The Kremlin, furious at Navaln, hesitated against the West: no more words

Looking at the Russian media, it is easy to point out at least some of the recurring arguments that seek to discredit both the country’s opposition leader and his team’s high-profile investigation into Vladimir Putin’s palace in relation to the Western secret services. .

Everything consists of a general narrative in which A. Navaln is shown as a tool of the West to discredit Russia and to carry out a coup in her. The problem is that this narrative lacks an essential component: solid evidence and, sometimes, elementary narrative consistency.

Inconsistent arguments

The protests in Russia began on January 23. His main objectives are to support the arrested opposition leader A. Navalnas and express his discontent with the abuse, an example of which is the investigation of the opposition and his team in Putin’s palace. It is estimated that people took to the streets in almost 70 Russian cities and towns.

The opposition leader’s return to Russia was accompanied by a series of “expert” comments aimed at discrediting Navalna, his investigations, and showing that Western criticism of his treatment of politicians was based on an attempt to harm and humiliate the country. .

Piotr Akopov’s text on the RIA Novosti portal states that Navaln is a “project developed by the Anglo-Saxon secret services” to change the government in Russia for more than 10 years.

Mikhail Demurin’s comment on the Regnum website said that the Navaln poisoning and other “provocations” were intended to allow the Americans to stop the Nord Stream 2 project and that the opposition itself was allegedly acting against Russia.

The RT news portal points out that A. Navalnas works for Russia’s enemies, his popularity exists only in the minds of Westerners themselves, and the fact that the opposition does not work for his homeland and his rivals is demonstrated by a group of diplomats. foreigners who attended his court hearing. The text also intimidates the West into seeking a coup in Russia.

The aforementioned Demurin went further by accusing the West of racism after the Navaln trial. It is said that the West, criticizing the Russian legal system, regards this country as a secondary state. The commentator also once again accused Navalna of working with the West with the aim of destroying the Russian state.

All these texts are linked by accusations against the West of supposedly seeking to harm Russia or even destroy the latter, constantly suggested to look at itself first and solve its internal problems first.
However, there is no evidence or solid basis to suggest that A. Navaln is in any way related to Western secret services or performs tasks dictated by foreign states, and such unsubstantiated statements can be made about any disbeliever.

Any Russian politician who receives the intercession of the West quickly receives the label of an agent acting against his country in the Kremlin media.

In the context of the US presidential elections, the main target of the Belarusian news service Sputnik was not only Navaln, but also another opposition politician, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is supposedly looking for traitors and preparing for a revolution.

At that time, the real support of the West was until now only verbal or symbolic, like the presence of diplomats at the court of Navaln. Sanctions or other actions that could have a real impact on Russia are still being debated.

Narratives are also challenged by the fact that the latter sometimes contradict each other. Demurin’s text tries to show that Navalnu is being used to stop the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, but at the same time says that the poisoning of Navalan, at the epicenter of which Germany is interested in continuing the project, is a provocation against Russia . It is unlikely that Germany will be able to simultaneously pursue and preserve the pipeline project and at the same time help the United States sabotage it.

To discredit Alexei Navalna, the goal was also to discredit his team’s particularly notable investigation into Vladimir Putin’s luxurious palace. The West has also received unfounded accusations in this regard.

Efforts to discredit the study

Following Navaln’s return to Russia, his team’s latest investigation was published, claiming that Russian President Putin owned a huge luxury villa on the Black Sea coast.

The record caused a stir both in Russia and abroad. It has been viewed over a hundred million times on YouTube. Putin denied that the palace belonged to him or his relatives, and very soon one of the richest people in Russia, the orligarch Arkady Rotenberg, close to the president, declared himself the owner of the palace.

The investigation also received a lot of attention in the Russian media, where Germany and NATO, who received A. Navalna after receiving a poisoning, were accused of being the authors of this investigation.

The television program Vesti de Rossija 24 claims that the German government acted as producer of A. Navaln’s film. With government escort and protection, the film was shot in Dresden, with the deliberate aim of creating an information bomb and causing trouble in Russia.

In the same issue it is stated that the text of the investigation was prepared by the secret services of NATO to be filmed in a German mountain resort. It is alleged that the text of the film was written in English and then ignorantly translated into Russian. It is said that the English word “moodroom”, which means entrance, was translated in the film as “mud room”.

The report also claims that Putin would not need such a palace and that the palace itself and its surroundings do not correspond to the president’s style of leisure.

Although A. Navalnas has been featured in the film for a long time, the investigative work “on the ground” was carried out by activists from the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), which he founded and runs, and who are shown filming the palace itself.

Since 2011, the existing fund recently received a legal blow, with the declaration of the organization as a “foreign agent” under the new legal framework, as part of the support grants that support it from foreign countries. The latter has already appealed against such a decision in the country’s courts, and the law itself is widely criticized both by organizations operating in Russia and the West for completely restricting the activities of anti-government public figures.

There is also no basis for alleging that Mr. Navaln was commissioned or assisted in any way by the German Government in conducting this investigation. Even the conversation about the clay rooms is more reminiscent of an attempt to find hooks than of actual evidence to justify the involvement of Germany or NATO in preparing this study. So far, there is also no evidence that the images seen in the studio were filmed in Germany, although knowing the location of the filming in Dresden would not have been difficult to find.

How ridiculous and contradictory leitmotifs are presented to different audiences. Fighting against disinformation, EUvsDisinfo reported that the Kremlin’s Arabic-language media carried a completely opposite message from Vesti’s. In this speech, the propagandists try to imply that A. Navaln was deported from Germany.