Is Russian Opposition Leader Alexey Navalny a Key Prop in a Psychological Warfare Operation Designed to Bring Down Vladimir Putin?
by Jeremy Kuzmarov - CovertAction Magazine
Navalny was arrested in January on his return from Germany following treatment for poisoning with what many Western countries say was a military-grade nerve agent.
“Russia’s attempt to kill Mr. Navalny follows an alarming pattern of chemical weapons use by Russia,” a senior U.S. official told reporters, referring to the March 2018 poisoning of former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, with a military-grade nerve agent.
Seven senior Russian government officials will face asset freezes under the sanctions, including Andrei Yarin, the chief of the Kremlin’s domestic policy directorate, and Alexander Bortnikov, the director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), along with 14 entities associated with Russia’s biological and chemical agent production and a Russian government research institute.
The seven government officials also include Igor Kranov, Prosecutor General, and Alexander Kalashnikov, director of the federal penitentiary systems who is responsible for jailing Navalny.
In announcing the new sanctions, the Biden administration declassified an intelligence finding that the FSB orchestrated the poisoning against Navalny on August 20, 2020.
A formal report has not been released to accompany the finding.
On December 30, 2020, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial and Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Agnes Callamard, and Irene Khan, the UN Special Rapporteur on promoting and protecting the right to freedom of opinion and expression, sent a letter to Russian authorities demanding a probe into Navalny’s alleged poisoning.
Callamard and Khan wrote that “if proven, the allegations [of Navalny’s poisoning by the FSB] constitute a violation of the right to life.”
The words “if proven” are pivotal because they underscore the following: sanctions are premature given the allegations that the FSB was behind the poisoning of Navalny have not yet been proven.
Who Poisoned Navalny?
In their letter, Callamard and Khan provide a detailed timeline of events of the poisoning.
On Tuesday, August 17th, Navalny and some colleagues arrived in Omsk, Siberia, and spent the next two days meeting with residents and making a film about United Russia politicians (United Russia is President Vladimir Putin’s party).
On the 18th, Navalny had his clothes washed at his hotel’s laundry service and, on the 19th, he ate sushi after a long day, went swimming afterwards, had a Bloody Mary at the bar, and went to sleep.
The next morning, he left at 6 a.m. for the airport, where he had some tea and boarded his return flight to Moscow.
On the flight, he became violently ill, feeling “beyond pain,” and told the flight attendant he thought he had been poisoned.
The pilot then ordered an emergency landing back at Omsk, where Navalny was treated at a local hospital.
The doctors there did not find evidence of chemical substances in his system or poisons but attributed his illness to a metabolic disorder, suggesting that he had a grand mal seizure coming from hyperglycemia after going into diabetic shock.
At the urging of his family, Navalny was medivaced to Berlin for treatment at the Charité Universitatsmedizin, for which the Russian government gave authorization.
The medivac was arranged by a Berlin-based NGO with links to the anti-Putin Pussy Riot group—a group supported by Bill and Hillary Clinton and Ukrainian boxer Vitaly Klitschko, who was installed as mayor of Kiev after the 2014 U.S. and German orchestrated Maidan coup.
At the Berlin hospital, doctors diagnosed Navalny with poisoning with a cholinesterase inhibitor.
Navalny’s supporters originally had claimed that he was poisoned through the tea that he drank at the airport.
The New York Times on March 3rd suggested that Navalny was poisoned in his “underwear” after being stalked by the FSB during his Omsk trip.
In their report, Callamard and Khan claimed that the Russian government was the likely culprit in the poisoning because they were the only government in the world which had developed Novichok poison, though they acknowledge that lethal doses of Novichok had been sold on the black market to violent criminals by a rogue scientist in the mid-1990s.
Other experts have suggested that Novichok poison had been obtained by Western secret services in the 1990s.
In a video leaked by Bellingcat, a British agency funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—which was established in the 1980s to take over various functions previously performed by the CIA—Navalny, posing as an aide to the head of Russia’s Security Council, speaks to Konstantin Kudryavtsev, who was allegedly involved in a clean-up operation at the Omsk hospital.
Kudryavtsev stated that the FSB “added a bit extra” [of the poison] in the attempt to kill Navalny, and that the plan would have worked if Navalny’s flight had not made an emergency landing. See call here.
