I watched the full version of the “shocking investigation into Navalny’s millions” that aired on NTV (a Russian state-aligned TV channel). I even made a video about the promo.
For now, I want to say two things:
I’m impressed by how intensive the surveillance is. It’s not just me, or me and my family together—they even surveil family members separately when I’m not with them. They were filming us from a boat (!!) even in the remote wilds of Karelia, on Lake Syamozero. You sit on the porch, look out, and see what seem to be fishermen in the distance. But it’s actually FSB officers with fishing rods and cameras.
They obtained surveillance camera footage from literally every hotel I’ve stayed in over the past few years. “A luxury hotel in Tver Region,” and all the rest of it.
You can judge the truthfulness of their “facts” from one simple example. The film shows a list of shares supposedly owned by me. It was taken from this post—you can tell by the red line:
And then they claim that these shares “generate 10 million rubles in income” (about $110,000 at current rates). Which means that a few years ago, “Navalny must have gotten 10–20 million rubles from somewhere to buy them” (about $110,000–$220,000).
I wasn’t too lazy to calculate the current market value of the entire portfolio:
So the whole thing is worth 1 million rubles in total (about $11,000). And I bought it back in 2008–2009, spending around 300,000 rubles altogether, probably.
Amounts like that don’t sound very interesting, so they boldly added one or two zeros everywhere.
This is how the Kremlin has kicked off its election campaign. I have no doubt we’ll see much more of this. How else are they supposed to answer me?
And you shouldn’t stay on the sidelines either—join in: