Putin’s plan is a failure, a betrayal of citizens — give people money

[music]

Good evening, everyone. In Moscow, it is exactly

8:00 p.m., and I’d like to say that

normally, I’d be in the Navalny Live studio,

Alexei Navalny, who today was called

a person who spreads

fake news about the coronavirus. But I’m not in the studio

at Navalny Live. Welcome to my

home, and I know for sure that at least

most of you — the overwhelming

majority — are also watching this

broadcast from home, so let’s have

a nice little tea-time YouTube streaming

party. Let me say in advance a huge

thank you — I hope nothing breaks,

or crashes. If it does crash, don’t

leave right away — wait a little while.

Many thanks to the Navalny Live team,

which somehow, by some clever means,

managed to organize all this. Send me

your questions on Twitter with the hashtag #RussiaOfTheFuture

— I hope we’ll be able to

— there’s a monitor set up here for me in a clever way

to pass your

questions onto this screen, and I’ll try to answer them.

Since this week I was called

a person who spreads fake news

about the coronavirus, I’d like to find out who

is really spreading fake news here. To do that,

I’d like to use your help. In the corner below,

where you’re watching on YouTube, there should be

a little icon there.

And if you click it, there will be a poll. This

question is very important, because our

government and Rospotrebnadzor (Russia’s consumer safety watchdog)

— a disgusting, vile, lying

organization — assure us that as of today

they have conducted five hundred

thirty-six thousand tests across Russia

for the coronavirus. What’s interesting is that

journalist Ilya Shepelin, shortly before

the broadcast, noticed that

for three days in a row, or maybe even four

days in a row,

they published the exact same figure. In my

view, it’s completely made up. And then

today Prime Minister Mishustin said

that 36,000

coronavirus tests are now being done every day. If that’s true,

then more than half a million tests

have already been carried out. If it’s 36,000 every day, then

practically every one of us should have

someone we know who has taken this

coronavirus test. So I’m asking you

to take part in the poll.

Do you know

personally at least one person — honestly,

I mean personally. Not that

you saw, I don’t know,

Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister

of the United Kingdom, took the test. So

say yes only if you personally know

at least one person who took

this test and got a result, which is important,

because right now everyone who ends up in

the hospital is told, ‘We’re testing you,’ but

then they never give them the result. I’m already

curious what result we’ll get. We already have

40,000 viewers watching us live

right now — that’s an excellent start.

Let’s begin. There are many topics today, and this is

probably exactly the kind of situation where

I can say that I’m not in any

hurry, and you’re not in any hurry either. We

can make this stream as

long as we want, but as usual we’ll try

to keep it to a little over an hour, or

maybe an hour and a half. But we’ll discuss

all sorts of interesting things. There really

is a lot to talk about. But yes,

naturally, coronavirus, Putin, and

everything else — by now it’s become a tradition

that has probably lasted a month, where I spend

most of the program discussing, of course,

issues related to the epidemic. I’d like

to dwell on several news stories

which, unfortunately, because

the news agenda has now completely

changed, some important stories

went unnoticed. And I’d like

people to pay attention to them. One very

funny story came out about how Putin

met — sensationally — with a real

grandmother. Remember that very grandmother from

St. Petersburg who asked him

that awkward question about 10,000

rubles — how can a disabled person survive on

10,000 rubles a month, and afterward everyone was delighted

and said, ‘Oh my God, what a brave

grandmother.’ Though it’s strange that

other grandmothers

or disabled people — and not just grandmothers, but girls, grandfathers,

young people — don’t ask such a simple

question. But let’s just recall this

little moment.

Don’t push.

Touch this here.

And... [inaudible] 1,000... 600...

Can you live on that? [inaudible]

But according to which...

[music]

Come on now, you know perfectly well whom

it’s worth sending to the store to buy groceries

with that money.

So that’s not...

When it’s in the thousands, I really...

And there are children too... this time we

understand.

We now have this kind of support program.

What was that story about earlier? Well, the story

was that Putin really was asked

a question

— an obvious, direct question: how can one

live on 10,000 rubles? And he was thrown off,

mumbled something, and couldn’t

answer anything. But now this is a story that,

well, happened about one and a half

months ago. Time passes.

So long ago that it feels like it was us already,

like it really happened in a past life. It has become

much funnier now, because

it turned out that this person was, in the literal

sense, the only random

person there—a St. Petersburg journalist. And then

several media outlets conducted, well, not exactly an

investigation, more like a study into who was standing

in that crowd, and it turned out they were all

plants.

Every single person who was there

was some kind of—there was an Alexander, like

the head of a commenting department

at RIA FAN, which is one of Prigozhin’s

trash outlets, basically

the kind that deals in bots and internet trolls—that’s what it does.

There were heads of commenting departments,

officials from the Vasileostrovsky District,

Eduard Ilyin, Vitaly Martynenko, Galina

Korolyova.

In other words, all those people who were standing there

around him,

every last one of them was planted. We’ve discussed many times

and laughed about how

Putin is always meeting lumberjacks,

fishermen, archaeologists, whoever you like,

and that they’re all staged people. But honestly,

when I saw, over and over again, this

matching of faces across different photographs,

it seemed to me like it was a bit of an

exaggeration, because at least for

some liveliness in the picture they would need

to bring in at least some ordinary people. But as it

turns out, no. In fact, just note—

or rather, remember—this was all

presented as a spontaneous meeting

between Vladimir Putin and St. Petersburg residents whom

he supposedly met on the street. In reality, they prepared

everyone. It was just some

woman passing by at random who

apparently squeezed in between those officials and

asked her own questions, causing that awkward scene.

Well, that’s just another very

good example, and today we’re going to

talk about this a lot.

The person is absolutely

completely detached from reality,

because

a spontaneous meeting with people is possible—

he may not even know about it. He just says,

“Maybe let’s—hey, Petrovich,”

“driver, please stop, I want

to spontaneously meet some people, we’ll

talk and find out how they’re

living.” And they say, “Wait, Vladimir Vladimirovich,”},{

“let’s just go around the corner—there’s a

prepared spontaneous meeting there.” Not a crowd of

ordinary people, but officials and some crooks from

the troll factory, all going, “Oh my God,

you’re so wonderful, you’re the best,”

“and we’re living so well,” and taking pictures with him.

After that, Putin gets into his

car and drives away, thinking, “The people really do love

me. Whatever all those things on the internet are saying,”},{

“but these people—random people,”},{

“St. Petersburg residents I met by chance—they love me,”},{

“everything is fine for them.” And in fact,

to jump ahead a bit, this is why he now

doesn’t want to pay anyone despite all

these self-isolation measures, because it seems to him

that nothing is wrong, that everyone is doing

just fine. 50,000 people are watching us live.

I also wanted to discuss a topic with the

provocative title “Porn Porno” from

Margarita. Today, Lyubov Sobol

released, you could say, the third part

of our series about how Margarita

Simonyan stole just about everything. It may not have been

all that noticeable,

again, against the backdrop of terrible news about

and simply major news about

the coronavirus, but on the Navalny LIVE channel

the full video is there—go watch it.

Sobol conducted an independent

investigation together with her team

into fake YouTube boosting. It may seem like

nonsense—what’s the big deal about inflating YouTube numbers?

But

this no longer concerns just “International Sawmill” (a Russian satirical TV show),

which was the subject of an investigation, or the film

*Crimean Bridge*,

where Simonyan, her husband, and the whole

family stole 50 million rubles (about $540,000). This

concerns something much bigger: the structure of the

RT channel, which receives 20

billion rubles (about $215 million). If you

follow Margarita Simonyan on Twitter, you’ve

seen how she disappears every time

after we release an investigation about her,

then reappears and

tries to distract attention.

She always comes back and starts writing

things that seem kind of correct, and

she wrote a truly astonishing tweet saying,

“Guys,

why aren’t the authorities buying anything for doctors?

They so badly need protective

equipment—masks and all that—and it would take only

5 million rubles (about $54,000) to

supply an entire hospital for a whole month.”

And yet RT receives 20

billion rubles every year. Thousands of

hospitals could be supplied with all of this. That’s

the crucial point. And now it has emerged

that even this giant, enormous enterprise,

where thousands of people work, which

burns through billions of rubles,

and which was already known to have no real TV

audience—nobody watches it on television—

was constantly bragging that

it had huge numbers of views on YouTube. Well,

Sobol proved that all those views

are absolutely, completely fake. Let’s play

a minute and a half from her long,

interesting video, which you should watch.

You can watch it, but for now here’s a minute and a half.

A video with 545 comments, and

almost nobody writes anything about the video itself.

But there are lots of comments like these, or

like these very strange comments. 13

million views, and hardly any

comments from real people. Margarita

is everything fine, or maybe this is part of

some very cunning multi-step scheme and he

is about to be made

editor-in-chief of a new Russian

national patriotic porn website.

to look very tense. We are planning

to come to London and

whose freedom we will stand up for.

long-suffering, and the video about child

footballers — when people watched it, it was like, wow,

what beautiful statistics.

Now I’ll explain to you what these

graphs mean. On July 17, 2018, the video was posted

online — note that it was posted at the very peak

of interest in the FIFA World Cup

topic, and despite how ultra-trendy

the subject was, the video did not become popular. In

six months it got only 30,000

views.

Anyone here will tell you that, unfortunately, with

a probability of 99.9

percent, this video was never going to take off

ever, and in the coming years it was unlikely

to even break 50,000. And yet, suddenly

the view graph shoots sharply upward

literally out of nowhere. So, from January 6

to March 6, 2019,

the video crosses the threshold of about one million

views. From March to April

it grows phenomenally to eight million.