The authenticity of the video remains in question given the fact that an FSB agent would not normally divulge a secret operation over the phone.
Kudryavtsev claimed furthermore that the poisoners received instructions to “work on the side of the underpants” to administer the Novichok. However, he is unlikely to have been privy to this information as part of the alleged clean-up operation at Omsk hospital, where Navalny was not actually treated for Novichok poisoning.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko claimed that Belarus’ intelligence service intercepted a phone call between Berlin and Warsaw in which two agents talked about providing German Chancellor Angela Merkel with false information to present about Navalny.
Germany refused to cooperate with Russia in its investigation, in violation of treaty obligations.
The Kremlin considers the Navalny poisoning to be an “amateurishly staged performance aimed purely to further sanctions against Russia.”
It was part of a “hysterical anti-Russian campaign begun in the West which makes the Ministry believe that the events had long been planned.”
A spokesman for the Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office, Andrei Ivanov, told RT News that “no poisoning agents had been found as a result of expert tests,” and that members of Navalny’s entourage had removed or planted evidence in his hotel suite in Omsk, demonstrating a well-planned provocation, and that Navalny’s health had beforehand been deteriorating.
Navalny’s case follows the FSB’s alleged poisoning of Sergey Skirpal, a Russian military intelligence officer turned British MI-6 agent, and his daughter Yulia, in March 2018, which was also used as a pretext for expanding U.S. and EU sanctions.
Skirpal and his daughter were allegedly exposed to poison on their front door, though they were found incapacitated on a park bench miles from their home.
The elapsed time—like with Navalny and the water bottle—is suspicious because Novichok is a deadly agent that takes effect right away.
In Navalny’s case, it was suspicious that no one besides him experienced any symptoms from the poison since anyone who comes in contact with it is normally affected.
Frank Elbe, who headed the office of German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher for five years and negotiated the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons as head of the German delegation in Geneva from 1983 to 1986, raised doubts about the German Defense Ministry’s conclusion that Novichok was used, stating that Novichok belongs to a group of “super-lethal substances that cause immediate death” and that it “made no sense to modify a nerve poison that was supposed to kill instantly in such a way that it did not kill, but left traces behind allowing its identification.”
Elbe added that “there was something strange about this case. Either the perpetrators—whoever they might be—had a political interest in pointing to the use of nerve gas, or foreign laboratories were jumping to conclusions that are in line with the current general negative attitude towards Russia.”
When examining a crime generally, one always has to look at who benefits from it.
In this case, the prime beneficiaries are the anti-Putin forces and U.S. and UK governments.
The latter have carried out a vendetta against Putin for years because he is a more independent leader compared to his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, and has reasserted Russian control over its economy and humiliated the U.S. in Syria.
At the time of the poisoning, the U.S. and UK were trying to block completion of the Nord Stream II pipeline from Russia to Germany, which the Navalny scandal helped build momentum for.[5]
Navalny himself was transformed into a media sensation.
On February 4th, The New York Times, under the headline “Aleksei Navalny Is Winning,” wrote about a “David vs. Goliath struggle going on in Russia between Navalny, the 44-year-old opposition leader who was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for violating parole, and president Vladimir Putin, Russia’s by now aging ‘president for life.’”
Who Is Navalny?
During his confirmation hearings, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called Navalny “a voice for millions and millions of Russians.” Time magazine compared him to Erin Brockovich, the famed environmental activist.
Navalny, however, has the support of only around two percent of the Russian populace.
He has distinguished himself from other figures in Russia’s “liberal” opposition—which promotes free-market policies and privatization—through his determination to integrate the far right into the anti-Putin opposition.
Amnesty obtained a series of YouTube videos Navalny produced in the early 2000s in which he referred to immigrants from the Caucasus as “cockroaches.”
In one clip, he is featured behind a table with a pistol shoe and fly swatter and states that “everyone knows we can use a fly swatter against flies and a shoe against cockroaches.” Navalny then asks, “But what happens if the cockroaches are too great and the flies too aggressive?”
When a person dressed in black comes screaming toward him, Navalny shoots the man point-blank. A dead body appears. “In that case, I recommend a pistol.” See video here.
Another video has Navalny dressed up as a dentist who says his job is to “root out cavities [immigrants].” When neo-Nazi skinheads come on the screen, Nazis giving the Hitler salute, and war criminals hanged at Nuremburg, Navalny states: “These aren’t real specialists. You need to precisely and firmly deport.”
