People want me to comment on Navalny.
I have avoided doing so because I just don’t know. There are plenty of other people who don’t know either but are writing about it anyway so why would I waste my time and your time on this.
I don’t know what the poison was. It probably was a poison, at least one of the Omsk doctors’ versions that it was caused by a sudden fall in blood sugar levels due to fasting seems quite ridiculous. There are date rape drugs that make people act in uninhibited ways, as if heavily drunk. A couple of weeks ago, I speculated that perhaps one of Prigozhin’s goons – perhaps the same ones who had splashed Navalny with zelyonka back in 2017 – slipped some sodium oxybate or custom derivative into his tea. Being low tier goons, they overestimated the dosage and what they hoped would be a discrediting video of airplane debauchery turned into a life-threatening emergency. But perhaps novichok, sure, why not. Russia produces novichok. But it’s hardly some super-secret chemical weapon, the formulae are well-known, nothing stopping other countries and actors from producing it. I am not any kind of biochemist so I am not in a position to assess the claims of that German clinic. Though I would imagine that maintaining a conspiracy of silence amongst dozens of medical staff in what is, all things said and done, an “open society”, would be very far from trivial to put it mildly.
I don’t know who poisoned Navalny. Maybe it was Putler, to eliminate or incapacitate the “leader of the opposition” (as he is presented, not entirely accurately but neither entirely inaccurately, in the Western media). Maybe it was rogue elements within the intelligence services. (Not sure any of them would willingly stick their necks out like that, though). Or maybe it was a faction within the Kremlin that happened to want to settle its own scores with Navalny. There are persistent rumors and some circumstantial evidence that Navalny is the sieve through which the siloviks keep liberal technocrats in line by spilling kompromat on them in the form of Navalny’s ceaseless “corruption investigations” (which have never rarely touched on Igor Sechin, long considered the #2 after Putin in Russia’s power structures). That’s not the world’s safest occupation, even if Putin is your secret BFF.
I also don’t know what will come out of it in the long run. On the one hand, a non-lethal poisoning that official Russia will deny had anything to do with it is not quite the same as a successful assassination. On the other hand, Navalny could well become the next big “Victim of the Regime”, replacing Magnitsky in that capacity. This is especially likely if Biden wins the US Presidency this November. Perhaps Germany could use this as a convenient pretext to finally shut down Nord Stream, after Russia has already invested $10 billion into it. Or perhaps it will be used in an attempt to cockblock Russia from annexing Belarus – much like, perhaps, grander plans for Novorossiya in 2014 may have been torpedoed by that unfortunate incident with the Malaysian airliner (there are rich conspiracy theories over what exactly Burkhalter communicated to Putin a day before he withdrew his authorization for the use of military force in Ukraine). Though the two goals would seem to rather go against each other – if Nord Stream is shut down, which would represent not just a significant financial loss but also a major political humiliation, then securing Belarus would become all the more important.
I just don’t know and neither do any of the high profile hacks writing about this and probably even many of the key players are not that clued in either.
However, the one concrete observation I would make, and one which I will admit is not even original to myself but which I first saw from Egor Prosvirnin, but which I have not yet seen made in the Anglosphere, is that this episode marks an end to Navalny’s political career. And not because he might still die, nor because he might become physically or mentally incapacitated, nor even because the kremlins, Ramzan Kadyrov, the CIA, the Jews, or the reptiloids (cross out as per your particular obsession) will have successfully intimidated him from further participation in political life. No, I am reasonably sure he will continue his corruption investigations, and I would even put better than 50/50 odds on him making a return to politicking in Russia.
Navalny’s big problem is that his entire image is built on him being a “man of the people” revealing how Russia’s oligarchs and regime insiders preach solidarity and “spiritual values” (духовные скрепы) within while maintaining Italian villas and holidaying in Courchevel and getting treated at elite European clinics without. This is the last remaining thing about Navalny that could potentially make him appealing to the popular masses in the event that Putin and his system somehow becomes massively discredited and delegitimized. His current “base” within Russia consist of radical SJWs who hate their own country and its cultural and religious traditions, and who are far more radical than Navalny himself on these questions (this is not an exaggeration – read the highly agitated Twitter replies to him wishing his flock a Happy Easter, or expressing condolences on the death of Russian nationalist Konstantin Krylov). He’ll get their support, but that’s ~2% of the population. Although Navalny used to express ethnonationalist rhetoric, infamously comparing Gastarbeiters to cockroaches in one video, that was more than a decade ago – only kremlinoid hacks still push the tired old propaganda that he is some kind of nationalist or even Nazi when all of his closest confidants have long become internationalist, multi-national neolibs. Certainly almost no Russian nationalists have considered him as one of their own since 2014, when he supported the Ukraine over Russia on Crimea (not that Ukrainians themselves appreciated the gesture, many of whose own nationalists bizarrely consider him a Russian imperialist little better than Putler and expressed approval of his poisoning in one of the many weird horseshoes you see in identity politics).
So again, I repeat, Navalny has no hardcore support amongst any major ideological Russian groups apart from very online schoolchildren, university students, and Western NGO employees. But what he does still have is his image as the consummate populist, living in an “ordinary” Moscow apartment, suffering the “hardships” of the common folk (if not with his daughter, whom he sent off to an American Ivy school) while pointing out the Russian elite’s manifold and undeniable hypocrisies and rootlessness. This might not be very relevant while the “Putin system” remains strong, but it could suddenly become very relevant in the event of its complete or even partial discreditation, as happened with Yanukovych in 2013-14 and with Lukashenko in 2020.
But here’s the problem. No ordinary Russian is ever going to be airlifted out of a run down hospital in a Siberian rustbelt city into one of Germany’s top clinics, paid for by a tycoon telecoms family (the Zimins) and at the personal invitation of Chancellor Merkel herself. And not just any ordinary Russian – not even any Russian high official. The closest example from amongst the Russian “elites” that would come to mind is… the DNR supporter and washed out Soviet-era crooner Kobzon. Hilariously, Navalny has de facto ended up far more “apatride” than any of the big targets of his political invective in the past decade.
Though TBH, this almost makes me sad for Navalny… he was in a comma, so the decision was hardly his own choice, but presumably belonged to his wife, Yulia Navalnaya. His situation at the Omsk hospital had stabilized, it was clear he was not going to die by the time he was medically evacuated. For better quality of care without too much damage in the way of optics, Navalny could have at least been evacuated to a private Moscow clinic, there are several of them that are at the level of Charité, the German clinic where he was subsequently treated and diagnosed with Novichok poisoning. But Berlin it had to be. In fulfilling her spousal duty of care to her husband, Navalny’s wife inadvertently – in all likelihood – torpedoed his future chances of becoming a second Yeltsin.
Incidentally, this is also the most succinct explanation for why the kremlins had no objections to sending Navalny to Germany.
Thanks. Sensible take.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
the simplest explanation seems to be the correct one: Putin had him poisoned. Putin is not entirely a tyrant, he can tolerate a patriotic opposition in Russia (Zhirinovsky, what remains of the Communist Party), but he had no tolerance at all to any opposition connected with the US
I don’t know what’s “Germany” supposed to refer to here. Merkel’s government so far certainly has shown its strong desire to have the Nordstream 2 project completed, despite the persistent American pressure against it, why would they want a “pretext” to suddenly bail out of it? Just out of anti-Russian spite?
And annexation of Belarus under the present conditions will be seen as illegitimate by pretty much all Western countries anyway (and given that going by your own recent posts there wouldn’t be majority support for it among young Belarussians – even if their pro-Western enthusiasm is quite misguided imo – why wouldn’t it tbh?). No need to use Navalny as a pretext for that either.
Anyway, the whole Navalny issue looks pretty bad for Russia, as do some other events in the recent past (e.g. there was a murder of a Georgian in Berlin in August 2019, and it seems pretty clear that Russian security services were involved; now this Georgian seems to have been an Islamist scumbag whose death isn’t regrettable by itself, but such incidents don’t make it easier to argue against anti-Russian sanctions). Obviously nobody commenting here can have any real idea what’s behind this, but it will definitely harm Russia’s image among Western normies.
What is the point of this top secret Novichock trash if it never kills anybody?
There are so many things comically wrong with this post, I just wanna go “bruh…”
From claiming that a foreign agent is poisoning russian citizens with impunity from within russia
(I guess this “actor” also poisoned litvinenko, skripal, gebrev, maybe it even shot nemtsov. )
To saying despite being poisoned with a nerve agent, navalny is STILL an agent of putin
To claiming that:
Based on twitter shitposters.
You wanna know who the real 2% are? Nationalists, who fail to engage with anyone in russsia, dont take part in politics, have no platform, are infinitely splintered. Where is prosvirnin’s political power? Where is Krylov’s 10 million strong audience? Did they elect a single candidate? Guess to that you will reply “but the state persecutes us so” right, so much as to poison you with nerve agents?
You have the audacity to claim utter comical BS, (lapping up and retranslating kremlin narrative), which has been proven wrong many times:
Navalny has no popularity amongst any major ideological Russian groups apart from very online schoolchildren, university students, and Western NGO employees
Despite the evidence from the demographics of his voters in the 2013 election (he got 27% of votes), demographics of protest attendees or demographics of his youtube channel subscriber base.
Based on this laughable level of ignorance, I conclude that the prediction of your post is uninformed at best and will not pan out, just like your prior failed predictions of “russia will handle covid brilliantly” and “no-one will strike against lukashenko”.
Typos?
“not just a not entirely insignificant financial loss”
AK: Thanks, I don’t think so, but awkwardly worded, I rephrased.
Saw this on my feed while writing the post: https://twitter.com/XiXiDu/status/1301523249805889536
As to why, well, why not. Nord Stream becomes less and less relevant to German energy security with every passing year. Might have already become irrelevant if it hadn’t shut down its nuclear power plants. Would improve relations with the US (esp. if Biden becomes President) and Poland. That said, I only mentioned it as one of several possibilities, I ofc have no idea what they really think.
