In less than 24 hours, what will probably be the loudest, most important—indeed, historic—trial will begin. The trial of the world’s most prominent political prisoner. The leader of the Russian opposition. They are preparing to put Navalny behind bars for 15 years.
Why is Putin imprisoning Navalny? What will happen this week? What should we expect, and what should we prepare for? What crime did he commit? Today we will answer all of these questions. We will examine the charges in detail and leave no question unanswered.
The prosecution’s story is as follows. Just listen to how grand it sounds: Navalny raised money to fight corruption—and spent it on himself.
Thousands of defrauded people, a pyramid scheme, MMM (a notorious Russian Ponzi scheme), shattered hopes, and billions stolen. They are presenting us with the con man of the century, who, like Kashpirovsky (a Soviet-era TV hypnotist), hypnotized everyone, lured them in, and robbed them. You believed Navalny, and Navalny deceived you. Putin REALLY wants—Putin NEEDS—you to believe this. Remember these words: this is exactly what you will hear at press conferences and in interviews. Well, just without the word Navalny.
Do you know how many people have donated money to us since 2012? 300,000 people. That is the population of a medium-sized city. A city like Murmansk or Vologda. And according to Putin’s version of events, Navalny deceived this enormous number of people. If you believe the Investigative Committee’s press release, Navalny stole 1 billion rubles. Just imagine it: 1 billion rubles from 300,000 people! Now that is some mafioso. True, later, when it came time for the actual investigation, the amount of alleged damage shrank significantly. In the new press release, it is already three times smaller: 356 million rubles. Still substantial, still a huge amount of money.
Now let’s open the case file itself. A criminal case is not the same as churning out press releases for a website—you have to prove at least something here. The official amount of damage, meaning everything Navalny supposedly “stole” and is being tried for, is 2,693,503 rubles. And here is how it all began…
If you think it cannot get any more embarrassing, just wait. Out of the 300,000 victims we hear about on television, the case materials contain… four injured parties. Four people. Not four thousand. Just four. One, two, three, four. “Hmm,” you are probably thinking right now, “something is off here.” But wait. The most interesting part is still ahead. We are about to meet them.
Let’s go back to December 21, 2020. A winter day in the Moscow region. A small apartment in the settlement of Rublyovo. It is rented by a 38-year-old man named Alexander Koshelev.
He came to the Moscow region from Kursk. Alexander is officially unemployed. Until that summer, he had at least been scraping by—he worked as a plumber for the state municipal utility service “Zhilishchnik.” If you live in Ramenki and your riser pipe leaked or your sink was dripping, you may have met Alexander—he might have come to your home to fix the plumbing. His salary was 33,000 rubles—almost half the average salary in Moscow. But now, in December 2020, even that is gone. Our Alexander takes whatever odd jobs he can—he needs money. At the moment he works as a tow-truck driver. His number is saved dozens of times in other people’s contacts as “Sasha Tow Truck,” “Sasha Tow,” “Sasha Tow Truck Moscow,” “Tow Truck Elektrogli,” “Sanya Tow Truck Peredelkino.”
That kind of work clearly does not bring in enough money. So Sasha hustles however he can. He makes a bit more by renting out a portable site cabin and doing semi-dry concrete floor screeding.
So, December 21, 2020. Alexander the tow-truck driver opens YouTube and sees the video “I Called My Killer. He Confessed.” The famous call to Kudryavtsev, the FSB poisoner. Alexander watches the video and is so moved that he can no longer eat or sleep. Exactly seven days later, he pulls out—apparently from under his bed—1,000,000 rubles in cash. What? Yes, really! One million rubles! Three years’ worth of his salary, banknotes he had carefully saved for a rainy day. He takes all that money and goes to the nearest Sberbank branch. He steps up to the counter. With trembling hands, he passes over the cash and says: “Deposit all of this into the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s account.”
Alexander was already about to leave, but then he realized that was not all. He still had his last hard-earned money left, and he had cowardly held it back. His last 20,000 rubles. Give those to Navalny too. I will manage somehow.
