Sensational news. The crooks from Nashi (the pro-Kremlin youth movement) have simultaneously posted fragments of my correspondence with Belykh and are rejoicing: "Navalny exposed. He’s demanding money from Belykh for jointly carving up Kirov Region." For media support of this nonsense, they’ve deployed the very best of the very best. From Vladimir_I_put_out_forest_fires_Burmatov to Vladimir_I_love_apartments_at_your_expense_Solovyov. And although commenting on mail stolen from you is stupid, still. If you’re going to dig in and read, then read the actual emails, not Burmatov’s commentary on them and the commentary of other trash. I’ve known Belykh for ages. We’ve had all sorts of financial and business dealings over the years. All of them are completely legal and, for the most part, have been described in the media many times over. At different times, those financial dealings were either settled or left unsettled. Sometimes, when people are settling unsettled matters, the conversation is a bit uncomfortable. As often happens, unresolved issues get sorted out in a less-than-comfortable exchange. Part of that correspondence is what was posted by that very hacker Maksimov, who does a little hacking on the side with help from the Investigative Committee. Life is life, and this concerns no one but me and Belykh. An attentive reader of someone else’s email will notice that the correspondence is dated 2010, while the matters discussed in it happened much earlier — it literally says: we’ve been discussing this for many years. Everything being discussed relates to those happy times when Belykh’s governorship wasn’t even on the horizon. So if you’re going to be an attentive reader of someone else’s email, then don’t let every swindler screaming "they’re looting Kirov Region" take you for a ride. There’s no point discussing the sums and circumstances described in the emails: the context is clear only to me and Belykh. As I already said, these emails are from 2010, which means they were already stolen and published during the previous hack. As you can see, they’re still sitting calmly in my inbox; I’m not deleting them, because nothing described there contradicts the law in the slightest. Calling each other names is bad form, but so far it isn’t punishable. If they published my text-message exchange with Belykh, even stevedores would blush at those, uh, epithets, synonyms, and metaphors. If the Nashi crowd and company have anything besides screeching and distortion to support their claim that I did something illegal, then by all means: turn your posts into formal complaints. That’s what I do. Surely no one doubts that if there were anything there, the investigators certainly wouldn’t be covering for me. But that won’t happen: this only works on the internet, where, for the benefit of gullible fools, any phrase like "we’re putting together a budget" gets interpreted as "the budget of Kirov Region," and "you f...ing stole a distillery" can be twisted around without specifying which distillery, where it was, whether "plant" means equipment or an enterprise, and so on. As usual, it will all end with hot air and a couple of paid-for articles. There have already been plenty of stories like that (just remember how they exposed me as the "vodka king"). I’ve had searches, my computers have been seized, my email gets hacked, and all my bank accounts are being X-rayed. Listen, when my wife drives the kids to school or kindergarten, surveillance tails her. It’s scary to imagine where they’ve installed cameras. And you’re talking about a "sensation from hacked email." The firefighters are looking, the police are looking (a reference to a famous Soviet children’s poem). Only you can’t find what isn’t there. If someone thinks they’ve found something — no problem, call 02 (the old emergency police number in Russia). That’s what I always do. P.S. While I’m at it, I’d like to remind Belykh that it would be nice to pay the money back.