and calling for understanding, Navalny kept his would-be assassin on the line for 49 minutes as Konstantin loosened up on what “went wrong” with the operation: Navalny’s plane landed too soon; just a little longer (chut’ dol’she) and he would have been dead. The paramedics were not clued in. They injected him with a life-saving antidote. The Novichek dose was correctly calculated, but there are “many nuances” in such an operation.
Konstantin’s most telling revelation: The squad laced the poison into the seams of Navalny’s blue underpants.
As the squad’s chemical weapons specialist, Konstantin’s job was to remove any traces of poison from Navalny’s underwear confiscated at the Omsk hospital.
Navalny made a videotape of his conversation with Konstantin [below]. It shows his supporters listening tensely and exchanging virtual thumbs-up as they realized that Navalny had recorded a confession from his own intended assassin.
Gregory adds that Navalny delayed release of the recording until after Putin’s four-hour marathon. The video went viral, attracting over a million viewers within hours. It now has more than 2,000,000. It’s false comfort to say that Navalny lives — Putin lives — but Navalny’s legacy lives.
In 2021 then New York Times media columnist Ben Smith reported the interesting story “How Investigative Journalism Flourished in Hostile Russia.” (Smith has since co-founded Semafor.) The crazy brave Navalny turned up in Smith’s bullet points:
Mr. Navalny’s foundation flew drones over Mr. Putin’s palace, a vast estate on the Black Sea that Mr. Navalny labeled “the World’s Biggest Bribe” in a scathing, mocking nearly two-hour video he released on his return to Russia last month. The video has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube.
Below is the Navalny video that is now heading toward 200 million views. It is hilariously derisive toward Putin. The production values are excellent. Although it is not easy to keep up with them, it has English subtitles. Watching the video, I thought, Mister we could use a man like Alexei Navalny to do Joe Biden.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.