At the same time, this rapid growth in timing

coincides with the appearance of all these strange

and at times simply mysterious

comments.

Well done, Sobol, really excellent stuff.

She put out a great investigation, and we need

to remember that. This Margarita

Simonyan

and all the rest of them should keep having their noses rubbed in it

because, guys, 20

billion rubles — if 20 billion rubles

had been spent on healthcare

right now not a single doctor in

Russia would be asking

where am I supposed to get a medical mask. That is

an enormous amount of money. We must

protect that money from embezzlers like these.

85,000 people are watching us live.

Welcome to my home. And Alexei,

I’m being asked: “Alexei, good evening,

why aren’t banks following the president’s

instructions, specifically on providing

loan holidays for individuals?” There were

no presidential instructions at all — that’s the

point. We’ll talk about this in detail.

There are no instructions. From the standpoint of

formal legal reality, nothing

extraordinary has actually happened.

In real life, of course, we have experienced

extraordinary things, but in

Russia there now exists a “non-working month,”

and something was said there to the banks, but

in reality, of course, many of them

are not going to comply with all of this because

it’s not very clear to the banks who

is going to compensate them for these capital losses, and

so on. The same goes for employers. Of course,

many of them are not going to pay

anyone wages right now because there is no money. Well,

where is the money supposed to come from? Do you have some little chest

under your bed that you open,

take money out of, and pay people with? Banks don’t have money, and

businesses don’t have money either. So basically

Putin announced all this without taking the slightest

responsibility upon himself. With the

hashtag #RussiaOfTheFuture, write to me on

Twitter your questions — I’ll try

to answer. Congratulations to everyone watching

our program and everyone who supported Shiyes

all these months. There is still going to be a very

big and important struggle there, but today

they finally kicked out the vile,

disgusting crook who headed

Arkhangelsk Region and was in fact

one of the key people who

lobbied for this gigantic construction project in Sh

iyes, and

by the way, behaved in an extremely brazen and

arrogant way. Let’s watch 29 seconds of how he

basically says he doesn’t give a damn about

ratings.

He doesn’t care what people think of him. 20 seconds.

I’ll repeat: if I were guided by

the numbers, I should have hanged myself on May 13,

2012.

Not a chance. They’ll wait forever for me

to hang myself. I know what I’m doing, I know that I

have governed, and I’ve lived here for more than 20 years,

my children were born here.

And all sorts of riffraff here who are nobody and

have no standing at all

are trying to call me all kinds of things,

whether a Leningrader or a Ukrainian. I’ve spent 28

years on this land, so I don’t care

about their ratings or votes regarding

what they think about me.

Maybe you don’t care about

ratings, old man, but Putin does care about ratings,

and that’s why the governor was removed.

Because they took a measurement and found out

that everyone hates him because he

made — or wanted to make — this dump.

Wanted to make it.

And in that sense, this is an excellent example

of how

spreading information, lowering

a rating, destroying the rating

of a specific crook — it really works.

Guys, every time you press the

retweet button,

it genuinely works in that sense.

The people in the Shiyes support group, they

did an absolutely amazing job, but

I can even track it through such small details, maybe

As a matter of fact, you know that in peacetime

we used to put out these little things that

I call Kira News on social media—short

news items about different things. I would just

post them on social media, and the most popular

post of all time on VKontakte (Russia’s largest social network), I think,

got about 1.5 million views. It was

that particular story that really took off because

activists created a kind of network

for spreading any news, and

the entire Arkhangelsk region saw it—everyone

was forwarding it to one another. A huge

number of people watched it.

And in the end even that brazen, insolent governor

ran into the fact that people from

the Presidential Administration called

and said, “Buddy, your approval rating is so low that

United Russia (the ruling party) won’t be able to climb

to any decent result in our nationwide vote, which

we’ll of course rig in favor of the Constitution, but in your region

basically zero people will vote for us,” and

so on and so forth. “So leave.” And

he left. And we definitely need to

remember that. One last news item not

connected to the coronavirus, but connected

to the wonderful and very expensive Igor

Ivanovich Sechin, who really is

expensive in every sense of the word. The news

went almost unnoticed, and yet it is

something absolutely fundamental and enormous.

Remember how Sechin and Putin said

that it was a great idea to invest

in Venezuela and in Rosneft’s Venezuelan projects,

Rosneft being a state-owned company? In general,

our state invested billions, then

$18 billion.

The scale here is absolutely colossal,

the sums are fantastic, and naturally many

people said it was complete nonsense—there’s

a revolution in Venezuela, it’s unclear who

actually holds power there, and all that money

would be lost.

And I talked about this a lot on the program, and

then clips from my speeches

were shown everywhere, and all sorts of Kremlin

crooks said, “Navalny doesn’t understand

anything. Everything in Venezuela is going to be great.”

“We’ll see in a little while,” they said.

“All these opposition people just keep grumbling, but

Russia will make a huge amount of money in Venezuela

because, you see,

it’s great—the Venezuelans kicked the Americans out

from everywhere, and now everything will fall to us.”

So what happened? Rosneft, the largest

Russian oil company—our company, yours and mine—

a state-owned company, and its money is

our money. And, properly speaking,

Rosneft’s share capital, Rosneft’s stock, is

our stock, yours and mine, because it is

a state-owned company. Rosneft

came up with a clever scheme: they took

all of their loss-making, now obviously

completely failed Venezuelan

projects—they failed, they are worth

nothing, they are unprofitable—

and transferred them to some company, and then

the shares of that company were exchanged with

the Russian Federation for 10 percent

of Rosneft’s shares. It may sound

a bit complicated, but the point is that this was

a classic case of privatizing

profits and nationalizing losses. In other words,

Sechin—the crook and thief—who

managed the company in a completely talentless way and simply

poured money into Venezuela,

lost that money, and then handed those losses

over to Russia, while Russia, in exchange, put on Rosneft’s balance sheet

and gave away 10 percent of the shares. You

might say, well, but after all

they didn’t go to Sechin personally, they

went to Rosneft. But the dividends on

those shares, the seat on the board of directors,

the control, and so on and so forth—

this is called a circular ownership structure. In

Russia we already have one such major

oil company—Surgutneftegaz.

Who does it belong to?

No one knows. It basically belongs to itself; there’s a circular

structure there. It belongs to the pension fund

of Surgutneftegaz and to other legal entities, and that

pension fund is produced by—well, in other words,

it’s just mutual share ownership, and in the end

you get a giant company that it’s unclear

who

belongs to, but in practice it belongs to the management

that runs everything. The same thing

is happening with Rosneft: it used to be ours,

now it’s become Igor Ivanovich’s. Of course,

not literally in Sechin’s wallet, but

we can simply see how, under cover of

the coronavirus,

this news story was practically ignored—no one

paid attention. They simply took 10

percent of the shares of the largest company

and just removed them from the ownership of the Russian

Federation—just took them away. This is,

absolutely comparable to the biggest privatization

deals of the “cursed ’90s,”

the loans-for-shares auctions, the outright theft

of enormous state property.

This is happening right now. It is being done by

Putin and Sechin, and no one is paying

attention because of this damned

coronavirus. So, I’m being asked:

“Danila asks: Alexei, do you think it’s possible

to do the same thing with other issues?”

Yes, it is possible, and it should be done. This government

rests on Putin’s approval rating, on the government’s

approval rating. Most of our fellow citizens, unfortunately,

have simply been stupefied and duped;

they’ve had “noodles hung on their ears” (a Russian idiom meaning they’ve been fed lies).

They watch television all day long. And now

they’re going to sit at home for a month and

watch television for a month,

where they’ll be told that everything is wonderful here,

that our hospitals are amazing, how great everything is,

that we’re doing such a fine job sending medical equipment to

the United States.

Our task is to act in the opposite way

— that is, to try

to resist this propaganda. And at one point,

in a situation like the one in Arkhangelsk,

it worked: the whole power structure fell apart.

It’s a colossus with feet of clay — there are no

approval ratings there, nothing at all, and they understand they will never

be re-elected. The same thing

can and should be done

more broadly, with regard to absolutely any

other problem in Russia. Ninety-nine thousand

people are watching us live right now — let’s get

to one hundred thousand, that’s what we need. A reminder that

there’s a button there — you can become

a sponsor of our channel. Right now we have three

thousand nine hundred eighty-seven sponsors. I think during this

broadcast we’ll probably make it to four thousand.

There’s also a link below if you want

little ducks to float across the screen — then you

can click it and

support our broadcast that way.

Let’s move on, actually, to the main

topic of discussion — basically, to our lives,

to where we’ve found ourselves now. And of course,

the main topic of discussion, really,

is how we are going to live

for an indefinite period of time.

Right now it has already been indicated that this will last

for a month, until the end of April. My assumption

is that it will last longer.

Quite possibly until the beginning of summer. But at

the very least, we look at the experience of other

countries and understand that the peak of this

epidemic has not yet arrived here. In other

countries, when the epidemic reaches its peak,

there will probably still be

a huge number of cases; people

will keep getting sick and getting sick, but at

least this

exponential growth will stop increasing. We are obviously

still far from that.

Because we still do not want to use

— we are still ignoring — Western experience and

objective data. Therefore my

assumption is that this may last

quite a long time. And even now

no one understands what is allowed and what is not.

Some kind of quarantine is being

announced endlessly — or rather, not even a quarantine

is being announced: in one place it’s “self-isolation,” in

another it’s “quarantine,” and Putin announces a

“non-working week.” What does a non-working

week even mean? Why, exactly, if it’s

just a non-working week,

can’t I go outside?