Curtain. Now that is a story!
The remarkable events we have just described at the Sberbank branch in Rublyovo took place on December 28 at 4:36 p.m. On December 29, just one day later, a criminal case was opened on the basis of that donation.
Under the Criminal Code, damages of up to 1,000,000 rubles count as “large-scale.” But 1,000,001 rubles already counts as “especially large-scale.” Those 20,000 rubles played a crucial role. If it had been just one million, Navalny would have faced 6 years in prison, but at one million and twenty thousand rubles, it becomes 10. Our tow-truck driver certainly knew that, didn’t he?
He seems to be a very knowledgeable man in general. To make a cash deposit like that at a branch, you need to know the account number. And Koshelev knew it—he recited it to the cashier from memory. There is just one problem: our account number was never published anywhere. It simply was not publicly available. An ordinary YouTube viewer could not possibly have known our banking details.
Just as he could not possibly have had a million rubles in cash. And cases are not opened within a day like that. Koshelev would not even have had time to file a police report. What do they take us for? What kind of circus is this? And THIS is the case of the century against the “fraudster” Navalny?
Let’s move on. The second injured party. We go back to a warm summer day in 2017. August 31, the settlement of Krasny Bor in the Leningrad region. Mikhail Kostenko lives there; he is now 72 years old.
Back in the summer of 2017, he watched this video on Navalny’s channel. It was about Peskov’s secret son, who, after serving time in an English prison for petty robbery, returned to Russia and began living like a true heir of Putin’s elite. Mikhail Kostenko was impressed. He went to Sberbank… Sound familiar? He pulled out a wad of cash—50,000 rubles in his case—and deposited it into Alexei Navalny’s election campaign. He was almost ready to leave, but then remembered that he had a stray 100-ruble note in a far pocket. Kostenko adds that 100 rubles and deposits 50,100. And how conveniently it all works out, because up to 50,000 means a magistrate’s court, while 50,100 means a more serious venue: the Savyolovsky District Court of Moscow, a familiar and controllable one. Only lawyers know such fine points—or our pensioner Kostenko.
Then the following happens: a month later, Kostenko realizes that the video about Peskov’s son misled him. He wants to get his 50,100 rubles back, but instead of, say, emailing us or calling, he goes straight to court.
We learned about this case from Twitter. There is this internet grifter, a trashy lawyer named Ilya Remeslo. He became notorious for claiming on a federal TV channel that Yulia Navalnaya’s father was an intelligence officer. That he was a former embassy employee, lived in London, and managed foundations there. This despite the fact that Yulia’s father died 26 years ago and had never been to London in his life. In short, Remeslo is a petty legal parasite whose life revolves around inventing stories like this about Navalny and lying shamelessly.
So this Remeslo publishes a post saying that he, specifically, will represent in court a CERTAIN Mikhail Kostenko.
Pure coincidence. He volunteered to defend some random man. A certain someone. Now let’s take a look. Our donor, the pensioner Kostenko, has a daughter—or rather, a stepdaughter. Her name is Nadezhda, and she has a husband named Suren Zoryan. He is a lawyer too. And Ilya Remeslo has known this Suren Zoryan for a long time, since 2012. Here are the cases they handled together. Here is a ruling: both of them represent the same client. They are issued powers of attorney at the same time. Zoryan’s phone number is saved in Remeslo’s phone.
We have no doubt that both of these donors—the one with the million and the one with the 50,000—are plants. That is obvious to anyone from their biographies, the sums involved, and the circumstances. These are people who were led in by the hand, given someone else’s money, and told: make a single payment. Fake victims, paid to slander an innocent man.
But there are still two more injured parties, and their situation is much worse. Unlike the fake donors, they really did transfer money to us voluntarily. Regularly. But pressure was brought to bear on them.
Vyacheslav Kuzin from Samara. He is 63. He had his own small bank. Since 2015, he transferred 957,000 rubles to us. Not in cash at a Sberbank counter like the tow-truck driver or the pensioner from Krasny Bor, but normally, from account to account, in a total of 58 transfers.