I think that Navalny is such an a**hole that I feel more sorry for the poison than for him. I bet that he made the poison sick when it was given to him, that’s what a rotten human being he is.
You were the person who was claiming that Lukashenko is imminently on his way out a few weeks ago. How is that panning out?
Russia’s Corona response was ultimately not great but far from the worst either (excess deaths per capita are significantly lower than in the US). My Corona predictions, all things considered, were incredibly accurate: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/corona-scorecard/
Which I predicted more correctly than most at the time: https://akarlin.com/2013/09/open-discussion-the-moscow-elections-2013/#comment-3124158690
This was when Putin’s approval was near its nadir of 60% and Muscovites in particular were angry over the massive electoral fraud in the 2011 elections, and your idol hadn’t destroyed his reputation by shilling for xoxols who shelled Donetsk and burned down the Odessa trade house (as Russian normies, i.e. the people you liberasts need to get the sympathies of to actually get votes in elections, saw it at any rate).
And yet even so he was still beaten by Sobyanin in what was a fair election (unlike in 2011) without the need for a second round.
I felt it was a mistake to let Navalny out of the country. Keeping him in Omsk would allow kremlins to control the narrative around his health problem. You gave me a different perspective. Interesting.
If Navalny had dirt on Putler and Russian power elite and they wanted him dead, Navalny would commit suicide in prison just like its done in the civilized world. There is no way he would be able to leave the country.
Its highly unlikely about Nord Stream 2 or Belarus either (the pipeline is 50% EU financed, so its not all Gazprom losses, and Germans insist on getting it done, and US shale/LNG is getting wrecked in bankruptcy courts so their ability to supply long term is questionable). If Putin lets Navalny sanctions limit his policy options on Belarus, that would be dumb, and Putin is not dumb.
I think its simpler than that. Russian liberal opposition is fractured – Navalny, Sobol, Sobchak, and they don’t get along. Too many generals, not enough soldiers. So their CIA handlers (sorry, not CIA, “Cinema for Peace”, totally not CIA) and liberal oligarchs decided to reorganize and trim management costs. Navalny pulled the short straw and was sent into retirement.
The “totally-not-CIA” people of course organized appropriate level of retirement fireworks to embarass Russia again. Navalny will be Skripaled and Russian liberal opposition will be told to rally behind Sobol or something. Its a win-win for all except Navalny (Skripals are most likely under house arrest and surveillance under fake identity in Utah or something, its a rough life for people used to Moscow and London posh amenities, same fate awaits Navalny).
Question with Navalny is always, why people are not trying to kill him every week. He spends all life attacking and humiliating wealthy and powerful people, before internet’s largest political audience. So the reality is, that people in the government are protecting him.
If he was in a country with less centralized state capacity – which could be Brazil, but also country like USA – he would be “sleeping with the fishes” since around 10 years ago.
It’s one of the “luxuries” of the very centralized state capacity in Russia, that people like Navalny are able to continue working.
Navalny’s popularity is almost all people from the last 5 years, from his YouTube channel, and it’s become quite mainstream. He is the most popular political YouTuber in Russia, and his main channel would have attained a billion views sometime next year.
Audience are mostly Generation Z, because it’s people this age who are living on the internet, instead of watching television.
These responses are not strange, if you have been lived any time in the Russian-speaking internet. It used to be even more like this.
For example, compare any users reviews of films with religious themes, between Russian and American websites. American users’ reviews will be “10/10 – we watch this in Sunday School”, while the Russian users’ reviews of the same film, half of reviews will be “1/10 – disgusting religious propaganda”.
It’s because of the aggressive atheists have been pushed onto the internet, as the other media has not represented them in recent years. Moreover, these people are disproportionately active on the internet.
Internet generally becomes disproportionate repository of attitudes that counter the official government positions. Although this can be changing in recent years, as more and more old and normal people began to use the internet.
I don’t think so, as his successful metier was to be blogger, and now YouTuber – he will fail as any politician, and government worker. As blogger he wasn’t very popular, but as YouTuber he has been successful – because he is quite charismatic before a video camera.
Interesting part of Navalny’s story, is that he is an example of transition of the political internet from blogs to YouTube.
As a blogger, he has relatively little views, and was just amplified by the fact journalists and political nerds read him. Whereas YouTube is representing a significant change in how people observe politics. Bloggers are usually nerds, as this form of communication was independent of personal charisma, while YouTube is less civilized in the sense that charisma and demagoguery are becoming central again.
Are you a Russian person?
Please explain, who or what “gebrev” is? Never heard of this fella…
And yes, it’s possible that one of Navalny own allies had him poisoned: Navalny’s entourage is full of Western spies I would imagine. They could have given him Novichok after they brought him to Germany. lol
Not at all. Poisoning Navalny – who is consider by 99%, ok 98% Russians to be mentally disturbed, the one that each of us met in our lifetime – must be viewed by the cost/benefit analysis. It is all pointing to the outside prearranged cooperated scheme (badly simulated Novichok poisoning) and maybe even with full knowledge of Navalny himself. The shipment to Germany is highly suspicious…where even Merkel has no privacy from the CIA.
That’s a huge exaggeration, close to the point of being wrong. He clearly became famous on account of his mayoral campaign in Moscow: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/navalnys-ten-percent/
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/navalny-awareness-rating.png
Moreover, his “antirating” grew more than his name recognition:
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/navalny-voting-intentions.png
I suspect we don’t frequent the same sites. This would not be attractive even to online Russian normies.
I casually googled “Fireproof” and disproved Dmi’s comments on American ratings of religiously themed movies.
I suspect Dmitry lives in a world where the US got stuck in a time capsule during the Bush years.
Religiosity has plummeted in the US since then at one of the fastest rates in the world, comparable to Ireland or Poland – that was evident to me even during my rather short “window” there from 2006-2016: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/american-decade/
In Russia, it has instead crept upwards (if from a low base).
His observations would have been accurate enough… c.2000, to an extent in 2010. Not in 2020.
I do not think that rational people predominantly consider youtube being anything more than a trash/gossip media. The word “fcuk” is by far outnumber any other word.
Lukashenko could have poisoned Navalny to get Putin back in his corner. Their relationship had been tense for years, maybe sanctions drive Putin and Luka back together.
The only reason any British people except anti-Putin fanatics ever cared about murders of dissidents before was becasue they were in exciting and unpleasant ways (poisoning) and because they happened in Britain. Absolutely no-one here cares about Navalny.
The Potato Pill: Belarus Owned Government
Putler must be the slowpokiest dictator in all of history.
Why’d he wait 10 years?
At the time all useful idiots became useless idiots. When this happen, it is good to cancel useless idiot before idiot feel too scared and start talking.
Navalny is part of the bigger process. One reason, why many known people have TDS is not because of Donald but they have afraid about their masters. There is a chance for massive sethriching to get rid from lower level witnesses.
Also maintain discipline. Keep in line or you will be the next unknown and useless person novishoked by evil Kremlin. How many people knew Mr. Skripal before Salisbury ?
Anti Putin people are most endangered species in the world today. Anybody can kill them and get away with that because all blame will fall on Kremlin and nobody is interested to find real culprit.
Norbert is in favour:
https://www.politico.eu/article/pressure-grows-on-germany-berlin-to-pull-support-for-nord-stream-2-gas-pipeline/
Maybe, but it certainly will have an effect on Germany where anti-Russian sentiment so far has been more muted than in some other Western countries. tbh I actually find the Navalny poisoning disturbing, because the obvious conclusion is that either Putin and his men are really using questionable Soviet-style methods (which would indicate the people warning against Putin as a Chekist who can’t be trusted might have had a point) or they don’t have sufficient control to prevent something like this. Maybe there are other explanations, but this incident will certainly lead to another deterioriation in relations with Russia, even more so if the Kremlin comes up with bs propaganda about Navalny having been poisoned by Germany.
Röttgen is deputy chairman of the Atlantik-Brücke, a major atlanticist lobby group in German politics, not surprising he’s taken that position.
Familiarity with the word “Navalny” (which is presumably what your graph is measuring) becomes awareness when people are asked in surveys, as he began to be reported regularly on television for around a decade now.
The popular acquaintance with “Navalny”, (which is what I am talking about) is from the last 5 years.
I recall the old stats of his website – his articles had thousands of views a month, a lot of his traffic was from America. Mainly journalists and opposition activists were reading it, and also surprisingly many people in America. He has more views every hour on his YouTube channel today than he had in a week.
Difference will be something like 100-1000 times more people watching him (which is in the last 5 years), than had used to read him before he became a YouTuber.
https://i.imgur.com/TvSoHzV.jpg
Also even 3-5 years ago, a lot of people who were commenting on his material were in America or Germany.
Craig Murray has a take on this, if Putin or somebody else high up wanted Navalny dead, the he would now be dead.
A. Navalny’s plane was allowed to make an emergency landing – this could have been denied
B. He was taken to a hospital ICU – the ambulance could have moved slowly
C. The doctors treated him – would have been easy to have a power cut to the ventilator or something could have been added to the drip or the doctors could have made a mistake, oops
D.he was stabilised in Siberia and allowed to move to Germany
Other Types of “ accidents” could have happened to the man If the Russian government wanted him out of the way
Who benefits?
Which website?
In IMDB – American reviewers seem mostly very religious people. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1129423/reviews
There are a couple of atheist reviewers, but even it seems more than half of the negative reviewers are talking about being religious.
E.g.
https://i.imgur.com/dZ4hn5O.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/N6mEuWY.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/DPfBpP2.jpg
–
This film seems positively reviewed with wives in the Russian internet by the way, but most reviewers don’t seem to watch a religious aspect of the film, but rather a family relations one. E.g. https://irecommend.ru/content/vse-nachinaetsya-s-tebya
Western countries overreacted here. Millions of people watched his videos in Russia, that’s undeniable. And yet no one came to his defense after what looks like a serious assassination attempt by the Russian state. No public outcry, no protests (I do believe AK somewhat downplays his popularity). And it’s the second one in five years. Why should foreigners care if Russians won’t. The meek will not inherit the Earth. I’m saying this despite finding Navalny a very sympathetic figure. I hope he gets well.