And already after my last

broadcast, Sobyanin announced this very

same

self-isolation. We are now supposed to, as it were,

do it voluntarily. We’ve got 102,000 people watching us

live — hooray, hooray, congratulations

to everyone on this record viewership.

It’s kind of great and at the same time

sad. It means that, well,

everyone is sitting at home, waiting, and not understanding

what is happening. And with this sudden

announcement that in Russia there will be

some kind of digital

concentration camp built — in Moscow, in Moscow, note

this, it was announced that in Moscow

some kind of app has apparently already been made,

and some QR codes will be issued

so that people can go to the store; with a dog

you can walk only within a distance of 100 meters.

All of this looks completely,

well, fantastical, surreal. I

am absolutely in favor of quarantine.

I am in favor of a strict quarantine, but

measures of this kind do not exist even in

countries with strict quarantines — these kinds of

excessive and strange measures, which

for all that, absolutely do not

correspond to what the authorities should be doing

to fight the epidemic. Notice

that within the framework of

fighting the epidemic,

we are told about nothing except

tightening restrictions: we will tighten something,

we will tighten everything, we will fine

you 300,000 rubles (about several thousand US dollars), we will

put you in prison for five years,

we will do various other things to you,

you will be walking around with

these codes, and so on and so forth. Meanwhile,

do you hear any news about

how we bought new ventilators or how

well prepared we are?

There is news about testing,

but there is no actual testing. A reminder for

those who have just joined us: we are

running a poll. Click the letter “i” in the corner

of the screen and take part in the poll. If

among the people you know there are people who have actually

gone through testing,

all of this is a lie. But when all this

was suddenly announced on Saturday,

it

looked very strange, very

harsh. And what struck me most, what I

want to talk with you about,

is that the stated reason was

that City Hall was furious: it had announced self-

isolation, Putin had announced a non-working week,

and then everyone went to the parks. And

there really were videos from

Sokolniki Park showing everyone going out for

shashlik (barbecue). Let’s take a look.

And there was a lot of justified outrage, like,

I saw people writing, “My God,”

“what a gathering of idiots,” “Serebryany Bor (a Moscow park area) is completely

packed with people,” “they’re so stupid,”

“why are our fellow citizens so stupid?” And

the authorities, and Sobyanin as well, apparently also

through various leaks to the BBC Russian Service,

let it be known that they were enraged

by the sight of everyone going out for

shashlik in Sokolniki Park

because, how could this be — people just don’t understand.

People this stupid obviously need to be dealt with.

Fine them or beat them with bamboo sticks.

Like in India, where people were being invited out for shashlik (barbecue).

Speaking of those "good fairies," who was it that invited people out for shashlik?

These people deleted their report, but we’re going to

watch it now. I’ll keep it up in the

corner so that our broadcast doesn’t get

shut down later. A report from Channel One (Russia’s main state TV channel). Crooks,

scumbags, and all the rest of those cowardly

types deleted it. They were putting out reports like this:

Great, it’s a non-working week, and now

an Emergency Situations Ministry employee will explain how to

grill shashlik. We’ll watch a short report,

10 seconds long, but really

there were much longer reports about how, guys,

we get it, the weather is great right now,

go out for some shashlik, just make sure you

light the coals properly here, don’t

head out into nature carelessly. I mean, why

not go during a non-working week, right?

You can look up information about a specific forest park

online before heading out for a picnic, and at the

entrances there are always

information boards.

And where can you light a fire? In specially

equipped areas. Chef Ilya and his

friend Alexander are avid hikers.

They say they know all the fire safety rules.

But Sergei Grekov, an Emergency Situations Ministry employee, has

a comment.

If you start lighting it right away,

the accumulated fumes could cost you your beard.

Now we wait 30 to 40 seconds,

and only then do we light it. And here’s another

mistake. I have one small remark for you:

you placed the lighter fluid bottles

next to the grill. Note that the shashlik was

cooked in a designated area, which means it was

safe.

Hooray, hooray, in the middle of a global

epidemic, when countries all over the world are already in

quarantine, they’re announcing that shashlik season is open.

They bite off a piece of meat, and with that same piece of meat

they clink it together like a toast. This was shown on

Channel One with cute, good-natured

jokes: guys, go have shashlik, just

don’t singe your beard,

and otherwise everything’s fine. So people went.

But they watch Channel One, not

Twitter. They’re not sitting here on

YouTube. They watch that stuff over there, probably. But

most of those people weren’t watching my streams, where

I’d been saying for a long time that quarantine measures needed to be introduced,

that people needed to self-isolate, guys,

please, take this seriously, wear masks,

wear gloves. You definitely should not

bite off and eat a piece of shashlik and then

rub that same piece against someone else’s

piece and then keep eating it. That’s

just insane, and they were showing this

already after that very

Putin non-working week had been introduced. And before that,

by the way, people here were actually

being amazingly disciplined. I look out the

window and I see almost no one on the street. I

don’t know what it’s like in other cities, write to

me here, but in Moscow there are very few people out.

People really are staying home. And I

see more and more people wearing masks.

People understand it. All the shop workers are in

gloves and all that sort of thing. In other words, people

are trying, and they had been trying for quite

a while. But some countries

had been in quarantine since March 2,

and some sensible part of our

fellow citizens, let’s say the internet crowd,

had been shouting the whole time: what the hell,

bring in quarantine, the disease is spreading and everyone

will get sick. The authorities were ignoring it. What were

the authorities doing all that time? They were consistently

telling everyone it was all nonsense, all nonsense,

guys, what is there to be afraid of, it’s not a real

disease. Even the most disgusting figures like

Margarita Simonyan—how many tweets did she write,

my God.

It’s no more dangerous than the flu, just look.

That famous line: what luck,

look how many people die every

year from the flu, while from coronavirus overall

no one has died. It’s nonsense.

Where are those very

dead people? They’re not lying around in the streets anywhere,

so it must all be nonsense, it’s

all hysteria, someone must benefit from whipping this up, damn it,

from creating this panic. Of course, foreigners,

of course, some villains benefit from it, and

it’s all nonsense—that’s what our authorities were saying.

They were brainwashing everyone who watches

television. So why are you now

making accusations against them for the fact that they

went out for shashlik, if they were watching

this? Let’s watch 39 seconds of it.

Actually, not 39—more like 1 minute 7 seconds of how

crooks and scoundrels of every kind, the very same ones

who are now going to demand that we be

locked up and tagged with QR codes, how they

spent a whole month, when there was already

a global quarantine—well, not global,

but at least a European quarantine—

convincing us that it was all nonsense.

If this were some American plot, then it wouldn’t

make sense, because the virus’s weakness—or rather the fact

that the virus mainly affects

at least the Chinese population—

also suggests that it’s unlikely this

was deliberate. There’s no need to punish

people for spreading panic; there’s nothing of the sort.

There’s nothing there. Just live calmly and work calmly.

What medicines can be used today?

Of the medicines already available, there are 30 or so

that could be used—I don’t know.

Let me reassure him right away: in fact,

this outbreak is no more threatening than

what we’ve seen before. I want to say

that this excessive panic over it

will definitely do more harm

to humanity, and we will lose more people

because of that panic than because of the virus itself. We will defeat this virus.

Kholodilnykh Petrovich

today's situation in terms of the trend

of the epidemic shows that it has already started to decline

decline

so most likely we will soon forget

about it. Viktor Vasin

the coronavirus will not pass; we will defeat it

if Channel One (Russia's main state TV channel) shows you

people in white coats saying, well, looking

at this trend, we understand that it is going into

decline — but what do you expect from people? Of course they

went out for shashlik (barbecue)

you didn't tell them, "go have barbecues, everything

is declining, only Chinese people are getting infected

it's no more dangerous than the flu" — what do you expect from people?

What are they, virologists? They can't

read all these articles in English

that many of us read. They

can't; they don't understand these scales, they

don't understand these graphs, after all

and then again, on television they are told that in

Italy there are piles of dead people, but there the

healthcare system collapsed; with us, of course, that

won't happen. And now these same people are

telling us fairy tales that, well, those who

have that vaccine — we all have this

BCG vaccine, so we'll be spared, meaning

maybe we will be very happy if

we are spared, but so far there is no objective

evidence that this will help us. In China everyone

got BCG too, and China was not spared

so if you yourselves keep endlessly telling people in your rhetoric

spreading this fake news and hanging

noodles on their ears (feeding them lies), why? Because Putin

didn't want to at all; until now he had not introduced

any quarantine. They don't want any of this

at all. They wanted to do one very simple

thing

well, basically: people get sick, the young get sick

and recover, while old people, like in

Italy, 85-plus — we simply don't have that

many of them; ours have all died already

long ago. If someone here dies at the

age of, say, 79

this is how they reasoned in the Kremlin — that is their logic

exactly. Good Lord, they tell you

a person has died

at 79 — what is your reaction? We are in Russia

here the value of human life is, first of all,

low, and second, everyone here says

79 years old — he's already lived too long

really, he should have died earlier

by every calculation and by every notion, so

that is how we live here in Russia, and therefore

that is exactly how they thought: well, some

people will die, and we'll record them under

some other illnesses; here they will all

die not from pneumonia, not from

coronavirus, but from those other diseases

no one will pay attention to that. But all this

had been discussed earlier, for several months

even on

back in January there were debates all over the world on

this topic, and it became clear to everyone that no

that wouldn't work, even if you don't care

about the value of human life

it is impossible to make this epidemic

pass unnoticed. So at first they

did nothing; they convinced everyone that

there was nothing to fear, nothing to do. And now

now they're running around us, damn it, shouting: quarantine!

