Of all the comical trash Kiselyov showed yesterday, this is what struck me most.
Last Friday, Rubanov, Zhdanov, and I were leaving the office to buy coffee downstairs on the ground floor of our building—the ACF, as you know, is based in a large business center near the Avtozavodskaya metro station in Moscow.
So we’re walking along, discussing something. Suddenly some bald creep comes up with a Rossiya-1 microphone, with a cameraman next to him. The guy, actually looking a little embarrassed and clearly uncomfortable—I was surprised myself—says: Alexei Anatolyevich, how would you comment.....
Naturally, we told him: dude, you’re bothering us, go away. Then we headed back to the office, realizing he wasn’t going to let us have coffee in peace.
The bald guy with the microphone shouted something after us, filmed the office door for a bit, and left.
And in yesterday’s film, they showed that footage of us standing in the corridor of the business center with the caption: “KYIV, UKRAINE.”
I literally started rubbing my eyes when I saw it—I couldn’t believe it. No wonder the bald guy seemed a little embarrassed: he knew he was filming me “in Kyiv.”
All this is to say that Kiselyov’s film is a huge stroke of luck. We’ll use it as another opportunity to explain that TV propagandists do not utter a single word of truth.
My last name is Navalny—that much, admittedly, is true. But everything else is not just lies; it is deliberate, outright defamation.
That is why we are not only filing a lawsuit against Rossiya-1, Kiselyov, and the “authors of the investigation” to defend our honor and dignity, but will also seek to have a criminal defamation case opened. This is defamation in its purest, textbook form:
The dissemination of knowingly false information. In the details—they film in Moscow and label it “Ukraine”—and in substance.
We haven’t even gone through the film ourselves yet, but the collective mind of the internet has already found the following:
The “CIA agents” are corresponding in English with mistakes that even a third-grader wouldn’t make. There are no articles at all.
Apparently, this is not even the work of a bad translator, but an automatic Google Translate rendering. Here is a detailed breakdown: Popov’s Tremor: The Funniest Blunders in Rossiya’s Film About Navalny.
The “screenshots of correspondence” violate our usual understanding of space and time. Browder asks me a question, and I answer it two years earlier:
The “CIA letterheads” were simply taken by Rossiya-1 from one of its own earlier broadcasts:
The “intelligence documents” are signed by none other than V. Plame herself. She is one of the most famous CIA agents—she was at the center of a major scandal during the Bush presidency. Obviously, Kiselyov’s staff just googled “CIA agent” and found her name, but failed to read the articles mentioning her; otherwise they would have known that the scandal ended with her leaving the agency in 2006. Yet in Kiselyov’s version, she is corresponding in 2009.
I didn’t hear it myself, but I was told that Dorenko said on the radio today that he had worked with Berezovsky for many years and had never once heard of the clown presented in the program as “Berezovsky’s head of security.”
The secret servers supposedly used for correspondence between MI6 and CIA spies are located in Ukraine. In Ukraine, CARL.
Skype correspondence is not stored for more than 30 days, and previously it wasn’t stored on servers at all.
The “Skype conversation between Navalny and Ponomaryov” sounds much more like a conversation between Dmitry Kiselyov and his grandmother. Listen from 12:50—does that sound like my voice?
It’s strange that they didn’t include this in the “investigation”:
And so on and so forth.
This is the first time in my life that I’m suing a media outlet over honor and dignity (the case with Chaika was technical, so it doesn’t count), but this one is worth it.
One last thing: I’d like to point out that VGTRK, which churns out fakes on this scale, receives 23.3 billion rubles a year from the state budget (roughly hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars, depending on the exchange rate).
They lie and they steal—and they even steal from their lies.
P.S. If you know any details about how this “film” was prepared—the names of the authors, the names of those who commissioned it, the people who passed along instructions, or any other information that could help us in court (or simply clarify how the whole thing works)—send it anonymously to Black Box.