The reviews (the ones you picked out and in general for this film) are over a decade old. I don’t know how much this says about present-day American religiosity.
We will see. Current 74% rig count drop is not encouraging.
https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-rigs-baker-hughes-idUSL1N2FG1CR
While there are still 1,000’s of DUCs (drilled uncompleted wells) out there, which can buy shale oil a few years, im pessimistic because to break even on new wells, you need at least $50/barrel price. I think oil price will stay closer to $40 rather than $50 in the foreseeable future, which means rig count will remain depressed. Shale well output declines 80% in two years, so total US output will decline as DUC inventory is depleted.
US is increasing the purchases of Russian oil though, im sure US could rebadge the cargoes and sell Russian products under American flag. That would be a possible solution.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil-russia-usa/russia-keeps-u-s-fuel-oil-exports-high-as-washington-seeks-to-replace-venezuelan-barrels-idUSKCN24E1HN
People being nominally Christian while condemning anything religious is increasingly a norm.
Thus rainbow flag churches.
More importantly: none of that 10/10 sunday school; you rather live in a strange universe. I’ve been to sunday schools and there’s nothing like that organized Evangelical presence anymore. It all died pretty heavily post 2010, arguably with Tea Party as the last gasp.
Imo the same religious fervour was recruited to many SJW causes.
Let this minor Navalny affair influence the Russian policy would be the dumbest option. Let the Western cry and sanction and proceed with the unification of Russia and Belarus is the sensible option.
Or perhaps the test for Novichok that the Germans used has really bad specificity, so a million other substances may be identified as Novichok. This could explain a lot of things about Navalny’s case. Skripals, too.
Most young white Americans who believe that “white supremacism” and “structural racism” is keeping Blacks down.
Too many young Russians are West-worshipping cucks.
Many or most young Europeans want moar refugees.
Why the hell should any weight whatsoever be given to the opinions of any of these people?
An alleged poisoning of a Russian citizen within Russia is a much more pressing issue than Turkey’s saber-rattling against Greece, which could potentially drive a rift within NATO.
https://twitter.com/terischultz/status/1301565243374612480
I don’t think that is true because I was widely criticized for the exact opposition here: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/navalnys-ten-percent/
I also say that Navalny’s potential popularity is much greater than his actual popularity, should the “Putin regime” face a major discrediting event. Which is the only scenario in which Navalny realistically has (or had) a chance of gaining power. I don’t think Zyuganov or Zhirinovsky can take over in such a scenario; while formally oppositionist, they are too closely linked to the current system to be viable leaders (plus there’s the fact of their age and that both have been in national politics for even longer than Putin, of course).
The people who do underplay Navalny’s popularity tend to emphasize that only 2-3% of Russians say they’d vote for him in official opinion polls.
PS. As you point out, the fact that there have been no significant public protests surprised even me and somewhat made me adjust his influence to the downside.
I sort of agree, but tbh such disdain for the young seems like a bit of a problem given your often stated disdain for boomers (including their Russian Sovok version)…if both boomers and the young should be mostly written off, who’s left?
Anyway, I have no insight into public opinion in Belarus, and you could of course argue that sometimes people need to be told forcefully what’s actually in their own best interest (and imo NATO/EU integration wouldn’t be in that of Belarussians).
If discussion are about declining religiosity in America, then film reviews were a bit of useless thing to mention, as religious audience seek out religious films. The reason I mention about film reviews, was to say that Runet was selecting those kinds of atheist activists disproportionately.
Runet experienced a disproportionate aggressive atheists, because that kind of person was also more active on the internet for years, while in America internet penetration had been more universal. Moreover, because the internet functions as repository of views which were excluded by official media. Militant atheists commenting on Navalny’s Twitter are not at all exciting or shocking if you have time in the internet. There’s a lot of those people on the internet, and Navalny as an opposition activist is one of the collecting points for them.
In what sense? Numbers going to a religious service at least once a year peaked in Russia in the late 1990s, while in American in the late 1950s. However, the proportion of the population in those respective peaks was more than order of magnitude higher in America. If you mean in Russia, that self-identification of people as orthodox is peaking at up to possibly 85% of people, then there it is rapidly crept upwards, but it’s crept upwards from a quite high base. By 2008, it was already at least 63%.
https://takiedela.ru/2017/04/takaya-rossiya-cerkov/
What do you think about Mishustin and Luka’s meeting?
Luka claims “The Germans did it.”
Because his reports are completely unimportant and fake. Did ANYTHING negative happen to Chaika or Medvedev after his reports on them. Nothing – Medvedev calmly did his job for a few years and it was actually a big surprise to everyone when Medvedev was shuffled for Mishustin as PM. Same with Chaika – he became Kavkaz presidential envoy after remaining as General Prosecutor for several years. Was anything verified in the reports?No. So were they relevant and have consequences? No
Elena Malysheva TV doctor – somebody who I already knew was (legally) rich, have no interest ( or expectations) of being a big patriot of Russia…. has luxury homes in the US. That was his report – something of absolute zero relevance to Putin, to myself, although of course alot of people know her so it was of interest to many people. It’s like if he did a report (hypothetical) on that fith column POS Pozner donating money for the last 30 years to the Democrat Party in US – I have zero expectations of him being a patriot…. so the story would be irrelevant.
Or Sergei Brilyev has British citizenship – so what? He was chief correspondent in UK for many years – common sense to get citizenship, and he is not a big opinion journalist as Kiselyov, so the story was irrelevant.
No – it’s for the same reason that plenty of people don’t kill anybody every week. Or that Russia is not Honduras. Or that Felgengauer ( freak from Ekho ) was not an attempted victim of murder by the state…..but by the schizophrenic, Israeli nuclear physicist ( true story)
OR that Kara-Murza was able to attend his fathers funeral in Russia – even though his arrival should, legally speaking, have resulted in immediate arrest for Treason – which lobbying for sanctions by the US against Russia must qualify as.
Navalny’s brother was in prison for 2-3 years for involvement in the same embezzlement.
I would add that Zhirik who is on tv 24/7 and is over 70, has larger audience on social media despite probably 1% of comments on there compared to Navalny. Medvedev is (bizarrely) the most followed account on twitter ( or is it Instagram?) in Russia , plus we don’t know if Youtube is not conveniently manipulating the numbers to make this retard Navalny seem important.
Incidentally, after double-checking, it seems that it is 60% negative per top reviewers in the US(though admittedly 82% positive audience score) and 4.8/5(96%) positive in the Russian review site you linked, so its a strange self-own you just accomplished there.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/10010214-fireproof
https://irecommend.ru/content/vse-nachinaetsya-s-tebya
I can see your point about self-identification, but it seems to suggest that the message of a religious movie was more accepted in the self-selected sample of the Russian movie reviews you linked. Although this is surely an extremely unusual self-selected sample of Russians(The intersection of Russians who watch obscure foreign movies and Russians who then write reviews on the Internet), it seems to refute your idea of Russian movie reviewers on the Internet being extreme atheists.
And Yury Dud (8M) has twice the number of subscribers as Navalny (4M):
I mean LOL, that demented Stalinist “Goblin” (he of “Anti-Soviet equals Russophobe” fame) has 2M subscribers: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWnNKC1wrH_NXAXc5bhbFnA
YouTube is the kind of medium where you will automatically get at least 1 OOM more views/visits than anything written given equivalent influence/effort invested/etc.
I don’t think that makes automatically makes them 1 OOM more “influential” (let alone politically so) and I don’t even think that’s a “cope” on my part as a blogger.
Main culture difference I perceived was that two reviews in Russian who mention religion, both say it is “don’t worry or be offput this film is not religious propaganda”, and rest do not perceive religion in the film, while almost all American reviewers are about talking religion.
American films are not self-selecting – as they are the most popular with audiences in Russia (like everywhere).
The self-selecting is that all the reviewers in Russian women.
Because remember you selected the film. And most of American reviewers talk about being Christian and many about how film has strengthened their religious faith.
And yes there are often American films reviewers talking about how they watched some film in Sunday School. I see that a lot of times reading reviews on letterboxd for films such as Ten Commandments.
The fact these demographics, which filter against each other, are large enough to intersect (people going to church and people with rainbow flags), and result in rainbow flag church – is result of the large amount of Americans who go to church. When 50% of the population go to church, then you can find such an intersection of minorities.
If you compare in Russia, where 3% of people might go to church service in a year, and 0,3% (who knows?) of people might want to wave rainbow flag. Both groups filter against each other, and the market for rainbow flag churches will be fraction of fraction of percent even if you proposed such a thing.
I’m not sure what you are arguing about by now though? The point was that militant atheists on Navalny’s Twitter is nothing unusual for internet in Russia (militant atheists are disproportionately active on the internet, especially when more normal people were less online).
I don’t really want to discuss this at length here since it was already discussed many times on this blog, both know that religious service attendance is not a legitimate proxy for religiosity given the large differences between Western Christian and Orthodox services and traditions.
Previous threads:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/russian-religiosity/
Russian belief in God went from 35% in 1991 to 73% in 2012, US went down from ~95% to 88%, in the past eight years I would guess they converged.
Youth are much less religious than elderly in most of the West, including the US, whereas Russia bucks global trends in that youth tend to be marginally more religious, or at least not less religious than their elders. I also posted about that, though I can’t quickly find it. It is exceeding likely that Russian millennials and zoomers are more religious than their American equivalents.
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/pew-poll-on-religiosity-2020/
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/poll-PEW-religious-trends-2020.png
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/map-god-morality-2020.png
LOLOLOLOL!!!!! So in the world of Karlinistan, a Russian pilot, hospital administration in Omsk and the doctors are involved in an instantaneous conspiracy …even though it would be absolutely impossible to predict the effects from the “poisoning” with such precision in time that Omsk, that specific hospital and that group of doctors would be maliciously prepared for their “coverup”. If you give any credibility to the german version…then that BS is what you would have to believe.