quarantine! martial law! we'll arrest people!

we'll jail them! Well, that's what they did with

this — a state of emergency, over the top

on the eve of a curfew in the Moscow

Region

after Sobyanin and

Vorobyov, the governor of the Moscow Region, simultaneously

announced self-isolation there

cars literally started driving around everywhere

announcing over loudspeakers that a

curfew had been introduced. Let's watch

[music]

I'm back on the air — the cables just can't handle

the sheer tension of our broadcast, but

sorry for that glitch. I hope you

didn't all drop off — after all, this is a stream from home

this is a stream from home, some relatives

are walking around, kicking the cables with their feet, and everything

falls apart. Anyway, I hope you

saw this video about

the curfew. I mean, the Moscow

Region, the second most populous federal subject

of the Russian Federation — across the Moscow

Region police cars are driving around and shouting

through loudspeakers: curfew

ordinary people on the street are hearing this

hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions

of people — they see that there is a curfew

they film it and post it on social media

and what do the authorities do? The Investigative Committee

opens a criminal case over

the spread of fake news regarding

the introduction of a curfew. And now I

see that I'm being asked, Radon

Alexei, what do you think, will

the coronavirus be used for even

more tightening of the screws? Of course yes. That is,

they themselves screwed up; apparently they

had some plan for introducing

a curfew, and somewhere in the

Interior Ministry someone grabbed the wrong folder and said, right

guys, let's send them out across the country later, and

they go around saying that a curfew

is being introduced, the cops are out, let's go, announce all this

they announced it. And the local committee, you understand, does not

punish the police officers — it opens

a criminal case and announces that it

will look for the people who posted

these videos — absolutely normal

real, honest videos

yes, it's a funny moment, thank you very much

it's a funny moment of a home stream, well

yes, after all, we have a warm, cozy

home stream: I'm at home, you're at home, you're drinking

a little tea, me too, so anyway of course

they will use this. More than that, they

will themselves keep messing up endlessly

but from us they will demand some kind of

simply absolutely fantastical things

well, for example, when we talk about

the authorities messing up, I, well, I think that

many people who saw this video were just

watching them with their jaws dropped, because

this is happening in a place where I lived

now probably not the greater part of my

life, but half of my life I spent in

the settlement of Kalininets in the Moscow region, here sta...

the Taman Division is located there, in Alabino, and

all these training grounds, Patriot Park—this is all now

there, and from there came this video of how right now

for some reason they gathered 15,000

soldiers in one place, and they are training, preparing for

the parade. What social distancing could there be?

The whole world is already shouting: one meter, two meters, masks

don’t stand close—no, instead they have to herd these

soldiers, 15,000 people, and there they are standing

there. And the video contains a lot of swearing, and naturally

we tried to censor that swearing. Let’s

take a look.

[inaudible] and into the group

something like fifteen thousand

while they were saying there should be no more than 50 people

not gather together, got it? So, are all of you

healthy?

[inaudible] your morals

damn it

Honestly, it’s literally impossible without swearing.

To watch this—what the hell is this, [__]?

This is the nearest Moscow suburbs, there are soldiers there,

probably officers who travel to Moscow

constantly. I lived in this military town;

half the people there work in Moscow, they

commute to Moscow. In Moscow, even Putin

announced that the situation with

the coronavirus is very difficult, and obviously

it will be brought there and spread around

because they spent a lot of time standing in

formation. Why? For parade rehearsals, for the

Victory Day Parade, which obviously will have to

be canceled—on May 9 it obviously needs to

be postponed. Why do this now?

Well yes, they’re young people, nothing may

happen to them, but you remember what the

mortality rate is among the young—it’s low,

half a percent. But with 15,000 people—well, I

hope this doesn’t happen, but if there

are 15,000 young healthy guys there

and they get sick, half a percent of them will die. Why

does this need to be done? Not even mentioning that

they will infect everything around them. But they

are doing this, and at the same time doing things

that completely contradict the whole idea

of quarantine, and meanwhile they run after us

with a baton

with fines, shouting that they’ll now

arrest us. Right now in the Moscow region they’re building

a hospital, and they say this hospital

will be a great 500-bed hospital

and we’ll put it up as quickly as

the Chinese did. But perhaps you noticed

that there isn’t much video from there, because

with all that Chinese construction, when

they built a hospital there in a week

and then built another hospital in 5 more days,

it was all shown directly on video cameras

and there was constantly a lot of

discussion. Here, they’re not showing much. Why?

Because the Chinese did all that

using technology, while here they did it by

naturally herding into one place

8,000 Kyrgyz workers, and these eight thousand

Kyrgyz are building it. Fine, if we don’t have

the construction technology, we sent them there

to build it—it has to be built, obviously

but let’s look at what this looks like.

What it all looks like—I saw on Twitter

an absolutely correct point: someone posted

this very video and wrote that if this

whole crowd builds it in this

way, the way they’re doing it during

an epidemic, then a 500-bed hospital only makes

sense if they immediately also build

another 8,000-bed hospital next to it, because

they’ll all infect one another

[inaudible] this is happening either from physics

[inaudible] there, Sandra Bullock there, on

you, or you take it, Beringa [inaudible]

[inaudible] benefit for bash, loves gardens

[inaudible] activates dinner for lips so that others

for the virus pair, kinguin

Aidan Babyzen saw a queue of groups

army thalac, they didn’t touch that, there auto

for what that pair

vacancies

Ayia Napa

it’s standard El Capitan

kangaroo bar, like Messi, Kharon, in spring, Margo

Margo

but it gives [inaudible], water runs, ice

you’ll come back after that

Well, it has to be built, obviously, there’s no

getting around it, it has to be built. It’s clear that this

is a risk zone, but if you are, during

an epidemic, building a hospital for the epidemic,

for an infectious disease, then you at least need

some basic precautions

especially since these are migrant workers

obviously, and people live in hard conditions

they live in site trailers, they have no money, they eat

whatever they can, and there are probably some

difficulties—there are difficulties at any construction site

but with basic, with the most basic

hygiene, this really has to be

provided for. Maybe after all we should

build it, I don’t know, three days later

but everyone will be wearing masks or

following some hygiene rules, because

these eight thousand people are building it

they ride the metro

they, well, that is, they move around the city, they

do they all have permits? No, they are not

in self-isolation, not in quarantine. If

they all infect each other, what happens with this

after that? How are we supposed to deal with it?

fight it? I’m talking about this not just for

to criticize the authorities over there

although of course they should be criticized for this

because until you show it

look, to an audience of 118,000 people, the Moscow mayor’s office

won’t hand out any masks right now

they’ll bring this clip to Sobyanin (Moscow’s mayor) and

say, damn, all of Moscow has seen this kind of

chaos going on, some Kyrgyz guy filmed it, and

then he’ll start handing out masks if they

don’t talk about it—if they don’t talk about it, they

won’t hand them out. But honestly, what really

drives me crazy is this constant

finger-pointing over every single thing—any

problem exists, the problem isn’t solved, but

all they focus on is the police side of it:

intimidate people, force them,

break them up, jail them, arrest them. In countries

even with strict lockdowns, they still allow

for example, jogging. Nikita, in our case, the rules started with

the message: basically, we’re going to lock all of you up.

In other countries, public messaging about

lockdown is done completely differently and

much more properly, because

you need to persuade people to do this voluntarily

and you can say all you want

that you’ll be fined, arrested, that QR codes

have to be printed, but if a person doesn’t want

to follow quarantine, they won’t

follow it—they’ll

go around leaving traces of themselves

biological traces, and infect someone else, and

there’s no way to make this work except through

personal example from the very top. Right now we

see that quite a few leaders of

the biggest, richest, most powerful countries

with nuclear weapons and

all sorts of imperial, powerful states

and so on—no less powerful than we are,

that’s for sure.

But Boris Johnson, the leader of

the United Kingdom, first

came into contact with someone who was sick and then

self-isolated. Then they called him and

tested him—what does he do? He stays at home.

Boris Johnson is sitting at home, and

Trump too—and his whole family; his wife, I think,

had symptoms and they offered them testing

for coronavirus. He himself doesn’t have it, but

even so, he stayed home and self-isolated

because if you’re calling on the whole nation

well, that’s the government’s task—our 145

million, 144 million

people: some of them are sensible, some

less so, but you have to persuade them

to take reasonable steps.

Start with yourself. Putin should say: guys, I

went to that infectious disease hospital and

came into contact with a doctor named

Protsenko; he was found to have coronavirus. Under

the rules that, damn it, I wrote down

on paper for all of you—these rules

are written out, and every day we see a million

news stories saying criminal cases will be opened

against those who do not comply with quarantine,

we’ll jail them, shoot them, and so

on. But these rules are for everyone, and under

your own protocols, you should

self-isolate—so just sit

there, just like I am now. I don’t think I’ve

been in contact with anyone who has been diagnosed with

this virus, but I’m still sitting at home. That’s

exactly the point. He could record messages not in

a tie, but in some cozy sweater and

say: guys, I’m urging you to quarantine.

That’s exactly what Angela

Merkel did.

She came into contact with a doctor, just like

in that photo, apparently handing him

a pen; some time later, the doctor

was found to have coronavirus. What did Angela

Merkel do? She said: I’m doing what

everyone is supposed to do, what’s written on paper—

quarantine. I’m going into quarantine.

She isolated herself.