Well, maybe he became disappointed in us? Maybe he really decided that Navalny had deceived him, misled him? No. Unfortunately, it is worse than that.
Vyacheslav Kuzin himself was charged in a criminal case over his past banking activities. He spent time in pretrial detention, is now under house arrest, and faces up to 10 years in prison. His relatives and subordinates are effectively being held hostage too—they could be hit with the same charge. And Kuzin gave testimony. He said he had been deceived. While himself under criminal prosecution.
The fourth injured party is Alexander Karnyukhin. Also a mid-sized entrepreneur, with a small business in telecommunications. He is now 66. Starting in 2017, Karnyukhin transferred money to us over several years: 45 payments totaling 665,000 rubles. Again, account to account, nothing suspicious.
Only one thing distinguishes Karnyukhin’s situation: a criminal case for tax evasion had already been opened against him. A case like that, even an old one, can be taken off the shelf, dusted off, and sent back to court. Under a more serious charge. We are convinced that is exactly what happened.
So the last two really are victims. They are just not victims of Navalny. They are victims of a broken, twisted system of justice—criminal cases are opened against them so they will give false testimony against Navalny.
That is all. There is nothing else in the case. You have heard from the propaganda cesspools that Navalny stole 300 million and spent it on a luxurious lifestyle and vacations, haven’t you? None of that is there. It does not exist. You have heard about laundering a billion and tens of thousands of victims? You were being lied to. Instead of a billion, it is two and a half million, of which one million was deposited deliberately. By stand-ins. And the remaining one and a half million was not stolen by anyone—people were forced (through criminal charges, pretrial detention, and threats) to say that Navalny had deceived them.
This is a farce and a fiction masquerading as a trial. Putinist clownery, a symbol of their helplessness and insignificance. And, as if to confirm this point, as if wanting to shout to the whole world, “Look what idiots we are, admire what shameless cretins we are!”, they add yet another charge to Navalny’s case. One completely unrelated to fraud or money. A dozen volumes of waste paper. And if they had put in blank sheets instead, it would have been less embarrassing for everyone.
A case about insults. Insulting the judge. The female prosecutors. And who even knows whom else—the veteran’s grandson. A group of investigators from the central directorate of the Investigative Committee wrote down 104 phrases uttered by Alexei Navalny during the February trial in the “veteran defamation” case. One hundred and four phrases, including, for example, these:
All of this, along with a hundred similar phrases—including the word “blin” (“damn”), which is also in the case file—was deemed insulting. And added to the criminal case. So they can keep the country’s main opposition politician behind bars for longer.
Why is Putin imprisoning Navalny? It is the simplest question in the world, and it does not require any of these papers. Putin is imprisoning Navalny because Navalny humiliated Putin before the whole world by exposing the Novichok assassination attempt—and with it, the squadron of FSB poisoners behind it. Putin is imprisoning Navalny because of us, because of you and me. Because of the millions of people who support Alexei. Because of the hundreds of thousands who refused to give false testimony against him. Putin is imprisoning Navalny because the future belongs to him, to Navalny. Because he knows how to run a presidential campaign, and Putin does not. He never has. And because he, the great geopolitical strategist and world leader, still cannot bring himself to say Navalny’s name.
Starting tomorrow, we will keep telling you everything that happens in Navalny’s trial. It will not be easy. The proceedings will take place on the grounds of the prison colony in the Vladimir region, and neither journalists nor members of the public will be allowed in. There will be no cameras or microphones there. It is a prison, a restricted facility—no one can simply walk in. But we will make every effort to pull scraps of information out of this madness and tell you the truth. Subscribe to this channel, to Navalny’s team’s social media, and to his press secretary Kira Yarmysh, and follow the news. And of course, share it with everyone you can. Tell people how an innocent man was arrested, framed, locked away in prison, and is now being tried in secret. They think this will help them. They think their master Putin is eternal.
We have also launched a website where we will publish all the case materials we obtain. Including the monstrous “insults,” which you will be able to judge for yourselves.
Thank you for your support.
Freedom for Alexei Navalny.