Or has Karlin lived in California too long and thinks that Russia is one live action version of the US film Deliverance with 146 million actors ?
Seriously, WTF is wrong with you Karlin? This is just CIA, 5th column blogging. You should be ashamed of yourself.
Nazi Germany scum have opened their borders , just for this Russian, just for this retard and his family ( though his boyfriend deputy, Volkov, already there- and speaker of fluent German that must help him looking after his property in “third world” Liechtenstein LOL), so that he can be “treated” in the same hospital that was the scene for the still unexplained Yuschenko “poisoning” farce. Any sensible person would look at this as some trick by the west
TIL about newfound popularity of evangelical English Christian films in Russia.
Well I am happy to be assaulted by the nutjobs from both extremes (you and that “Concerned citizen” troll), it suggests I am on the mark.
What is OOM?
AK: Order of magnitude.
Purely co-incidental that Porton Down is a few miles away from the Skripals poisoning, and that like the alleged Liventenko Polonium poisoning, the UK refused any 3rd party access to the alleged substance used.
The links below outline the huge holes in the official narrative.
https://sputniknews.com/world/202009021080349842-novichok-would-have-killed-navalny-developer-of-substance-says/
https://sputniknews.com/analysis/202009021080351100-chemwar-expert-berlin-waited-to-find-poison-in-navalnys-system-until-no-more-tests-could-be-done/
Ask yourself why the Russian Government (or Putler) would use the poisoning agent, for which the Mighty Wurlitzer has been playing non-stop, to poison a 3rd rate annoyance. If Jorg Haider can die in a car accident, so can Navalny.
There is the most popular YouTuber of those that (sometimes) discusses politics.
Because he’s popular. I doubt he is using bots or something – so there most be many real people watching him.
Just in the last few years, we can watch the rising influence of YouTube on the political discussion.
Navalny has become negatively influential, just to the extent of those YouTube views. If he makes a video about you, then you will be appear the most unpopular person in the internet with younger YouTub watching people. You can see angry netizens flood from the Navalny video, to write negative comments across the internet.
aight put on your biggest tinfoil hats for this one:
The Germans deliberately did it, knowing that it would end his career. They’re getting uppity again, might want to screw over Putin and replace the US as the butthurtbeltistan’s favorite benefactor
If I recall (not being such a political nerd), that Medvedev messed up his PR in the worse way in 2016. And Navalny’s video was in 2017. So there is not likely direct relation of the video to Medvedev’s public relation.
But surely, it cannot have helped him to recover his public relations, as it is above 36 million views on YouTube now, only around 7% of those who rated of video are negative (although people who rate the video likely will be self-selecting to view it favourably) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrwlk7_GF9g.
Airfield denial. Wounded airstaff in distress slow the other side down more than killing them. If it loses potency after a few hours like Novichok, even better. You can take over the airfield. I dealt with it in my blog on the Skripals. Incidentally, you can put whole sentences from that post into any search engine and they never find it. So, here it is.
https://waleseuroperussiafuture.blogspot.com/2018/03/revenge-of-spies-how-to-become-target.html
Luka is now unambiguously relying on Russia to prop him up. Complete iwththe admission that RT did indeed keep TV news running. He is paying the price. He just agreed to move production of the higher volume Belarus tractor production to Russia. Other economic concessions are being made.
Shades of the Orange revolution in Ukraine in 2004. Lukashenko has chosen Russia against the people. He could have compromised with his own people. The People will win in the end. He has sent them away from Russia. Short term silivok thinking on Russia’s part. Putin continues to put every foreign policy foot wrong as always.
Lukashenko is trying to be helpful.
https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1301480566706110464
Navalny and Novichok have floated around for a few years so it was inevitable that they would eventually meet. Merkel as a chaperon in her last duty as a faithful servant.
Now for the happy ending: Putin dressed up as a flight attendant (the LBGTQ angle) slipped a few drops of the most deadly poison known to mankind to unsuspecting Navalny…but of course Navalny survives and comes out with an emotional J’accuse in the Murkan port on the desolate Baltic coast calling for the immediate stop to North Stream II. Happy liquified gas from Kentucky can start lighting up Polish homes. Yeah, it is a bit pricey, but would you prefer to be poisoned by Novichok?
This is third-rate sh..t written by ageing Bond writers. As in all tedious Bond movies, the evil guy uses an inordinately complicated method to kill, and predictably fails. Again and again. They need to get the story straight, because if Putin is this incompetent I will invade Kamchatka all by myself and chase Volodya into his flammable bubble under the sea.
That’s the story, and as-always gullible Germans are eating it up. They love Bond movies too. This is bordering on retarded. There is precisely one scenario under which Putin did this: if he wants us to think that he did it. Now why would he want that?
If you believe that the perpetrators helpfully sent Navalny to Germany so he can be saved and promptly diagnosed with Novitchok, well, how about some nice mountain resorts in Florida? Would you be interested in buying?
Luka is not the only one who could use a few chill pills.
As Karlin says, none of us simple netizens knows the truth of this story, and anything is possible. But we can speculate that if someone poisoned Navalny, Putin is not necessarily the more likely cause.
Navalny produces always such a lot of material which attacks reputations of a wide range of different people, and which is consumed by a large audience. Navalny has attacked reputations of at least hundreds of different wealthy people, and there must be many people who will dislike him for that.
If he was in a country with less centralized state capacity, like Mexico or Brazil, he would surely be “sleeping with the fishes” after a few weeks of beginning his blogging career. In America, he would surely at best have been bankrupt from defamation lawsuits. Whereas in Russia, he could afford so far to pay costs.
Is there an equality of Navalny in America? (who is allowed to produce corruption investigations and public them). I cannot think of an equivalent figure.
Corruption in the US is so different that its hard to find the exact equivalent; the public tends to dismiss corruption and have a certain naive faith in the government, since low-level corruption is pretty absent. Lobbying is the most common form of “corruption”, but it is legal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying_in_the_United_States
An equivalent might be someone like Ralph Nader:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader
Generally speaking, such individuals are dismissed as cranks. Since society is overall less cynical, I think such individuals would get less popularity; causes are usually raged against more transcendent and encompassing forces, e.g. against all men, all whites, all elites, rather than specific bad actors.
There are some extremes, like Tom Delay who was literally pork barreling money(attaching useless ‘edits’ to bills for extra money) to his district and building statues to himself(not sure if Russian politicians do that), but even that seems generally ignored.
Anyway, he got into some trouble eventually.
Well yes, it doesn’t make any sense but neither did poisoning Skripal in the UK with a nerve agent shortly before the Russian elections and the soccer World Cup. However, we now know that GRU agents Mishkin and Chepiga were in Salisbury the day of the poisoning. And that Putin lied on TV when he said that these two guys had absolutely nothing to do with the Russian secret services. Even Israel Shamir admits this.
In any case, I think that the Russian people deserve a government that does not do very stupid things or that, if it does do them, is capable of putting up a credible defense when being accused of it by a host of very important nations (partners, as it calls them). All I have read in RT, Sputnik and Rambler are the old and tired denials and platitudes.
If the Kremlin did not poison Navalny, there are quite a few things that it could do to spare the Russian population a new round of sanctions:
I developed quite a lot of sympathy for Russia after the Western MSM shut the news off when our new Ukrainian “democratic allies” started shelling their own civilian population, which was soon followed by a stream of Russophobia that culminated in the Russiagate freak show. But quite frankly, if the Kremlin doesn’t do any of this and the response is Skripal or MH-17- tier, I don’t see why Russia shouldn’t be sanctioned, be it for guilt or for incompetence.
Using military-grade chemical weapons on civilians is not a minor matter. The world doesn’t need to accept that as an inevitable new norm.
I’ll add that Western society seems to much more admire the crusader against corruption, for example, Upton Sinclair and “mudrakers”; I think this is in part due to a Puritan heritage of an ideal of championing purity.
I would not know for certain, but I think that someone who wishes to destroy all crime would have been seen as a madman in Russia while someone like Elliot Ness in the US, who thought he was on a divine mission to stop mobsters and scrupulously followed the law regardless of his own convictions can be seen as someone admirable. E.g. he drank the very day Prohibition was cancelled, but was a ferocious prosecutor of bootleggers at any cost to himself and his family, a kind of ideal of “lawful to the exact word without questioning the law.”
Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die, much as Abraham did not question divine will to slay his son. That attitude can lead to a lot of witch burnings, but I think it is also extremely hostile to corruption in general, which often relies on some degree of nuance and cannot deal well with fanatical idealists.
Frankly, I find this whole business rather disconcerting, a new manner too. Navalny, unlike Politivskaya, Nemtsov, Khordorovsky, Litvinenko etc, etc, doesn’t (didn’t?) have close relations with armed separatists, former political office, didn’t betray state-intelligence secrets, isn’t independently rich, and doesn’t seem to have particularly close ties to foreign governments. So in some manner it’s somewhat of a precedent, if the Russian government was indeed behind it (The Americans could have the means and motive to poison him as some sort of ‘false-flag’ but honestly this seems rather unlikely to me, <15%). I personally think some mid/upper-tier bureacrat acting independently and incompetently is responsible, which nonetheless doesn't augur well for stability in Russia.
Also, unlike most of the other characters, Navalny wasn't anyone in the 90's and thus this poisoining business can't be easily pinned on feuds/debts with various criminal figures or organisations that infested almost every facet of Russian public life at that time.
Well you are in luck because sanctions on Russia are coming regardless of this case or another. If not Novichok, soon you will be reading about top secret Russian assassin program that cross breeds Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot to produce scary agents that never quite manage to kill anybody, but Russia must still be punished.
Details of the narrative do not matter anymore. Reality is, American Empire is running out of time to take down China, and in order to take down China, they must take down Russia first. Russia must be destroyed to deny supply lines to China, and if it takes Loch Ness Monster swimming with Iraqi WMDs in Lake Baikal, then so be it. As long as President Biden believes it, and President Biden will believe in unicorns flying about at the rate his mind is going. The world’s most powerful military will be commanded by a demented old guy.