And Germany, a much richer country

with far fewer

problems than we have—in that sense, Germany

looks like one of the most successful

countries in terms of fighting the epidemic.

She self-isolated. Here, nobody cares at all.

And this Denis Protsenko is just

a good person, a good doctor,

he’s just forced right now, of course, to somehow

play along with the Moscow mayor’s office and

do a bit of bootlicking for the authorities. But everyone

says he’s a good man. He also writes: I’ve

self-isolated in my office.

Meaning: I feel fine, I’ll

stay in my office. But come on, dear Denis,

you’re a doctor—there are quarantine rules.

You can’t do that. You cannot self-isolate like that.

Stop telling us fairy tales—you can’t

self-isolate in an office, even if you’re

wearing all the protective equipment in the world.

The point is: quarantine rules are for everyone.

And there’s no need for this nonsense. Everyone

must be treated the same, regardless of the color

of your pass, regardless of your status—whether you’re

police, doctors, and so on—the rules

are the same for everyone.

And when abroad we see that

the leaders of countries follow these

rules, then first of all they have

the moral right to punish those who do not

follow them, and secondly, in principle,

far fewer people need to be punished

because people

listen. They say: well, look,

Merkel is properly staying in quarantine,

so I’ll stay home too. Here, publicly,

there’s a public attitude of not giving a damn about all this.

Peskov (Putin’s press secretary) says: no, we’re not

complying, and we’re not going to comply with

quarantine—but we’ll jail you if you don’t

comply with quarantine. Here we have

plenty of this kind of hypocrisy.

At the headquarters in Kaliningrad, a young man ended up in

the hospital, and it was clear that he had it.

Coronavirus, because he's a young guy.

He can't breathe at all.

He has all the symptoms, runs after them all, shouting.

"Take a test from him"—they take a test.

They tell him, "Your test is negative."

He's lying in a ward together with everyone else.

After he posted and recorded

several videos—after those videos started spreading,

he says there were thousands there,

tens of thousands of people watched them.

They eventually took a second test from him, and of course

it turned out that he did have coronavirus.

Why do I have no doubt that this was

done for one single, absolutely specific

reason?

Any doctor could see the guy had coronavirus,

but then he'd have to be included in the statistics,

and the rise in cases in Kaliningrad Region

would go up. And there sits a crook,

the governor, and another crook along with him,

saying, "Guys, we don't need

the statistics here to go up," and so they

told him, "You have community-acquired pneumonia,

sit here with your pneumonia." Pneumonia.

After the scandal, they tested him and—

surprise, it's coronavirus. What happens next?

Now they're threatening to jail him

because, supposedly, he violated

quarantine rules and because he filmed videos,

posted them, and walked around somewhere. But you

yourselves said the test was negative.

I specifically asked him to record

a minute-and-a-half video for our

program. Let's watch. In the hospital,

I was in the ward there, they were treating me

for what was supposedly, attention, attention,

as it turns out, still viral—but that's not

the point right now. Yesterday afternoon, the result came back

that I did not have coronavirus.

Everything was fine. Then

the head of the department came and said in front of everyone,

"Please stay, don't run off, we'll keep treating

you further." Then later that evening,

they drove all the patients out of the ward, while I

was left there under the pretext that I was on

oxygen, and, "We'll disinfect everything here for you in the meantime."

After 30 to 40 minutes,

three people came in, fully

in protective gear and respirators, wheeled in an isolation box

and said, "Get ready, let's go

to the infectious diseases hospital." When I asked why,

they said, "You have coronavirus.

The result is positive." So it turned out

that all this happened because the first test came back

negative, but apparently someone didn't

like that, so they decided to recheck it, and the second

test was already positive. Or

they sent another swab there—that is,

they themselves... I don't understand how that

happened. The point is: yes, I do have

coronavirus. During all the time in the

multidisciplinary hospital, literally not a single—well, only

one doctor said, "Why isn't he in the

infectious diseases hospital? He's here with us, but he

should really be there, by all indications.

That's exactly the point. But if a young

person has all the symptoms, yes, it's that very

disease, and nobody cares at all—they

don't enter him into the records so as not to

spoil the statistics. But when he posted

a video saying, "Here I am, and basically

nobody in the hospital believes that I

obviously have coronavirus"—my God, arrest him!

Arrest him for what? You need to

lock up all those who ignored this,

those are the people who really should be jailed.

Sooner or later we'll learn their names, and this

is simply information—it won't be possible to

keep it secret forever. Those

officials who call regional health ministries

and say, "Register fewer cases,

don't register them, write 'community-acquired

pneumonia,' don't write anyone a chart for

it." Why is this lie needed at all?

It's unclear. Danil asks me:

"Alexei, do you think we'll manage

to match China in building

the rest of the hospitals?" Are you kidding? Well,

of course we won't. We build any kind of nonsense

for years. Maybe now, by means of

rounding up 8,000 Kyrgyz workers, we'll build a more or

less decent hospital fairly quickly, but in

Moscow.

If you live outside Moscow, you won't see anything

even remotely like that.

I've already been live on air for fifty-five minutes,

and I still feel like I've only spent about

a third of the time I meant to. Anyway, I hope that

since you have nothing to do—there are 27,000

people watching me live, I see—I'll

keep going a little longer. And I saw

a question here about Liksutov.

The Moscow HQ released

an investigation, and they're asking what you

think, because Moscow's authorities removed

information about Liksutov's son. I want to

say something about that, because this is also

an excellent example of exactly how they—

Liksutov, Sobyanin, and all the rest—

are introducing, or trying to introduce,

some hellish systems to control us.

By the way, read Vladislav's posts—

Zolnikov, a well-known IT specialist and

internet rights advocate. He looked into

this app that was made by

the Moscow government, which is supposed to

monitor all of us, and he wrote a lot of

truly astonishing information about it.

You are supposed to install this app. This

app gets all the information from your phone—

that is, it learns literally everything about you.

You have to photograph yourself, and

what's more, it collects all your personal

data, your photo—in other words, it demands access

to absolutely any information.

After that, this information

is sent to Estonia, in my view, and there

it is analyzed and then forwarded on.

In other words, they’re breaking the internet for us.

And over the past few years they’ve passed a whole bunch of

countless

absolutely idiotic laws under the

pretext that foreign

internet companies collect the personal data

of Russians, and of course use it for their own

malicious purposes, because there are NATO

troops there, and of course all they do is sit around and watch

how they can get at the personal data of some average Ivan

who posted something on VKontakte (Russia’s largest social network).

Meanwhile, they’re making an app

for police surveillance, a crazy surveillance app

for police monitoring, and the data

is processed in Estonia. It’s just

magnificent: 128 million rubles (about 1.28 million USD)

of our money was spent on this, on

tracking us this way. And on top of that,

the app is buggy and poorly made, I mean,

it’s not going to work. And at the same time these

same people are telling us that, well,

it’s irresponsible citizens who are to blame,

something about Courchevel (the French ski resort), and

recently Sobyanin (Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin) said this outright,

he said that all sorts of Courchevel tourists

are bringing us the coronavirus.

Let’s see—no, we can’t watch it, that

video isn’t there, maybe it’ll show up later.

Anyway, the situation is that they all

show off a lot and say that

tourists are bringing it here

and that irresponsible citizens aren’t complying.

At the same time, our Moscow штаб (local campaign office) has long

been watching—in fact, we’ve long been keeping an eye on

Liksutov, because he is one of the

biggest corrupt figures in the Moscow city government.

In particular, our Moscow office

monitored his children’s social media and started

tracking it because it turned out that

his 15-year-old screwup of a son was racing around in a

Mercedes, some kind of super-

expensive 6-liter, mega-

tricked-out G-Class Brabus and so on,

all that—at age 15.

He was taking part in races and quite openly

bragging that he had just come back

from that very same Courchevel

and was supposed to be in quarantine with his family, but he

obviously wasn’t there alone. Was the

Liksutov family in Courchevel and in

quarantine? No. They don’t care, and don’t

doubt it.

They’ll have all the permits they need—no

QR codes needed for them. Let’s watch

a minute from the Moscow office’s investigation.

Maxim Liksutov, Sobyanin’s deputy,

sent his underage son

to Courchevel

right in the middle of the epidemic. And when this

teenager returned to Moscow, he did not

self-isolate at home with his father. No, he

kept socializing, taking part

in illegal street races, and even

got into a car accident. Liksutov’s car is racing

another car.

And behind the wheel is a person named Oskar.

Also, in this video, for a second

the nickname [ __ ]49 appears—this is the account

of Liksutov’s younger son.

Oskar, and he is only 15 years old. Oskar

actively uses Instagram. Every single

post here is a photograph

of the Mercedes, plate O008, from different angles.

There’s no doubt: it’s his car. On February 21,

Oskar posted Stories from Courchevel.

Soon he returned, but he did not

self-isolate at home with his father, as required

by the rules, but kept racing around and even

caused an accident.

He swerved into the oncoming lane.

Obviously, it was precisely the Liksutov family

that Sobyanin had in mind when he spoke about

a suitcase full of disease from Courchevel.

Well, basically—come on—that wasn’t Liksutov himself,

some critics will say, or

let’s really try to look at this objectively,

let’s examine this situation.

A 15-year-old screwup—well, Liksutov is busy

lining his pockets at city hall.

The mother may be busy with something too.

A 15-year-old screwup can be hard

to control.

