Look how well this works. We publish an investigation, and in a week more than 90 million people watch it. And Putin is forced to dodge, squirm, lie — but still respond. Let’s make this happen every time.
The only way we can explain the week-long delay in responding is that the entire presidential administration was busy searching for the shabbiest room in the residence — the one where Putin could talk about how close he is to ordinary people and how ascetic he is.
Siding indoors, Soviet-era wall lamps, an air conditioner in the middle of the wall. Why, it’s just a modest little dacha in the Ryazan region, thrown together from whatever was lying around. That’s how Putin wants to be seen. Gold? Frescoes? Furniture costing as much as a three-room apartment? Never heard of it.
But now we know what his real lifestyle actually looks like.
Now let’s get to the substance of it. You can listen again to the magical seven minutes of lies and absurdity here. In the meantime, here are quotes from the speech by the “reset” guarantor (a reference to Putin’s constitutional term reset), and a look at what’s wrong with them.
For two hours in the film “Putin’s Palace”, Alexei Navalny explained the same point in different words. Putin’s friends built him a secret palace, put it in the names of front men, and created an entire infrastructure so that no one would ever learn the real owner of the palace near Gelendzhik. Nothing is ever registered in Putin’s own name; everything is put under the names of his trusted associates. Yesterday, Vladimir Putin repeated that exact point himself. Message received, thanks.
It was especially funny that Putin specified that his close relatives have nothing to do with the palace and never have. The lawyer in him suddenly woke up:
Nikolai Shamalov, in whose name the palace was previously registered, really is not a close relative. A svat (the father of your daughter’s husband) is not considered a close relative. Mikhail Shelomov, who is now overseeing the construction, is Putin’s first cousin once removed. Apparently, in Putin’s mind there is some imaginary court where he will show up and say: “I didn’t deceive you — I just phrased it so that everything I said was technically true.” That won’t help you, Vladimir Vladimirovich.
This passage sounds like a joke or trolling. Our investigation is built on exactly that: we took 15 years of this property’s history and analyzed land records, financial transactions, and notarized powers of attorney. Precisely the things Putin lists.
And here is the very document that, according to Putin, does not exist. A notarized power of attorney showing that the palace is managed by employees of Shelomov’s companies, which also service the companies of Svetlana Krivonogikh. But Putin says there are no traces and no mentions. Ninety million people can see them, but Putin cannot.
And now for the best part. A line that provokes both a fit of laughter and a wave of embarrassment.
It is 2021. The president of the largest country in the world, the leader of a superpower, a great strategist and geopolitical mastermind, thought this drawing was a photograph. And started arguing THAT IT WAS DOCTORED. Deep-space exploration? Nanotechnology? Science? What are you talking about — the man cannot tell a photograph from an intentionally badly made drawing.
We at the Anti-Corruption Foundation now demand an individual rebuttal for every drawn character shown in the palace interiors.
Did Putin recline in a caftan on the reading room sofa? We demand answers.
Did citizens Timati, Mikhalkov, and Boyarsky perform on the stage of the home theater in Praskoveevka, surrounded by a bear, a little horse, Cossacks, ballerinas, and a gymnast? The people have a right to know where this image came from.
It is urgently necessary to establish the origin of this “photograph” from the “hookah lounge.” Is it genuine or fake? Chicken or lamb?
Remarkable, isn’t it? A whole group of people who seem unrelated at first glance — lawyer Egorov, billionaire Timchenko, billionaire Kovalchuk, oligarch Abramovich, Rosneft chief Sechin, the obscure Sovcomflot employee Shelomov, Tokarev from Transneft, the mysterious Gelendzhik resident Kolbin. And Putin knows every single one of them. It’s not even certain these people all know each other, but Putin knows each of them individually. What an amazing coincidence.
Let’s decode that. The “good acquaintance” is Timchenko. His “partner who passed away” is Pyotr Kolbin, Putin’s childhood friend, with whom he used to go to village discos. And once again, Putin knows all about it.
Highly unlikely, Vladimir Vladimirovich, very highly unlikely.
In short, what we were given was not a response to the investigation but some kind of nonsense. Putin did not refute a single thing, not one fact. Just imagine for a minute that we were wrong and the palace really had some other true owner. It is completely obvious that half an hour after our film was published, that owner would be shouting from every possible platform: “Are you out of your minds? It’s mine, not Putin’s — I bought it and built it, Navalny is lying about everything.” And the Kremlin, taking advantage of such a stroke of luck, would even organize a tour to Praskoveevka to show that it is some entirely different person strolling around the casino there in a house robe.
Today the clown show continued, and Peskov said that they in the Kremlin know who the owner is, but they won’t tell us. A little secret.
Excuse me, does the Kremlin have every owner of every piece of real estate in Russia memorized?
We have all been watching Putin for more than 20 years, and we know one thing about him perfectly well: he lies to the very end and never admits even the most obvious things. The whole world may laugh at him, but he still will never admit anything. There are countless examples.
In short, the fact that Putin denies everything is just the five-thousandth piece of evidence in an already overflowing pile of evidence. It confirms that we are absolutely right. This is Putin’s palace.
Help us spread our film even further. You can see for yourselves how beautifully the Kremlin’s liars and their court propagandists are squirming and struggling.
If you know anything interesting about this property, write to us anonymously via Black Box.
Freedom for Alexei Navalny!