Russia should proceed accordingly, details of Navalny story simply do not factor into this.
It is perfectly conceivable that the Russian central government either felt secure enough or was headstrong enough to just kill the guy, so that can’t really be ruled out. However, I’m mystified as to why they would do it now, in such a public fashion, and then let the guy be sent abroad afterwards, with the distinct possibility that he would recover. Furthermore, he is a bit of a has-been, and didn’t pose any real political threat anymore.
I think a more likely explaination is the one Dmitry suggested earlier; Navalny has been making enemies of rich, powerful, and corrupt people for years, and it’s possible that any number of them picked this point to pursue revenge. He probably was actually protected to some extent by the government, which would explain why he wasn’t killed earlier, and now for whatever reason that protection failed to materialize.
With that in mind, I think that the Russian government may “revoke” protection of that kind as a form of retaliation. People speculated that Nemtsov was killed by a Chechen gangster on the orders of Kadyrov; perhaps something similar was done here, a powerful figure close to the government wanted Navalny dead for some reason, but never managed to get the green-light to do the deed until now.
My two cents. I must state this first: I have no idea what happened to Navalny and who made it happen, whatever it is. But there are obvious things in the Western narrative about the event that scream “lie” at anyone minimally competent.
First, when you analyze a sample (presumably Navalny blood), you identify an individual compound (sometimes along with its metabolites), and then judge whether it belongs to any group. No compound was named. Second, when you state that someone was poisoned by one of cholinesterase inhibitors, you can do it based on symptoms, but Navalny symptoms do not match that at all. Large dose of any cholinesterase inhibitor (say, like nerve gas) kills a person within minutes, low doses (like anti-Alzheimer drugs) make a person a bit smarter for a few hours (Navalny would benefit by that). No cholinesterase inhibitor ever would make a person lose consciousness and survive. Third, statements are made by politicians and journalists, i.e., the people nobody sane would expect to be either honest or competent. No statement is signed by a chemist or a physician. I’d say, for a good reason. A chemist or physician signing onto things that Western propaganda currently spews would proclaim loud and clear that s/he is either stupid or incompetent, or possibly paid enough not to be ashamed to publicly proclaim his/her stupidity and incompetence.
Finally, there are dozens of poisons that act quickly and leave no trace within minutes to hours. History tells us that when KGB (currently called FSB) wants to kill someone, it kills the target. Only an inveterate liar would claim that Putin’s goons used military grade nerve gas Novichok twice (Skripals plus Navalny) and both times did not kill the target. Inveterate liars have the floor in Western media.
You are a believer, so there is not much to discuss. What I remember from the Skripal’s case is that the two dudes (“GRU super-agents“) were partying with ho’s in a cheap London hotel and that Skripals survived whatever it was that befell them. Now, if you assume that Russia can’t do better than two goonish drunks who can’t shoot straight – or spray straight – then let’s go with the British media story.
Regarding Navalny: you can only ‘find the culprits‘ if there was an actual crime. It is not clear there was one and the Omsk hospital records have been made available. What is completely missing as of right now are the German medical records – all we have are descriptions by non-doctors of what the ‘conclusion’ was. You gotta do better than that. OPCW, UN, OSCE are simply not credible when it comes to ‘enemies‘ of the West. If you think they are, check out the mushroom cloud over Baghdad or any other bizarre stories that they have peddled. Western media is a part of the war so suggesting that they publish denials is rather silly – they are in a war, of course they will do whatever it takes to demonize the enemy (Russia mostly).
There are basic logic and rationality rules that many of these Western narratives disregard. You can convince yourself that doesn’t matter if you simultaneously see Kremlin is an evil all-powerful gang of villains and as the usual bumbling Russian incompetents. Possible, but unlikely. But believe it all if that makes you feel righteous and the “Using military-grade chemical weapons on civilians” is absolutely precious in its self-righteous fury. What if there was no ‘using’, no ‘weapons’ and we could hardly talk about ‘civilians’? Has that even cross your mind as a possibility?
The best analogies in the West to people like Navalny are Julian Assange or Edward Snowden. They published information that embarrassed powerful politicians and business leaders (‘oligarchs’ in a more neutral terminology).
The pursuit of both has been dogged and uncompromising. A number of self-declared ‘liberal’ Western countries like UK, Sweden, etc.. have joined in enthusiastically. So much for ‘welcoming the muckcracking’ in the West.
Still probably more favorable than any Russian or Chinese equivalent of Snowden tbh.
A person even with rudimentary analytical skill would deduce that Putin would not allow Navalny to be diagnosed in Germany – you are insulting his intelligence. Navalny is harmless to Putin politically. He is switching, creating , abandoning going nowhere mediocre parties. More then thousand Americans working at the embassy in Moscow, I wonder what are they doing there .
And then ship him to Germany to be diagnosed – pathetic nonsense.
The “poisoning” of Navalny is such a tragedy. With his removal from the political scene, it’s almost a certainty that the dream is dead.
Navalny was such a visionary, he knew that the only goal worth pursuing for Russia is to make the Americans like them. Without Navalny, there is no one left to pick up that most noble of causes, which every country on this planet should strive for, but particularly Russia.
Without such a clear vision, I think it’s safe to declare that the Russian foreign policy is in shambles. If they give up on Navalny’s vision, what other goals are left worth pursuing? Not many, I can tell you that.
Navalny was the last in line which started with Gorbachev, continued with Yeltsin, and was so rudely disrupted by Putin, who destroyed the dream. Now the only thing left for Russia is to wander aimlessly on the international stage, guessing if there ever is going to be another opportunity to make themselves likable by the Americans.
That’s what they have been missing throughout their whole history – to find someone to like them. Sure, there are plenty of countries that like Russia, but they are small fish, compared with the big prize. There is only one country whose admiration is worth pursuing. Everything else pales in comparison. If one lowly Poland can achieve such a lofty accomplishment, why can’t Russia? I don’t understand.
It’s always good to set the bar lower…how about what Saudis would do?
I suppose, at least, the Saudis can’t get any lower.
Navalny has been accused of being corrupt in addition to having made comments against some minorities. Perhaps a non-ethnic Russian criminal wing went at him, independent of either Western Intel or the Russian government.
Look at the bright side: Navalny can be rolled out half-conscious in front of the EU Parliament or even the Congress. He can publish editorial pieces with his newly acquired respectability and martyrdom. He can point his shaky finger at Putin and mumble ‘my murderer‘…the theatre can be incredible. Me wonders why wasn’t he signed up for this earlier? Why wait till now? Maybe a big new play is about to be staged an the cast is being assembled.
There is also the Nobel Price – how can they say no? A perfect fit for a not-so-great year: white guy from the land of evil. They might do it just to put BLM in its place so they stop clowning around and get on with the program.
Anatoly Karlin article, paragraph 2, sentence 2.
The Omsk physicians did NOT say what Karlin asserts they said. They diagnosed a sharp drop of serum glucose. They observed that Navalny is a diabetic and that his symptoms were consistent with diabetic shock. Two Russian laboratories tested Navalny’s blood. They found no toxins or other “unusual” substances. Specifically, they found no cholinesterase inhibitors (no carbamate or organophosphate poisons).
In one documented case that occurred in India, an organophosphate poisoning instance was misdiagnosed as diabetic ketoacidosis (a diabetes Type I condition involving very high serum glucose and dangerously high serum ketones). No other such cases have been reported. So, one cannot expect, rationally, that the Omsk physicians and labs mistook organophosphate poisoning for diabetic ketoacidosis — especially because Navalny’s serum glucose level was LOW.
The poisoning allegation occurred in CNN and BBC “reports” before German physicians FINISHED examining and testing Navalny.
Why was Angela Merkel’s teetering government so eager to get Navalny to Berlin?
Would Merkel obtain U.S. forgiveness of her Nordstream agreement and even her China-friendliness if she enabled the U.S. Deep State (and its MSM cronies) to create a new Russiagate that might sabotage Trump’s re-election? Might Merkel delude herself so? Concering the Merkel-government/China relation, compare Pepe Escobar’s article “Definitive Eurasian Alliance Is Closer Than You Think,” https://www.unz.com/pescobar/definitive-eurasian-alliance-is-closer-than-you-think/
Whatever may be an “truth” of the Navalny matter, this much is clear to me: Mr.. Karlin’s article is either a reflection of a peculiar reflex-stupidity or the dreaming of an anti-Putin whore. He has lost my respect.
Poisoning a guy on a plane or before boarding is quite tricky. Proximity is an absolute key – as with most poisonings it is one’s entourage who are in a best position. The idea that a server or a stewardess could be used is risky – you lose control.
Novitchok would infect a large number of others, on the plane and in the hospital. Where are the other sick ones?
Two favourite Western memes about Russia, Navalny and Novitchok, met in the air above Siberia – I am surprised we didn’t see it coming.
You are right. Navalny is the new Malala Yousuf. Trying to free his country from the shackles of medival tyranny. Definitely a Nobel Prize material.
Ralph Nader contributed to avoiding many peoples’ deaths, if we consider his work was successful to publicize about the lack of car safety in the 1970s.
But I think his career was not based around publicizing embarrassing allegations about elite individual peoples’ lives. So in a way it’s a little less dangerous.
I imagine perhaps you might survive publishing allegations against elite individuals in America within a politicized, partisan context i.e. if you were protected by either of Democrats or Republicans, as you only targeted allegations against people associated with the other political group, while protected by your own side. I.e. someone like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN4L_EUnUqk
Not pissing off everyone is a good idea if you want to continue your work, otherwise your sources will dry up.
Beckow your comment @70
Is spot on: I cannot say it better.
I kind of lean toward this poisoning being an event to be used as an emotional lever when telling the world they not only aren’t allowed to buy the Russian COVID vaccine, but in fact it’s in their own interest, because would you buy medicine from a known poisoner?