But still, somehow a Mercedes for a

15-year-old delinquent can’t just

materialize out of nowhere. After all, he’s

15 years old—he’s a child, not 18. Fine, he

didn’t self-isolate, he climbed out the

window and ran away from someone after

coming back from Courchevel—but he’s driving a car,

and by the way, here’s a great,

just a really great

detail: he’s just driving along. I’ll show you

30 seconds of it, and for 20 seconds he reasons like this:

They all have Estonian citizenship there, I’m

sure of it. Liksutov himself most likely

is hiding Estonian citizenship, and here he is

calmly explaining: they say I can drive around

Moscow with no documents at all,

no license, none of that—I can do

whatever I want in Moscow, but

you can’t pull that kind of thing in Estonia because there

they’ll lock you up for 15 days right away.

Let’s watch {URL_1}.

No inspection, no insurance—and over there

they can really get you for that. This isn’t Moscow.

Here we drive however we want, whether there’s insurance or not.

Even without a license. Over there I’d get nailed for that.

So how are we supposed to expect Moscow residents

to comply with this voluntarily when

the best self-isolation, the best quarantine,

is of course voluntary—when you yourself

put on the gloves, when you yourself

try not to cough on anyone so that

no one coughs on you. How can we expect

people to follow this gladly

and voluntarily when simply

none of these people follow it themselves?

We don’t even have it properly defined in law—this so-called self-isolation.

It says there that they may not have to comply with it.

A public official, a State Duma deputy (the lower house of Russia’s parliament) — why?

a State Duma deputy

should not have to follow the law

self-isolation — why, if they have such

super-important work? Fine, they

did their work, passed their laws, very

wise ones, and then they came back home and should self-isolate

because those are exactly the people

who are very often abroad on

so-called official business, and then

the State Duma

they get the opportunity to travel around like this again.

What we see is the nomenklatura (the privileged Soviet-style ruling class), or simply

the usual [__] — they issued passes to themselves.

None of this applies to them.

Idiocy, just like in those famous jokes about

how, you know, the highest privilege is

crossing the street on a red light and

running across the road in the wrong

place. They’re so absurd they even grant

themselves privileges like being allowed

not to observe quarantine, and probably

having a greater chance of getting sick — but even so

they insist on it; for them it is

very important. And at the same time, for us — for the 28th

time I repeat it, and I won’t get tired

of repeating it — they are building a digital

concentration camp for us. I say this as someone who supports

quarantine. More than that, this digital

concentration camp simply

— well, it will be, and already is, super-

degenerate. In Samara, was it? Or, if I remember correctly,

in Samara — no, sorry,

of course, the classic mistake: not Samara,

Saratov — in Saratov

they have already announced that there will be

special passes. So, everyone who

wants to get a special pass, in order

to receive one — let’s look at what that actually looks like. So,

they literally gathered, during

an epidemic, an entire crowd out on the street,

and that crowd is all milling around there,

obviously without masks and without any kind of

social distancing.

That’s how they’re getting passes. Elsewhere, in

Volgograd — Volgograd is a well-known case.

It’s hard to find authorities as stupid as

the ones in Volgograd right now. I mean,

the governor there — of Volgograd Region — is

simply the very embodiment of an absolutely

stupid governor,

an alcoholic, and all the authorities below him are really

just a collection of degenerates and thieves. They reduced

the number of bus routes. Now

let’s take a look: they basically announced

self-isolation and then said, well, let’s also

send fewer buses out onto the streets

to save money on it. So now, what does

a trip on public

transport in the city look like? There’s a photo, and on

video too — here, the first bus

in half an hour, and it’s packed to the brim.

Only one bus. And this is their fight against coronavirus?

It’s simply outrageous. Volgograd,

morning, social distancing: 1 meter (about 3.3 feet).

That’s it.

Excellent work, guys — this is

a very concrete fight against the virus. It has simply become

just awful.

Just living

—

Volgograd is a city of over a million people, really.

Big cities are the highest-risk places, yet no —

they turned it into a death trap — literally

driving through the streets of Volgograd

in a little box,

spreading it around — a kind of incubator for the corona-

virus, with people standing this close

to each other,

breathing on one another, sniffling, coughing,

sneezing, and so on. Why do this

now, during an epidemic? But at the same time,

of course, I have no doubt that in Volgograd

it’s already like that there all the time —

police lawlessness. Our headquarters has run into it,

our people have run into it, I have

run into it, someone came there — I mean,

it’s this kind of unchecked police

power, and don’t doubt that of course there

they’ll be running around especially hard, punishing

someone or other. And these kinds of ideas have already

started across the country — whole

degenerate, idiotic raids in

Naberezhnye Chelny.

They go around, and they deliberately show people

videos of how police officers

and Rospotrebnadzor (Russia’s consumer safety watchdog) go door to door in apartment buildings and

check how the self-isolation regime

is being observed. Let’s watch.

[music]

[music]

[music]

And what music, did you notice? Some kind of action-movie soundtrack,

really.

And they show this on local

television as if it were some kind of achievement.

With this superhero-style music — they should also have added

a shot of the cop

putting on his uniform jacket, and this

girl from Rospotrebnadzor putting on

her cap and mask, and then they go off

to carry out their so-called heroic deeds.

What the hell is any of this even for?

And they happily show how a

police officer, without gloves,

presses the doorbell with his finger, and then

with that same finger he’ll scratch himself

and spread this coronavirus. ‘Are you observing

self-isolation?’ ‘We are observing self-isolation.’

‘Well, good, keep observing it, we’ll go on

to the next apartment.’ And they go around like this

during an epidemic, and it contradicts

absolutely every rule, every single one, and this

is being done from top to bottom. But to build

a digital prison — in the WHO recommendations, someone

wrote to me, a person who

understands this well — he says:

Alexei, you were discussing how Putin...

went to a hospital in Kommunarka (a Moscow district)...

The recommendations clearly state that

officials are prohibited from visiting

infectious disease hospitals — in other words, it is forbidden.

Officials have no business being there,

they are not supposed to go there, and that

makes sense, because we do not want an official

to get sick. Secondly,

an official is in contact with a large number of

people — an obvious

vector of transmission. Not to mention the fact that

when the president shows up at your hospital,

with the FSO (Federal Protective Service) and everyone else,

your hospital is paralyzed for half a day. Why do this?

And why do you expect everyone else

to follow the rules if you are either consistently

or deliberately not following them? In the case of

Putin, you are either doing that or doing unbelievably stupid

things. And what needs to be done

has been clear to everyone since January.

This has already been discussed all over the world,

in Europe it has been the main topic — a nightmare situation —

since the beginning of March. More or less, it has been clear

what needs to be done. But of course here we have to

do everything our own way, and first of all

through this kind of police-style approach.

And secondly,

we just have to lie endlessly. And this

lying, for example, simply

drives me into a state of shock, because

I am currently spending quite a lot of time

trying to understand

the problems in healthcare, because, as you know,

for a long time I — and in general the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation) and Navalny Live —

have been helping the doctors’ union and

keeping track of all this. So this lying

about how our doctors are supposedly properly supplied with something

just drives me crazy. Today, 20

minutes before going on air,

I was reading the latest report from the Italian

government: in Italy, 10,000 doctors

have been infected with coronavirus, and of

those, 67 have died. This is a huge

problem.

Thousands of people have fallen ill in Spain; all over

the world this is a huge problem.

Doctors are a high-risk group, and they need

protective equipment. There is a shortage almost

everywhere, and governments in all countries

are constantly discussing it and appealing to

people for help. You see those videos

and news stories about one billionaire buying

masks, another billionaire buying masks — everyone

is allocating large amounts of money, and yet

only here everything is supposedly fine.

We are consistently being told that everything

is more or less okay, and that there is no such

situation where we need to hit

the red button. But the thing is — and

everyone knows this — in our country there are 3.5

million medical workers: doctors,

nurses, paramedics, orderlies, and so

on. And every one of you has

a medical worker among your acquaintances — a doctor you know,

an ambulance doctor,

so ask them about protective equipment.

They will just start laughing, because they are

literally sewing all this protective gear themselves right now,

and at the same time they have been told: sew it,

but keep quiet about it, and do not even think about

telling anyone anything. In that sense,

the Doctors’ Alliance — today, before going on air,

I was frantically trying

to help them spread information about the fact

that they had simply been detained.

At the same time, Putin was making his

address and saying, “We love

our doctors so much, thank you very much, doctors,” while

at the same time a shipment belonging to the Doctors’ Alliance

of purchased masks was stopped and seized on the road.

They were threatened, they were all detained — and as I understand it,

they are still being held

at the police station, at least

as of the start of this broadcast, because they

were detained for having raised money and

bought masks for their colleagues, who

had written asking, “Please bring us

masks, we cannot receive patients without

masks.” They set off to deliver them, and were stopped.

Officials were there — the deputy head

of the police for Novgorod Region

was present and giving orders. In other words,

it was a special operation against what? Against a campaign

that, well, would seem simply...

I understand that the Doctors’ Alliance may not

be liked by the authorities, because it is

a normal, classic trade union. It

says everything plainly and directly.

It is not afraid to cooperate with us, for example,

because we support them. But they cooperate

with everyone, and they announced

this fundraising campaign

for masks. Let’s watch a few

seconds of it — it is really great, and I

support it. I first donated 3,000

rubles, then when they were targeted the first

time, I sent another 1,000 rubles a week later.

After this police detention,

I will send more, and I urge everyone

to support them — and most importantly, to be their

information sponsor. Let’s

watch the video about their campaign.

Our medical trade union is launching

the largest medical public initiative in the country.

We will travel

across all of Russia

to inspect medical

facilities and deliver protective equipment

to healthcare workers where the state cannot

provide them with such protection. One of the

reasons for the catastrophe unfolding in Italy

is that at an early stage there,

many doctors contracted coronavirus, and

they infected their patients.

