I'm convinced they have portraits of Goebbels hanging all over the Kremlin. They follow his playbook to the letter. A monstrous, vivid lie spreads quickly, grabs attention, and shifts the focus away from what needs to be hidden.
I absolutely believe that Putin personally was behind the attempt on my life. Who else could have given the order to those two or three intelligence chiefs who have Novichok at their disposal, along with people who know how to use it? I said this in an interview with Der Spiegel. Here is the German version, here the English version, and here Mediazona’s Russian summary.
And if until now the Kremlin’s lies ranged from “it’s diabetes” to “he was faking it and poisoned himself”, then after my statement they needed something more colorful and aggressive.
So they brought out the good old CIA. Though they seem to have forgotten that I’m “Agent Freedom”, the man who brought down the Soviet Union and is now bringing down Russia, and have demoted me a bit to someone merely “working with CIA instructors.”
But this time the accusations are coming not from some clown on state TV, but from Putin’s press secretary, Peskov.
My first reaction was cheerful, childlike, restorative laughter. Not even because the accusations are so absurd, but because they chose Peskov to say this nonsense.
At words like “abroad,” “foreign agents,” and “intelligence services,” this guy with an apartment in Paris ought to blush and crawl under the table. It’s not for nothing that we at the ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation) have a joke: “You could make a whole NATO platoon out of Peskov’s children.”
It’s hard even to decide through whom Dmitry Peskov receives his instructions. From which intelligence services, and which of his relatives serves as the main go-between. There are genuinely many possibilities. Maybe Nikolai Choles, his English son, who served time in a British prison and then became part of Moscow’s gilded youth, passes him little notes from the Anglo-Saxons? Or his daughter Elizaveta (“Liza”) and her brothers, who spent most of their lives in France? Perhaps we should take a closer look at Peskov’s stepdaughter Sasha Zhulina, a U.S. citizen by virtue of being born in New York. Peskov’s wife, Tatyana Navka, also fits quite well for the role of his CIA handler: she lived in the United States for 14 years and managed to acquire a Manhattan apartment there for $1.2 million. The instructions may have arrived in the form of coded messages to her American bank account (which she is not allowed to have)—that version is worth checking. Peskov’s ex-wife, Ekaterina Solotsinskaya, is no less suspicious: she moved to Paris permanently right after the divorce and stayed there. She’s dating a former president of France—surely something is fishy there.
But jokes aside, the matter is simple. You know that I very rarely sue propagandists, even though they lie about me all day long. I just don’t want to waste my time.
But here we have a direct statement from a government official.
So first, I am suing Peskov.
And second, I demand that they publish the evidence and facts supposedly showing my “work with CIA specialists.” Show it on television, in prime time. You have my permission.
I very much hope the Russian embassy has arranged some kind of surveillance on me here, and that they have full records of what I’m doing.
All those shocking and criminal two walks in the park a day. And also my work with a CIA instructor, who tells me: and now, Alexei, let’s roll up the exercise mat and try standing on it with our eyes closed without falling.
Presumably this is a coded message meaning: Headquarters demands the continuation of the operation to discredit Russia’s national leader and expresses dissatisfaction with the staged poisoning. We asked you not only to fall into a coma and convulse, but also to foam at the mouth. Sloppy work.
If the state authorities on whose behalf Peskov speaks have evidence for the nonsense he is spouting, then this is a matter of Russia’s national security, and I demand that this evidence be made public.