Frightened, Central Asians are subsequently shown being rounded up as a yanked cavity rolls across the screen. Then an airplane appears. Only blockheads think that “nationalism is violence,” tempers Navalny, adding that “we have the right to be Russians in Russia, and we are defending this right.”
When Navalny ran for president, he wanted to introduce a visa regime for immigrants from the Caucasus but not Germany, stating that “those who have a rich country should be more welcome as visitors.”
Navalny is most famous for his anti-corruption journalism. Together with a team of supporters, he has broken stories about the Russian political elite, first publishing on a private blog and now running a YouTube channel with well over a million subscribers.[7]
Many of the revelations bear the imprint of the FSB, which is notorious for compiling Kompromat dossiers with compromising material on high-level government officials that have in turn been leaked.
Navalny may also be receiving information from foreign intelligence services that are hostile to the Putin regime.
Anti-corruption drives are often valued by elites because they focus on removing one or two “bad apples,” rather than transforming the capitalist system as a whole.
Navalny defines himself as a “market liberal” and has for years advocated for greater freedom for capitalist markets and the opening of trade and easing of government regulations.
Navalny’s more recent support for raising the retirement age, and for increasing the minimum wage and funding for health care and education, and for Bernie Sanders, is largely opportunistic.
According to a former campaign worker, Navalny rarely talked about poverty, focusing more on the necessity of helping small business owners, and only talked about the working class with disdain.
Many fear that, if Navalny ever gains power, he would return Russia to the open looting of the Boris Yeltsin era, when Western corporations and Russian oligarchs had free reign.
Despite his anti-establishment persona, Navalny’s backers include Vladimir Ashurkov and Mikhail Fridman, two of the richest men in Russia, along with oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who profited from the chaotic privatization in the 1990s and was jailed by Putin.
Navalny’s economic program was designed by Vladimir Milov, former deputy energy minister in Putin’s government and a right-wing neoliberal.
Known as “Navalny’s patron,” Fridman is the subject of a criminal investigation in Spain for market manipulation, fraudulent insolvency, business corruption, and misuse of company assets, which points to the hollowness of Navalny’s anti-corruption crusade.
He has also promoted regionalist and separatist tendencies, which if successful, would contribute to the destabilization and weakening of Russia.
Putin has long attempted to subordinate regional elites to the federal government, sometimes through strong-armed methods, in the attempt to strengthen the Russian state and economy.
Navalny publicly advocated for “letting the Caucasus go,” while calling for the reintroduction of direct elections of regional governments.
Since 2016/17, his campaign established regional offices far outside of Moscow and helped organize demonstrations in Yekaterinburg, a city in the Urals, in solidarity with separatist leaders who called for a “Urals Republic.”
The protests were dominated by regionalist slogans such as “this is our region” and “Moscow get out.”
Is Navalny Himself Corrupt and Does He Deserve Jail?
On March 1st, The New York Times ran a story “‘Your Personality Deforms’: Navalny Sent to Notoriously Harsh Prison,” which invoked stereotypes of Russian backwardness and oppression.
Authors Andrew E. Kramer and Stephen Erlanger wrote that the prison colony to which Navalny was being sent in Siberia had seen few improvements from “the gulag camps established in the 1930s.”[8]
But what if Navalny was actually guilty of the crimes for which he was convicted and his prison sentence was actually warranted?
The question has never been explored by The New York Times or any other media outlets in the U.S but it is worth asking.
Navalny as noted earlier was jailed for parole violations after having twice been convicted on embezzlement charges.
The first conviction was for the theft of $500,000 from a state-owned timber company, Kirovles, for which he was fined 500,000 rubles ($8,500).
The alleged embezzlement occurred between May and September 2009 when Navalny worked as an adviser to Kirov regional governor Nikita Belykh.
According to the prosecution, Navalny partnered with Director Petr Ofitserov of Vyatka Forest Products Company and Vyacheslav Opalev, Director of the local bank, in order to illegally harvest 10,000 cubic meters (over 13,000 cubic yards) of timber valued at more than 16 million rubles ($500,000) on state forest land managed by the Kirovles State Unitary Enterprise.
The person who had originally accused Navalny in 2009 of stealing timber, Vyacheslav Opalev, was later revealed to be an accomplice.
In late 2012 Navalny, Opalev, and Ofitserov were charged with large-scale embezzlement. Opalev pleaded guilty and was given a four-year suspended sentence, and Navalny and partner Ofitserov were tried and convicted in January 2013.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) subsequently ruled that Navalny’s rights had been violated since the trial was a “politically motivated, arbitrary interpretation of the law.” Russia’s Supreme Court overturned the verdict, however, because of ‘corpus delicti’; the evidence was missing.
The material evidence in this case mainly consisted of the trees that had been cut down years ago. The Supreme Court ordered the gathering of additional evidence, followed by a retrial. Since no retrial ever took place, Navalny and Ofitserov never established their innocence in a court of law.
In December 2014, Navalny was convicted along with his brother Oleg of defrauding the cosmetics company, Yves Rocher.
The charges filed against the Navalny brothers were for embezzlement of more than 26 million rubles (nearly $850,000).
Both were found guilty of fraud and money laundering; Oleg spent three years in prison and Alexey received a three-and-a half year suspended sentence.
The case raises serious red flags, particularly with the establishment of a shell company in Cyprus—a notorious money-laundering haven—involved in shady business practices.
In December 2012, prosecutors in Russia accused Allekt, an advertising company headed by Navalny of defrauding the liberal CIA-funded Union of Right Forces by taking $3.2 million for political PR in 2007 and doing nothing with the money. The charges were initiated by the party itself, which counteracts the view that Navalny was a “political prisoner.”[9]
As far as the oppressive conditions of Navalny’s prison, this is not a unique problem to Russia.
The Times article claimed that the Siberian penal colony where Navalny was sent was known for strict enforcement of rules, extensive use of a separate, harsher, punishment facility within its walls, and prisoner self-discipline in collective units.
Inmates were also forced to use toilets without partitions, had to stand looking at their feet in front of guards for hours, and could not shave without the help of overseers.
While some aspects seem uniquely harsh, much of the description could match that of many U.S. prisons. The conditions in fact appear to be better than Super-Max facilities, which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has condemned for being “cruel, inhuman and degrading.”
Navalny: Is He a U.S. and British Proxy?
Navalny’s ties to the U.S. were established in 2010 when he served as a world fellow at Yale University, whose graduates played prominent roles in the 2014 anti-Russian coup in Ukraine and other U.S.-backed “color revolutions.”
Since his stint at Yale, Navalny has allegedly received more than $5 million from the NED.
He admitted to taking NED money in 2007-2008 in his blog, and identified himself in his Yale world fellows profile as a co-founder of the Democratic Alternative movement, a youth group that received NED funds.[10]
Predictably, some of the anti-government protests that Navalny has organized have been financed or supported by the U.S. embassy.
During the meeting Ashurkov asked Ford for information that could be used against the Russian government and for ten or twenty million dollars in funding, which he said was relatively little when billions of dollars were at stake.
Ashurkov further suggested that the anti-corruption campaign was part of a broader operation involving mass protests, civil disobedience and propaganda directed against the Putin regime—which Britain was covertly backing through its support for NGOs.
Trying to Unbalance Russia—A Color Revolution
The Navalny scandal appears to have been generated as part of a color revolution/psychological warfare operation, whose main contours were laid out in a 2019 RAND Corporation report, “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia.” It recommended an array of measures—from encouraging domestic protests to providing lethal aid to Ukraine to undermining Russia’s image abroad—for weakening and destabilizing Russia.
The likelihood for success remains low at this time because Putin has been able to weather the sanctions effectively through import-substitution programs and by developing local industries.[11]
Navalny also has only limited support within Russia compared to Putin who helped restore Russia’s economic sovereignty following the Yeltsin-era and has stood up for Russian interests around the world.
The greatest impact of the Navalny affair has been on U.S. public opinion.
A new Gallup poll finds that just 22% of U.S. citizens view Russia favorably, while 72% hold unfavorable views toward it.
Democrats hold particular hostility toward Russia, with fewer than one-in-six (16%) telling Gallup they maintained positive opinions about the country, as opposed to 25% of Republicans and 24% of independents
These totals indicate a high level of social conditioning whose end result could be war. 
Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and
author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending
Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John
Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018).
He can be reached at: jkuzmarov2@gmail.com.
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