And this concerns all medical workers. We

represent a medical trade union, and we

are obliged to protect and provide for

safe working conditions for doctors and physicians

all across the country, people are now simply demanding from

us: come and see, show

everyone that we have nothing, that we cannot

abandon medical workers like this; our resources

are limited, but we will go and bring these

protective supplies

if our rich oil-producing state

is unable to provide doctors with them

on its own. First, we demand

that they be provided with full-fledged

international-standard protective equipment, our

medical workers

Second, we demand that there be a sufficient

amount of equipment, including machines for

oxygenation and artificial ventilation

of the lungs. Third, we demand that all

doctors, nurses, and paramedics

finally start being paid as much

as was promised in 2012. And lastly, on behalf of

all 40 branches of the Doctors’ Alliance trade union

I officially invite Vladimir

Putin to travel at least part of this

route together with us, especially since

you already have an excellent imported protective

suit. We guarantee that you will learn a lot

new about medicine in Russia. At the Kremlin

hospital

you definitely won’t see anything like this. I see

the news that has just come in: the mayor of Moscow

has postponed the introduction of a pass system

and says that the experience of the first week

has shown that for now there is no such need

most city residents are conscientiously

complying with the stay-at-home requirement. I think this is

exactly what I was talking about, and I think that

they will not introduce this system; they simply understand

that there would be a revolt. But come on—Moscow, 10

million people, many in rented apartments, in

very complicated relationships with one another

But look, I live in Moscow in a rented

apartment, and my parents live in the Moscow

region

They are elderly people, and under these

Sobyanin-style decrees, there is no provision

under which I can simply

go to my parents. At the same time, travel

from Moscow to the region is allowed, but you supposedly cannot

leave your home to do it. But obviously

if my parents need food

or something else, if something happens, then I

will break these rules and go, and

at the same time as me, one hundred or two hundred

thousand people will go too, because you simply cannot

just shut everything down

and control it all with the police

So it is the right decision that you

postponed the introduction of the pass system. But

I will just repeat my appeal to

Sobyanin: you are doing many things

right now correctly; many things

you simply cannot do. But if you do not

want to be criticized yet again,

then please follow these rules yourselves

Just follow all the rules that you

wrote. If you believe they are reasonable,

then follow them. Right, we have just

watched the appeal from this doctors’ union

and, well, it may seem that

it is somehow critical of the authorities

but that is exactly the same thing

that is happening right now all over the world. In

France, the nurses’ union has almost

declared a strike; in Italy, the union

of nurses also, I think, threatened

to strike; and in America, where

colossal amounts of money are allocated to

healthcare—in all countries where there is

a well-functioning system

medical workers curse the authorities in the strongest terms

and say that they do not have enough

protective equipment, well,

this is a normal situation, a completely normal

reaction from the state should be what? To say, no,

medical workers, guys, we love you so much, we will buy you everything

wealthy people are giving them something there, and in

the end, this matters to us, well

because a doctor anywhere at work—or rather, there sits

a female doctor in a clinic, and she does not have

a proper mask

some elderly woman comes to see her, coughs on her

and then this woman keeps sitting there. Or not a doctor—in

the reception desk, not a doctor, just

someone who is not a doctor either, sitting at

the reception desk

and infecting everyone who comes to her afterward

Of course, objectively, we are

interested in making sure that every doctor right now

first and foremost is so thoroughly

provided with protective equipment, with absolutely everything

because otherwise they become the main spreader

if something goes wrong, and the example of Italy shows us

that. In other words, this is absolutely

normal. And they started

raising money and collected 2 million

rubles, as I already said. And you cannot even

describe it without using the phrase: what

irony. At the same time, in his address, Putin

said the following words. Let us

listen to how he addresses doctors

Working under intense pressure, they continue to labor—

doctors, nurses, and the staff

of medical institutions. For all of them right now

it is very difficult. It is they, in hospitals and

infectious disease wards, in all

medical districts, who are holding the line against

the advancing epidemic, treating and saving people

preventing the emergence and development

of the disease. I am sure that all citizens of the country

will join in words of heartfelt

gratitude to our medical

workers

Seriously? Heartfelt gratitude? That is,

of course we absolutely join

in those words of heartfelt gratitude, only

will you join them or not?

Because in reality, at exactly the same

time, somewhere out on the road, simply

Here they are on the highway, on the way to Novgorod Oblast (a region of Russia).

Oblast.

A shipment from the Doctors' Alliance, who raised

our money—not budget funds, nothing from the state.

They raised a little—well, 2 million

rubles (about $21,000 USD), a laughably small amount, but still.

We were collecting for masks after hospitals

in Novgorod Oblast wrote to us

saying, "Come, bring us something," and

they set off; they put respirators on themselves

and took those masks there. What is happening?

At the same time, Putin is addressing doctors with

words of thanks, while the doctors, from the road,

are appealing to Putin, saying, "Guys,

let us through so we can deliver protective

equipment." Let's watch: "We appeal to the President

of Russia.

"So, Vladimir Vladimirovich,

you have a fine imported protective suit, but

medical workers have no personal protective equipment

at all. We collected money from all over the country

so we could bring this protective

equipment to the hospital, but here

your subordinates

and the police have stopped us and won't let us

do it. Apparently we'll have to

ask you personally for a pass so that

we can provide medical workers with protective equipment. We are

a medical trade union; it is our duty to do this,

but we are being obstructed.

If you have protective suits

and they don't, do something—at least allow

us to provide medical workers with protective

equipment."

And really, they have nothing.

Somewhere there in the hospital,

a doctor without a respirator is seeing patients,

and sooner or later, of course, he will infect

someone. I don't want him to infect anyone,

including because I don't want it

to eventually reach me, or

my family, or my fellow citizens. And so

I transferred 3,000 rubles (about $32 USD) so that

with my small contribution I could, well,

reduce the epidemic a little—for one

person, two people, I don't know, five

people, however many. They bought masks

and took them there.

A whole police operation—they're being stopped.

Watch these 53 seconds.

Just look at how they are being followed by flashing

police cars.

A huge number of people, all these cops,

were sent there so they could catch them and

stop the union from delivering these miserable

masks. "We're driving now, look,

we've got a whole convoy of traffic police cars. We can see two

cars behind us and one car over there

in the distance.

We're being escorted by the Interior Ministry. Instead of

accompanying us with the protective

equipment and helping deliver it to the hospital, they are

obstructing us. Apparently, at the Okulovka hospital

and at the ambulance station there is absolutely no

protective equipment, so we are being

accompanied by this kind of escort.

A very real one, and it is in fact preventing us

from delivering this protection so that we do not

show just how bad everything is there, how

awful it all is. Nevertheless, we

will of course get there now. I hope

the medical workers will meet us there and we will hand over all

the protective equipment to them. They are there, I

know, already waiting for us." I can see I'm being asked

a question: there has been a lot of news in Russia

about the Doctors' Alliance. Tell me, how are they going to

move around the country when

many regions won't even let people walk

outside without a valid reason, or at least

soon that will be the case? How will you

solve this problem? I don't know how they

will solve it. I mean, I'm trying

to solve this problem in this way:

I'm showing you these videos and I hope you

will be outraged and post on social

media, and that this will cause a scandal

and they will start being let through, because it's

not clear how else this problem can be solved.

Because

a medical trade union is, in effect,

a medical organization. Of course they

have every right under all current rules, and they

completed the paperwork, spent a lot of time

processing all the documents for the shipment, and they

have every right to transport it. Plus, they are

doctors—they know how to use

protective equipment, and their aims are absolutely

good. But they are being stopped. At the same time,

there was also a whole special operation

because in the hospitals

that started calling in the Doctors' Alliance

and saying, "Please bring us

masks," special people came there and

told them not to come—or rather, not to

take those masks from them, because those

masks were infected by Navalny. Let's watch.

Attack.

Navalny infected the masks, you understand.

So don't take them.

Okay, I infected the masks—well then

fine, please give them masks

that Putin infected with his, I don't know,

antibacterial powers or some kind of

holiness, or whatever, I don't know,

or maybe the Patriarch of All Rus' (head of the Russian Orthodox Church) sprinkled them with something.

Bring them some normal

masks if you don't like the masks

and protective equipment that the Doctors' Alliance is supplying.

Doctors.

But they aren't bringing anything at all—really, they aren't.

And I want this

to be discussed much more, because

no real measures against the epidemic

can be taken. Everything we're being

told is nonsense as long as

doctors have no protective equipment. Watch

30 seconds of women from the ambulance service

receiving these miserable masks and speaking.

Thank you very much, we have nothing—36

seconds.

Today, Alliance arrived to help us with

humanitarian aid—they brought masks, goggles,

protective gowns,

gloves, disinfectants. Many thanks to them

for the help they provided, because the hospital

is short of everything, really everything.

There aren't enough masks—you can't buy them in pharmacies.

We are very grateful to you for

the information about crowdfunding for

humanitarian aid, and we wish you

all the best.

This is a nightmare, a real nightmare.

This very kind woman from the ambulance service

is saying thank you for

the humanitarian aid. My God.

Trillions earned from the sale of oil

and gas—trillions—and you maintain the National Guard (Rosgvardiya)

with a force of 340,000 people,

and yet an ambulance doctor has to say,

"Thank you for the humanitarian aid." To her,

thank you, and thanks to Alliance, and well done to everyone

who donated whatever money they could.