I’m surprised they haven’t yet started a campaign linking Chinese produce to the “genocide of the poor innocent jihadists” in West China. As in: “Buying Made in China=Sponsoring the Holocaust” or something along those lines.
Sometimes I suspect that the only reason the Anglo-Judean lobby isn’t pushing aggressively the “Six Million Uighurs Turned into Lampshades” narrative about China, is that there are still no implanted internal filters that would blind the Beijing elites as to who is behind this, as a group, and this would scuttle this group’s chances to infiltrate China peacefully for at least another generation.
But back to Mr. Navalny. When you’re a “walking martyr”, like Nemtsov, may he RIP, you’re a target from every side, very much including Western secret services, should it be decided it’s time you do the ultimate sacrifice in the name of world freedom and greater justice. And even retiring abroad and keeping your head down isn’t an option, like the Skripal incident showed. At some point someone somewhere will decide that using your health for their own goals is completely justified.
I guess that once you get atop that tiger, the only way off is if you manage to suddenly immigrate to controlled societies such as Cuba, North Korea, or China, where you keep your head down as a foreign language teacher or something, and foreign agents (both from your homeland and its adversaries) are very unlikely to be able to get to you.
Or become a minor celebrity in some Confucian democracy. Less safe than the controlled society option, but still is an efficiently paternalistic enough society for it to be protective of you once you become embedded in it in a productive way.
Tl; dr Mr. Navalny should have perhaps retired after Nemtsov’s assassination, or began aggressively re-branding himself into something less expendable.
Everybody who wrote with straight face that it was Putin who poisoned Navalny with (no less than) Novichok.. OK, I need to remember your handles and stop taking your opinions seriously anymore. I hate irrational thinking and this whole comment section gave me mild headache.
The Saudis aren’t competent enough anyhow.
The interesting thing is I don’t think the US has gotten all that less religious in a psychological sense. Christianity has declined, but my (utterly unoriginal) observation is that politics is quickly becoming the new religion for many Americans. This is most pronounced with the young, but isn’t necessarily limited to them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhgNyv_1TbE
I’m pretty certain she would have been a Moral Majority type in a previous time period.
I don’t really think sanctions should be implemented over this, but certainly agree that Putin deserves it for malevolent incompetence if they are coming.
The Germans confirming that Navalny was indeed poisoned by Novichok is very beneficial to the UK’s credibility, and by extension Brexit.
I think most countries strongly questioned the British narrative of the Surgei and Yulia Skripal poisoning, and thought it more likely to be just anti-Russian British bullshit than anything real.
However, now the wise and mighty Germans are confirming this Novichok stuff does indeed exist and really is being used to poison dissidents, it puts the British narrative of the Salisbury incident in a whole different light and vindicates it really.
Much of the world is more inclined to side with the Russians over the Brits, even many Brits themselves are more pro-Russian than pro their own government, but when the Germans make accusations against Russia as well that becomes a whole different proposition.
Getting poisoned might end up being the single most important thing Navalny ever does if it results in something like Nord Stream sabotage
Shale wells deteriorate rapidly, add in the longer they are shut in, the harder they are to restart, US shale won’t be the force it was two years ago.
German findings by their military bioweapon labs which is backed by the highest officials of German government, the finding that goes against German geopolitical self interests certainly will not be an easy task to ridicule and dismiss by the army of Olgino trolls so even Lukashenka felt compelled to chip in with his ridiculous intercept of Berlin-Warsaw phone call between anti-Russian conspirators.
This is very easy to do, you can ignore them, intimidate them or even have them die in accident or robbery gone wrong. You can ensure the right people deal with it in the first place. Really though it is easy enough to just ignore them. This part of your argument really falls down, you have perfectly legitimate example from the OPCW to JFK.
I don’t know what happened but I doubt it was novichok poisoning. The mystery is why the Kremlin let him go to Germany, consistent naivety going back to let Khordokhovsky go. Did they not forsee this happening?
What if the Kremlin does all this and it is ignored, because it will be?
Life Choices
AK vs VitalyzdTv
https://youtu.be/6UqsOkr7zRM
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcQh8BXBrEGQ2w9rkLlu9C_Ff-E7Y8Gq9ZvWCQ&usqp.jpg
US has a ton of corruption but who is going to talk about it? In Russia there is an active faggot audience. In US it’s split 50/50 so everyone believes the other side is corrupt. When big cases break there is always 50% that will not believe that is the case.
Recent example is Paterson election being annuled because 20% of the vote was falsified. Anywhere where you look in US you can find one type of corruption or another.
Even the stuff where whites move to a different town and then pass laws that make it difficult for blacks to move in is corruption. I mean don’t get me wrong I agree with this one in particular. Look up why there are a ton of small jurisdictions around twin cities.
Edit: antifa not being charged in blue areas is not a type of corruption?
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/09/04/germany-not-russia-should-answer-questions-over-navalny-case/
One can argue since he was barred by law from leaving Russia he stopped being useful. Russian authorities probably made it too difficult to continue contact and the people outside for Russia decided it is time to eliminate a loose end.
So a specialized purpose chemical agent, low chance of lethality, built in decay mechanism to further frustrate adequate dosage delivery but not so quick as to hide it’s unique providence to any forensic analysis.
Moscow’s poison of choice.
The only circumstances in which Putin would order something like that is if he knew his days were numbered.
Why not?
Nord Stream sabotage would cause Russia a loss of ~$10 billion. Russia gained a lot more by replacing the US dollars in its reserves with gold just recently. It will take this loss in stride. In contrast, Nord Stream sabotage would be a death knell for the German industry. It will never recover if it is forced to buy LNG. It does not matter whether that LNG is American or Russian: LNG is a lot more expensive than natural gas from the pipeline. The sequence of events will be set in stone: German products become non-competitive, German industry dies, consequently the main source of the EU funding dries out, and financially starved EU dies a prolonged and painful death.
The US appears to be hell-bent on destroying the EU. Previous anti-Russian sanctions damaged the EU at least as much as Russia (apparently, Europeans are too dumb to see that). The demise of Europe will damage the Empire a lot. The US elites are degenerate, they clearly don’t see several moves ahead, but I did not expect them to be stupid to the point of becoming suicidal.
Russia is preparing to tell Europe “we don’t have any more natural gas for you” by building a huge Yamal LNG plant and building gas pipelines to China. I don’t think Putin wants to put all eggs into Chinese basket any more than into European basket, so LNG is becoming the method of choice to sell natural gas. LNG can be sold to anyone and the buyers can be chosen and changed at will on short notice. What’s more, Russia is rapidly developing industry to produce polymers and other things from natural gas and oil. This development would take 5-10 years, but it would greatly increase Russian revenue.
So, the EU and the US are committing slow suicide, with the ultimate burial 10-15 years from now. Putin appears to follow old wisdom “if you see your enemy committing suicide, do not interfere”. A pity. The world could have been a lot better place with Europe and the US remaining as serious poles of power. Apparently, this is no longer on the cards.
No sensible decent Westerner will think ill of Russia for killing jihadist maniacs trying to bring death, terror, and sharia subjugation to their country. If Russia did it, good for them.
Better than aiding ISIS and helping the Islamist Saudis target Yemeni women, children, schools, and hospitals, as the US government has done.
1.) risk of armed intervention by Russia/war in Europe, with Belarus as a battlefield, 2.) would alienate Belarus from Russia, that is their own cultural sphere, history etc., 3.) Western societies are degenerate (the representative for Belarus in the “young leader” programme of the Obama foundation is a homo activist with a nose piercing like a pig) and on a probably irreversible road towards self-destruction through Islamic/African mass immigration.
I don’t know, as I am not privy to all the info Putin has. I can offer a guess, though: when it became clear that someone did serious damage to Navalny (who Putin aided and abetted, as hardly anyone discredited Russian “opposition” more than Navalny), Putin decided that it’s better for him that Navalny dies in Berlin than in Omsk. He might have been right in the long term. Putin, like Chinese, thinks long term. That’s how he wins with a weaker hand.
The US isn’t exactly pro-Brexit either. The Trump administration even said months ago that they won’t even consider negotiating a trade deal with the UK until the next term, if he even wins, and the Democrat opposition have made it clear that they are much more pro-EU than pro-UK.
So the US is not pro-EU, but they are not pro-Brexit either. Maybe Americans just hate everyone and see all foreign nations as a threat in some way and as adversaries?
I still think Putin naivety, we have other examples, presumably no poison was detected in Russia so he thought let him go to Germany, Merkel will play a straight bat and confirm this, and got suckered again. The novichok claim is the real giveaway. I would have thought you keep him there and treat him, whether true or not say it is a natural illness like diabetic shock, tell everyone to mind their own business. Doesn’t make sense, but these things rarely do, spook games are best ignored.
What is always overlooked is that the Arctic provides the Russians with a distinct advantage with regards to natural gas liquefaction for the simple reason of it being cold.
Knowing that liquefaction means simply cooling of the gas down to -160 deg C at atmospheric pressure, I would assume that the designers of Arctic gas liquefaction facilities would take into consideration that the ambient temperature there can go down to -50 deg C as opposed to Qatar or Iran where the average ambient temperature is well above + 20 deg C.
This should provide Russia with 5 to 10 % reduction of liquid natural gas production costs (provided Arctic gas does not contain impurities that would offset this advantage).
The US, as by far the largest market and funder, dominates the WTO for all Trump’s bluster. The WTO is the US’s world wide trade agreement. It is slow to respond to command and foundered in Doha because there is a ritual of consulting over 100 governements. Also the EU and British Commonwealth and perhaps one day the EaEU can have preprepared positions that don’t entirely reflect US interests. Straight bananas being the classic example.
The guy was a clown who did not challenge anyone politically. To the deep power, he’s more useful in the coma than active. This is clearly a Skripal-like charade, and his wife must have been bribed or hoodwinked into facilitating this.
It’s too easy to have only one or two agents doing the heavy lifting and the rest of the medical staff at Charité being fed bogus data, since everything hinges on blood analyses. No need for an elaborate conspiracy.
