In this interview—apparently one of the most popular I’ve ever given—I’m once again asked: why do you keep picking fights with journalists?
Well, here’s another perfect example. I’m not even arguing with them. I simply despise these people, do not consider them journalists, and have no intention of hiding how I feel about them.
Let’s start by watching this video—it was posted on my channel today. It’s very funny, and it was recorded by ACF’s (Anti-Corruption Foundation’s) head of investigations, Maria Pevchikh.
The NTV television network, evidently acting on Kremlin orders, has finalized the story the authorities are going to tell about my poisoning. Before this, it was total confusion—everyone saying something different. Lavrov said one thing. Peskov said another. Naryshkin said a third, and the Omsk doctors a fourth. And now, after thinking it over for three months, they’re presenting the best they could come up with.
They’ve brought in the Habsburgs, a show business expert, and a profiler as experts. I didn’t even know such people—profilers—actually existed. An absolutely brilliant invention. Anyway, watch it—you’ll enjoy it:
But that’s not all. You might say: come on, it’s NTV. Nobody considers them journalists anyway.
And this is where we get to the people whom some still do consider journalists. The NTV film contains a lot of ridiculous lies, even more insinuations, and one truly colossal falsehood. It’s delivered so confidently that it’s hard for viewers not to believe it. After all, an ordinary person would never imagine that someone could lie so brazenly about a fact that is so easy to verify.
- Yulia Navalnaya is lying when she says her father is dead. In fact, he is alive, lives in London, and is either a KGB or GRU general. And now he runs certain foundations.
Wow. Incredible. This family really does have something to hide!
The author of this shocking investigation is Oleg Kashin. A great many people consider him a journalist (Kashin even compiles some kind of annual ranking of journalists himself). Many are friends with him on Facebook. Some even shake his hand, and there are even those—few, but they exist—who are willing to sit at the same table with him. “Journalist” Kashin loves talking about me, bolstering his authority by saying that he once “knew the Navalnys.”
Kashin is “exposing” Yulia and me, fully aware that the Kremlin’s propaganda machine will pick up his words and spread them far and wide. Which is exactly what is happening.
Here, listen to this excerpt from his broadcast:
“Yulia comes from a non-ordinary security-services family. Let me stress once again: Yulia Navalnaya’s biological father is alive. Her stepfather died, her father is alive. The stepfather’s birthday is July 15, the father’s is July 17. Navalny didn’t come to my birthday because he went to visit Yulia’s father—Boris Borisovich Abrosimov. From what we know for sure: Yulia’s aunt—Abrosimova—was a co-author of the Russian Constitution. Boris Borisovich Abrosimov himself served as an embassy secretary.”
How could anyone not believe a journalist’s story when it comes with such details and specifics that he obviously claims to know firsthand?
And I won’t hide it—I was stunned to the core when I heard this. Yulia was even more astonished. Because the only true part of this story is that Kashin used to keep inviting me to his birthday parties, and I didn’t want to go, so I kept making up excuses to decline.
This “journalist” sits in London and simply invents the entire story from beginning to end, down to the tiniest detail, and then goes on air with a smug little smirk—“now you’ll all learn the truth.”
I feel very stupid posting this document, because this has gone beyond “prove you’re not a camel” (a Russian expression meaning having to disprove an absurd accusation)—it’s even worse than that. But still, here is the death certificate of Yulia Navalnaya’s father, Boris Alexandrovich Abrosimov. He was a quiet research employee until he died in 1996 at the age of 44. He had never been to London and could not possibly have been there—how was an ordinary Soviet person supposed to get to London?
And as you can see, his name was Boris Alexandrovich, not Boris Borisovich. He had neither brothers nor sisters. Accordingly, Yulia has no aunts or uncles. A certain Elena Borisovna Abrosimova really was part of the working group that drafted the Russian Constitution, but she has nothing to do with Yulia. The fraud Kashin invented the patronymic “Borisovich” for her father, then started googling every Abrosimov named Borisovich and adding them to Yulia’s “security-services family.”
It’s strange that Kashin didn’t think to spice up his sensation with yet another of Yulia’s “aunts”—this one from United Russia (the Kremlin-backed ruling party):
Yulia’s stepfather is also dead. He too had never been to London and could not possibly have been there. He also had no brothers or sisters. In Soviet times he was an ordinary employee of Gosplan (the USSR State Planning Committee), where he met Yulia’s mother. They were ordinary people with an apartment in a high-rise in the Olympic Village, where Yulia lived until she married me.
Checking all this is not just simple—it’s very simple. You can do it in 15 minutes using databases available to anyone. But you won’t believe—and this is the saddest part of the story—how many journalists wrote to me (some of them even claim to specialize in investigations) asking: “Listen, Kashin says your father-in-law is actually alive and some kind of security-services guy. He can’t possibly be lying that brazenly, can he? What do you say to that?”
What do I say to that? Yes, he can lie—and he is lying. Journalism in Russia is in such a state of crisis that people can’t even be bothered, not just to check databases, but even to do a simple Google search.
So. I want to end with a moral, if you’ll forgive me. There are good journalists and media outlets in Russia, and they are all the more valuable against the backdrop of people like Kashin. It is important for all of us to support them. But there are far more bad journalists—and outright crooks calling themselves journalists—and we should not be embarrassed to despise them and say out loud exactly what we think of them. Confronting liars matters a great deal: by doing so, we both hinder the spread of lies and help those who tell the truth.
I would be grateful if you shared this post and this video.