The Omsk samples are still available for any independent laboratory that cared to analyze them.
This comes conveniently at a time when Russia has twice humiliated the West (vaccine + Bielorussia) and is in a fragile position re Norstream 2, although frau Merkel made it clear upfront that the affair has no bearing on economic relations, and stated clearly her opposition to US sanctions on September 1st.
And, by the way, novichok is designed to kill thousands, not to temporarily incapacitate a single person with known metabolic problems. (But, of course, the Porton Down gang is up there at Charité; they can teach people how to protect against novichok with baby wipes, apart from suggesting how to vanish Navalnyj.) There is nothing funny about hypoglycemia with a pancreas condition, which Navalnyj is reportedly suffering from.
And, while we are in the poison department, Israel Shamir usefully mentions that Yasser Arafat was poisoned with plutonium roughly around the time Litvinenko was. The conclusion, of course, is that the FSB is responsible for both deaths, since we know it always signs its attacks; and plutonium traces is a pretty mighty signature.
I don’t know what should be done about this. Nothing, if all we eventually get is just Merkel’s word supported by some other Western Intelligence services.
And I really hate the idea of a new round of sanctions against Russia. All this Russian sanctions comedy started in a very wrong footed way. We got a Western-oriented regime in Kiev, for whatever that’s worth, after supporting a violent uprising to depose the elected president so it was kind of fair that Russia would get the territories where most of the population wanted to join it after the revolution.
But in the past 6 years the world has been getting closer and closer to the possibility of a nuclear confrontation that until recently was not in anybody’s mind.
Even the USSR and NATO understood during the Cold War that refraining from using alternative WMDs such as chemical and biological agents was a way of preventing an eventual descent to the nuclear catastrophe. If there is some credible evidence that Russia (or people Russia should have control of) is abandoning this principle, some kind of retaliation would look appropriate in my mind.
Some people here don’t want to address the damning fact that the two guys in Salisbury on the day of the Skripal incident turned out to be quite incontrovertibly GRU agents and that Putin was caught lying to the whole world about this. Or they are unable to understand what this implies.
I think that everybody (or practically everybody) in this thread agrees that it doesn’t make any sense for the Kremlin to try to poison Navalny with a nerve agent and then agree to send him to Germany for treatment.
But there are times when you have to accept the fact that things that don’t make any sense whatsoever are nevertheless the best theory backed by the available evidence. It is absurd, sure, but it looks like it all began 13.8 billion years ago with a big bang that just came out of the blue. And lots of educated people continue believing in reiki or astrology.
Well, I suggested one possibility – allowing him to go to Germany (there being no credible causes to hold him in anyway without seeming even more suspicious) discredits the image he has built up with Russians domestically.
This is more important for the kremlins than what foreigners might think.
A few minutes free time surprised the moribundity of my morning. So, awakened quasi-Lazarus-like, I found myself regarding the final few bigger-than-life paragraphs of Mr. Karlin’s piece, as if it were a second coming. The penultimate and ultimate mini-parables (excerpted and redundancy-edited, for your endurance’s sake, immediately below) “say it all” (the “all” of the nothing of “it,” like the seven last words of “Christ”).
[My emphases, and most ellipses mine. Loup-Bouc.] The “nothing of it”?
My trouble is that I am unable to receive messages from “God” or from a talking head of CNN or The Onion or…… So, I suffer being jealous of Mr. Karlin. HE can hallucinate…… No. let me correct myself: He can divine the true FACTS of the Navalny non-poison poison affair: intimate facts, complex hidden facts, mysterious facts, facts unknowable by anyone not created on Olympus.
Alas, mere mortal physician, law professor, statistician, logician, and poor “soul” who has lasted 79.8 years, during all but 9 of which he struggled through apprehending the myriad, wonderful machinations of the only near-wholly psychopathic species (humanity), I cannot just SEE closeted TRUTHS as Mr. Karlin can. I, frail creature, stumble without the crutch of valid, reliable evidence.
Russia might fight over Belarusian NATO membership, but over Belarusian EU membership?
Poland and Lithuania (both of them being both EU and NATO members) could also lay a claim on Belarus being a part of their own cultural sphere due to its history being a part of the PLC.
The Intermarium countries have managed to join both the EU and NATO while avoiding Western cultural degeneracy. So, why can’t Belarus (and Ukraine) likewise do the same thing?
Why exactly should Russians care as to where exactly Navalny gets his medical treatment? Honestly, I wouldn’t want to be treated in the same country that I was poisoned in if I was afraid that this country’s government was responsible for my poisoning.
Autism not yet widespread in Russia.
https://sputniknews.com/europe/202009041080369037-belarusian-state-tv-releases-recording-of-warsaw-berlin-call-on-navalny/
It is also possible for Belorussia to become integrated into enemy military, economic, ideological, informational, intelligence, etc. spheres without formally joining NATO.
As the narrowness of the recent Polish election showed, they haven’t.
“Intermarium” as envisioned by the Polish-Baltic axis exists as much as “Arab NATO” does.
Well, Yeah, that’s the right of sovereign states–isn’t it? As long as they don’t put nuclear weapons or offensive (nuclear and/or ballistic) missiles on their territory, what appears to be the problem? The US was willing to tolerate Cuba indefinitely being in the Soviet orbit after all of the Soviet nuclear missiles were removed from there, after all.
Are Polish liberals advocating opening Poland’s doors wide open to refugees?
By Intermarium, I meant a specific series of countries, not a formal association or alliance.
Because they have voting rights? Or are you advocating denying voting rights to young people? In the US context, this would require either repealing or judicially striking down the 26th Amendment.
As for Russia, I think that Russia’s best approach is to have a type of self-strengthening movement and to largely focus inwards. (A little intervention in Syria or whatever costs little to Russia and thus should not be minded.) Wait for its breeders to become a sufficiently large % of its total population, wait for an eventual Russian population boom/explosion, and also encourage the Russian people to embrace IVF plus IQ-enhancing technology once it will become developed and commercialized. Oh, and secure Russia’s borders, of course. Some Europeans, Israeli Jews, East Asians, Vietnamese, and Indians could add vibrant diversity to Russia but Muslim immigration into Russia should be heavily restricted, of course.
In regards to Nord Stream, what about a deal where it doesn’t get shut down in exchange for no more political assassinations from Russia and no Russian annexation of Belarus?
What a strange claim.
Bay of Pigs (yes, I know this takes place before the missile crisis)
Then there are the utterly ridiculous amount of assassination attempts on Castro throughout the years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_attempts_on_Fidel_Castro
Even today the US has iron-hard sanctions on Cuba.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-sanctions-investment-analysis/tougher-u-s-sanctions-make-cuba-ever-more-difficult-for-western-firms-idUSKBN1WO2LP
https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/14521/murdered-polish-mayor-supported-refugees
He got elected six times in a city under half a million.
Then there are the normiecon PiS who have already started opening up Poland to Philipinian, Nepalese and Indian workers, due to (of course) business agitation.
Then then it is advisable to use “Visegrad” or “Central Europe” instead, “Intermarium” has a much stronger geopolitical connotation.
Promise of no more political assassinations or annexation is dumb – what if Russia needs to carry out a few at some point? Why should Russia limit its policy options?
At some point, Russia will need to become more assertive and less nice. For example, since Ukraine openly declared Donbas war a war of Russian Aggression, Russia can freely treat Ukraine like US and Israel treat Iran. As such, the likes of Azov battalion leadership can recieve Soleimani treatment, and any time NATO ships military hardware that hardware should be subject to ballistic missile strikes.
Ukraine will not mind because they already claim aggression, and it will be good practice for Russian artillery.
So any deal Russia makes should be from a position of strength – not give up capability for a pipeline, but rather agree to reduce missile strikes from 10/week to 8/week or something. This will make things a lot better for all involved.
Navalny – autism?
Putin – autism?
Russia?
Who knows?
https://pics.me.me/vladimir-putin-i-am-not-autistic-this-story-was-published-1590052.png
Well, is there any evidence at all that Russia did in fact hit Navalny with Novichok? Seems not.
Based on the arguments here the Novitchok-on-Navalny case is built on the idea that ‘Germans just don’t lie‘. Right. Like never. Goebbels had to be a Belgian.
I recall the VW scandal with high level and blatant falsification of ‘testing‘ to sell more cars. Now if that is normal in Germany, and there are many other cases, why wouldn’t achieving a geo-political goal be ok for ‘German Military Biology lab’?
Germans are more trustworthy then English, but when the cause is just, or boss insists, they will lie like everyone else. We have Navalny’s blood tested in Omsk with ‘no poison’, but the same guy a week later has ‘traces of Novitchok’. This shouldn’t be that hard to resolve: let’s do a public, independent test with everything disclosed and let’s see who is telling the truth. The side that refuses to do this and insists on its own right to ‘security’ (Germany at this point) is probably the side that is lying.
It is still incomprehensible how the most lethal and contagious poison – I recall that houses were demolished in Salisbury to prevent its spread – has only attacked one person. His wife is ok, the passengers on the plane are ok, doctors and nurses are all ok. Germans tend to be tone-deaf, so even when lying they come across as awkward. Am I missing something?
Kadyrov lost personal access to Putin at that time, and then made many cringeworthy instagram posts declaring his eternal personal loyalty to him afterwards, so yes, many people speculated his guilt in Nemtsov’s death for that reason. But as I said before, Navalny didn’t move around in the same sort of scummy circles as Nemtsov and is/was much more careful with his personal life, so independent actors are less likely to play a role here. The main thing that sways me against an FSB poisoning is a find it difficult to believe they would be so incompetent.. although the Skripal affair did show they’ve fallen a long way from KGB standards already.
However, if you consider that Navalny currently is as good as dead, being in a deep coma, he’s certainly not making any more videos or doing any opposition rallies anytime soon. So you could argue that killing him outright was unnecessary, considering the results are the same.
The loss would be around $5 billion, the other $5 billion would be a loss for German, Austrian, Dutch… energy companies that put up 50% of the investment. My rough calculation is that Russia gained about $120-150 billion by dumping dollars and buying gold. But the real loss would be the continued partial dependency on Ukrainian transit and the few billion in transit fees each year.
One option Russia has is to go completely to cash-for-shipment with no negotiated contracts. That would put Germany and other EU customers in a bind – their risk would increase dramatically and basically at any point they could face an energy crisis or a sudden increase in cost. That was why Germany wanted a fixed, long-term contract with delivery (NS 1 and 2) completely outside of potential political hotspots. If you a German businessman not knowing where and for how much the next energy shipment will be is nerve-wrecking. Uncertainty limits investment because you have to account for worse case scenarios.
Another variable that is seldom discussed is that Russia has committed to buy German industrial goods with the euros that it earns selling energy to Germany. This supports a significant German exports to Russia – often cheaper alternatives are available from elsewhere (China, Korea,…). Similar deal was struck between US and the Arabs long-time ago: the petrodollars had to be ‘recycled’ for imports and investments in the West.
Yes, this would accelerate the unraveling of EU-Russia trade with both sides losing big, but with German industry (and its suppliers in E Europe) taking the worst hit. German industry is the engine hidden at the heart of EU prosperity. If Merkel folds she will be remembered for more than the 1 million guests she welcomed. It is getting serious.
In his defense, Navalny hardly ever talked foreign policy at all, his focus has always been nearly exclusively targeted at internal corruption (amounting to billions of dollars), a real and serious problem in Russia. Of course he repudiated Crimea’s annexation, but as far as he was never going to have high-office, I don’t consider his positions on such things very important. Just because one is disgusted by Western governments doesn’t mean one has to conversely cheerlead for the assortment of thieves and imbeciles in the Russian government.
Most of the scums who looted the country and profited immensely from its collapse under Yeltsin remain rich, connected and influential today, eg. Chubais, who holds as much culpability as anyone.
Well yes, the Kremlins (correctly) realised there was no longer any point in trying to befriend a West that invariably snubbed them around 2014, so yes, it makes sense from a domestic angle. Although ‘Europe’ and ‘the US’ won’t remain politically synonymous forever, although a split still seems far away.
There is no difference, in fact it doesn’t even qualify as hair-splitting.
Skripal affair showed woeful incompetence of British secret services. From the start, they did not invent a single lie, but offered of a kaleidoscope of lies changing many times within a week, each more fantastic that the previous one. Next, they allowed spreading in the media of a ridiculous picture showing two clowns in space suits next to a perfectly happy bobby without any protective gear. Then they faked alleged surveillance camera pictures of two presumably FSB agents forgetting to fake different time stamps on them. Finally, they did the right thing: eliminated Skripal and his daughter under the pretext of giving them witness protection. Dead people tell no tales. But that’s the only step where they showed some competence.
https://i.redd.it/sai8sn7hj8l51.png
https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1301664443370102784?s=20
Why link Russia and China on this type of thing? Why not just also nonsensically link North Korea and Russia then you cretin.
I already mentioned about scum who have gone to America to lobby for sanctions against Russia ( successfully) who have then gone to Russian soil and not been arrested or killed. No chance an American equivalent could get away with such treason . The crazed lesbian , murderer of Russians, Nadiya Savchenko has gone back to Russia a few times to support ukronazis on trial in Russia…..and no problems at all for her. You think this possible in America?LOL
I should add that Assange/Wikileaks worked on a large volume of things with Novaya Gazeta.
As it is there have been plenty of sources to liberast/traitorous garbage media in Russia saying the equivalent same (irrelevant) things happening in Russia as Snowden said about US. Has anything happened to them? No
In Russia there has been a trillion articles in media about mafia/corruption. In America for most of the last century there was exactly….zero articles exposing the mafia LOL. The US media corrupt then as it is now….just as whole cities like Las Vegas were getting built entirely on mafia money, and much of everyday life dominated by bribery and corruption in American cities from traffic police to Mayors and Senators.
This implies that someone wanted to kill somebody. But to break one’s political career it’s often enough to cripple to a necessary extent, killing, on the other hand, is bad for politics.
This would not make sense as we are talking about numbers who go to a church service even in Easter.
Easter is the important services of the year, and the fact that in Russia orders of magnitude lower than people that can turn off the television, walk a short distance, to attend church service in Easter, than go to ordinary church services each month in countries where religion is important in social life like USA or Poland.
Pew surveys about respondents’ belief in God’s iimportance, is not referring to organized religiosity in the sense that I think people here will interpret this terminology (i.e. that population are part of a religious group and have knowledge about religion).
Respondents will give this view in God as a philosophical answer (in a Russian, European or American cultural context). In Russian culture, asking about God is particularly likely to be interpreted as a private question about peoples’ relation to the world, rather than an organized social question (this question will be interpreted much more like a question about your social life in countries like Israel or Saudi Arabia).
For example, in post-industrialized European countries, psychedelic drug users will surely poll far higher in their belief in importance of God in their life, than people who drink beer and watch football. But the former demographic is not necessarily connected to organized religious lifestyles (if you would ignore some tiny organized religions like rastafarians or something).
Although it’s not impossible that government can be more incompetent than you can imagine.
In 1997, Netanyahu tried to poison Khaled Mashal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_Mashal#1997_assassination_attempt
I have been arguing for years that the US plan for Europe is either total submission or destruction. They’ve been doing a fair bit of destruction lately – last 15 years or so (instability and destruction in an arc all around EU: Iraq then Libya & Syria on fire, Erdogan helped to power in Turkey, US and its EU stooges in Ukraine etc. Bless the Algerians for arming themselves to the teeth.) – it looks like Empire decided that what it cannot control it will destroy. Scorched earth on somebody else’s land, how delightfully American!
Problem is convincing other Europeans to grow a backbone and throw out the Yankeestani-backed scum. And even that might not help: time-window is closing for EU to make a choice before tensions between “West” and RF+China block get too bad.
The US is committed to destroying Europe now that it can no longer wholly ignore its own decline. That which it cannot control is slowly strangled, and mined such that it can be “demolished” in controlled circumstances once the threat of the loss of control becomes too large. This has been obvious to any thinking European since the US started to mess with our near abroad. The choice is clear: stay with the US, and either be stabbed in the back, or end up crushed in a war not of our choosing, or leave the US, quickly, before they can do us in. Time window is short, and closing fast.
Not being there, or a complete lack of knowledge on medical/ chemical issues isn’t important when using process of elimination against an obviously nonsense western lie version….. one that is based not only on claiming novichok, but on large circumstantial “evidence” built up on years of disinformation to their public. The circumstantial aspect being more important to their operations than the technical claims like use of novichok.
For the German BS version to be true then the staff at the Omsk hospital have to be lying. Not right or wrong, or having a difference of opinion but saying the truth or lying.
For the Omsk hospital to be lying then they would have had to all (with the pilot, ATC and maybe even the girl making the chai in the airport cafe!) instantaneously and randomly be involved in a government conspiracy to kill or injure one guy….. based on the implausible possibility of knowing that, mid-air, the novichok would start showing its effects and the plane would land at that particular airport and go to that hospital (LOL).
It should also be noted that the pilot, ATC, emergency services, airline staff and hospital have all acted extremely quickly to land the plane and treat him immediately ( liberast scum severely restricted in their anti-russian ism by this fact)
Having listened to the hospital staff, they appear to have been very professional, detailed and there is no chance they are lying.
They tested his blood and urine immediately, they found high levels of sugar in his blood and high amounts of lactic acid. If I assume they don’t know or were not looking for novichok in testing, then I can still assume they were looking for effects consistent with poisoning, and with your comments on Cholinesterase inhibitors – effects consistent with novichok anyway.
The worst thing the Omsk doctors can do is say what is NOT wrong with Navalny. They already said there were zero damage to his lungs, kidneys and liver (typical effects of poisoning) …..so it is a certainty that Germany will ensure he does now suffer this. I think when russia started ridiculing the claims about his cup of tea being poisoned ( given to him by his own group, from pleasant girl at cafe) the west concucted the “one-size-fits-all” Novichok BS version.
Of course nobody else in hospital, airport or plane showing any effects… zero sign the Germans showed any interest in testing anyone on flight to Germany for it.
Navalny had better be praying that Omsk doctors don’t say novichok poisoning is consistent with the d*ck going all the colours of the rainbow and then shearing off in three pieces
BTW, what were your thoughts at the time on the Yushchenko “poisoning” in 2004?
Natural gas is just a cost item, not even the biggest. It can obviously be compensated. The Syrian refugees probably cost Germany way more in the long term.
While there are some analogies, there are many differences as well. In a WW3 scenario, Cuba without the nukes would have played a minimal role. While Belarus would be an important battlefield either way.
Even assuming it is true that the two guys have been proven to be GRU agents (last I saw, this appeared likely but not certain), so what? Given the proximity of Porton Down it would not be surprising if GRU agents were routinely present in Salisbury. GRU might also have been regularly keeping an eye on the defector living there. Whatever the guys’ mission was, their behavior was totally inconsistent with that of assassins. There are serious timeline problems with that scenario as well. And surely GRU has female officers, so why use two men to smuggle the perfume bottles through customs?
The simplest explanation for assassination attempts that would obviously be damaging to Putin and threaten projects important to him (World Cup, Nordstream 2) , is that they were carried out by persons who wanted to damage Putin and threaten projects important to him
Lukashenko atm couldn’t care less about Navalny of all the things, so quite likely he was just “asked” by RF to act as relatively higher status voiceover of this story, which was not originally scripted/produced in Belarus at all.
Do you think he just poured acid on his own face to garner sympathy or what?
The rumor has it that Yushch tried to look younger than he is, and used something under-tested on his face. Net result was that he got uglier than he was before. “Dioxin” theory was shown to be pure BS by Charite advising him not to have any tests done after his release. If they weren’t lying, they wouldn’t be afraid of being exposed.