In Moscow, an ambulance doctor—

the kind who gets dispatched directly on calls to

a patient with non-hospital pneumonia—

and who then has to deal with that patient

without a mask. What happens next?

Why can't we do this? I

of course really want the whole

country

127,000 people are watching us right now

live.

Let's talk about this seriously.

Let's put pressure on our authorities too.

This is peanuts, but these are expenses

that could simply be covered tomorrow, just like that.

The money could be spent, and right now there is already fairly

large-scale production in the world—you can buy all this.

We're sending everything to America; I'll say more about that

later. We can't provide our own doctors

with what they need. There is no real fight against the corona-

virus, and enough lying about it. As long as

people are sewing masks themselves, as long as doctors

are sewing masks themselves, as long as we are not providing them

with them—and on top of that, they are hiding

the fact that there is nothing, and they are stopping ordinary people

from supplying them—this is all just

truly absolutely infuriating. Here are the poll

results—let's put up the results

of the poll for those who have just

joined us. I want to say that I started

the program by saying: let's find out who

is actually spreading fake news. And our

consumer watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, first of all claims that

it has conducted 560,000 tests for

coronavirus in total, and Prime Minister

Mishustin said that 36,000

tests are being carried out every day, and

so I simply asked whether

among your acquaintances there is anyone who has undergone

this testing and gotten a result. Show it again.

There—you see, 94 percent

of people—after all, 23,000, no, 24,000

people took part in the vote—

94 percent do not know anyone

who has been tested. That means

there is no testing—it's a complete lie. And

it seems to me that with this main

point in mind, we should move on to discussing

what Putin said today, and it

was, of course, an astonishing address. I mean,

Putin disappeared. He announced this

strange non-working week, after which

he vanished—he wasn't seen for several days.

Journalists from TV Rain (an independent Russian TV channel) did an interesting

investigation showing that over the last

week, all of Putin's video appearances

were clearly canned, pre-recorded footage.

He disappeared, and it's unclear what's going on. I mean,

Sobyanin seems to be saying something,

Mishustin is making statements, some kind of

nonsense is being spouted, different people in

different regions are, well, doing something,

taking these strange measures. The thing is,

in Chechnya they basically blocked the roads entirely,

not letting anyone out. I mean, it's clear

that Chechnya

is a state within a state, I mean,

but still,

regional authorities are doing things—it's

all very strange. A very curious

announcement is being broadcast in Chechnya from

the minarets of mosques. If we have the

video, let's play it, to show how

they are trying to handle this at the regional

level.

[music]

Fear—and we will enforce it, and there will be fear.

Well, in Chechnya it can't be any other way, I mean,

everyone is doing their own thing; overall

nothing is clear. In one region it's one thing, in

another it's something else.

They announced a non-working week, then

they announced self-isolation. Who is going to pay for it?

It's not clear. Just look:

Moscow has announced self-isolation. Here

there are simply huge numbers of people who

are not working—people in small businesses,

I won't even list them all here,

there are probably tens, maybe a couple hundred thousand

taxi drivers, people in food service,

waitresses, cooks, and so on.

They're earning zero. I don't know, there are several

hundred thousand people, and so on and so forth.

In small business, medium-sized business, even in

large business that isn't state-owned—what are they supposed to

do? Where is the money supposed to come from? It's not clear. I mean,

at the same time, everyone is looking at the experience

of other countries. Other countries are saying

things like: in the U.S., they said it's a crisis, it's a problem, everything

is terrible, everyone is criticizing Trump, and Trump responds

by saying: we're going to spend 20 percent of GDP

—an absolutely enormous sum—

to help the economy. In different

countries it's 10 percent of GDP, 15 percent

of GDP—that is, trillions of dollars.

Hundreds of billions of dollars will be

handed out to support the economy, and in the

end, that also means simply giving money to people for nothing.

Paying people directly. Here, I wrote 20,000

rubles for each person. I put this proposal forward

deliberately, because the same

Putin is always showing off on

television and saying that we have no constructive

plan. I do have a constructive plan. I

am asking you to support it. And my

constructive plan is not something I

came up with by sitting around and imagining myself a genius.

For this constructive plan, I gathered

several smart people and said, let’s

analyze what has worked in

different countries, and we wrote a plan

that consists of two parts. The first is

what needs to be done to fight the epidemic.

It states very clearly there: a quarantine

that actually works. It is already known that

quarantine works, while these idiotic

“non-working weeks” and months do not.

Quarantine, providing protective equipment

for doctors, because every country has

figured out that this is what needs to be done.

Testing.

Not lying about testing volumes.

Look at how it works in South Korea:

these phone-booth-like stations are set up all across the

country. Look at a booth in South Korea.

This is how it all works: you

feel unwell, or you have simply been in

contact with someone, and you go to one of these

booths.

You get tested. In many

countries, people drive up in their cars, and so that

they are not just wandering around there,

they pull up in a car,

roll down the window, open their mouth, and with a swab

they take the sample, record your number, and send you

the result. Mass testing

makes it possible to identify infected people

and isolate them. In other words, if you

are just sitting at home right now and feeling

unwell, and you are a conscientious person,

you have self-isolated. You probably

do not think you have coronavirus, but

if you knew—and your relatives knew—

that you had the virus, even despite the fact

that you are not dying and do not

need a ventilator, you would treat it a little differently.

That is true. Every country has

figured this out, and that is why they are massively

testing people. And Putin should come out and

say: our priority is testing.

Right now, we are not doing very well with it yet,

but we will invest a huge amount of

money, we will buy Korean technology,

we will buy Israeli technology, maybe

we even have something of our own—fine, embellish it a little,

say that we have our own

Russian technology—but in three weeks

testing stations will be standing out on the streets, and we will be testing everyone.

He does not say that. Instead, he

moreover, we still have this idea

that mass testing is unnecessary, even though

every country has found that mass

testing is necessary. Next, when we

come to the issue of money—well, the experience of countries like

the United States, Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom—this is

simply a normal, ordinary idea:

the state has money, and that

money came from people paying

taxes. Right now, people are genuinely in a very bad way.

A huge number of people are unemployed,

without work, without wages, in apartments where

they live

with a whole crowd of others—your

divorced wife or divorced husband,

a paralyzed grandmother lying in the other

room, everyone renting some kind of room,

and there is no money, and it is unclear what to do.

And utility bills and housing charges (ZhKKh) still come every month,

and you still have to pay 6,000 to 9,000

rubles for them. People are saying: guys,

make this a little easier for us. And so

all countries are saying: of course, because you

we are your government,

you paid taxes, this is your money,

so now we will help you. For example, in

Spain, people were exempted from paying rent,

and it was even forbidden for

six months to evict people from their apartments.

There is, of course, another side to this,

because people who live off

renting out apartments in Moscow—

there are a million people renting housing there, and

a million people renting it out—so

we need somehow to let these people not

pay rent, while helping those landlords a little,

in other words, to balance it, because

it is hard for people.

And this is their money. This is their oil and

gas. We have this rainy-day fund, just so

everyone understands how it works: there is a fund,

the National Wealth Fund,

which contains 123 billion

dollars—that is 10 trillion rubles.

And we keep constantly building up this fund, and

we would also constantly spend this fund

during crises, as in 2008

and 2014, when almost nothing was left in it,

because where did we give it away?

To oligarchs and large enterprises. In other words,

every time, during every crisis, we still

hand out all this money anyway, we still

hand out all this money because

Deripaska (Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska) is having a hard time.

The price of aluminum has fallen, so Deripaska suddenly

needs money—here you go, Deripaska,

have a billion. Give money to this one,

give money to that one, give some to Usmanov (Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov), give some to another,

because supposedly industry must be supported.

Factories. But now a situation has developed in which

ordinary people have suffered first and foremost—

a specific guy like Petya,

who worked as a waiter, whose café

has closed, there is no revenue there, and Petya

No one will be able to pay wages because

the manager, the owner of this café,

has the same problem. All small businesses

could go bankrupt; there’s no money to pay salaries.

That little café, Romashka,

is located in rented premises in an expensive— not Moscow,

but Novosibirsk— location, and he still has to pay rent

because no one

has allowed him not to pay rent, and

so it all goes down the chain: the owner

of Romashka, Kolya, the waiter Petya, and his wife,

the waitress, their child— they’re all

left without money, and they’re waiting— that is,

they still have to pay rent for their

room or apartment.

They also have to pay for utilities,

they have to buy food, and they think, well,

maybe Putin will come out now and say

— maybe not exactly what Navalny calculated,

when he said that everyone should be paid—

I insist that right now, immediately,

everyone should receive 20,000 rubles

per adult and 10,000 rubles per child

(about 220 and 110 US dollars, respectively). It’s not a large sum, but we would at least

achieve something with it: over the course of a month,

right up to the end of April, people would not

go out of their minds. They would at least know,

I have money to buy food.

Because right now we really have

millions of people in this country sitting

there right now thinking, damn, where can I borrow

money just to buy pasta?

And these are ordinary people, not some alcoholics,

not some kind of outcasts— normal, decent

people, you know, just regular folks.

They’re the middle class, with salaries of 17,000 rubles

(about 185 US dollars), and we’re waiting for Putin to say something

about this, because all

normal countries have allocated money; our

people have suffered. So what does he end up saying?

Let’s listen. And Putin, who

first thanked the doctors, then

announced a non-working month, and then

said— well, he extended it, and note

this— “and one more very important detail.”

And when I was listening to Putin’s address,

and he said, “one more very important detail,” I thought, well,

now, surely— damn it— even if just for the sake of his ratings,

to show he cares about you, he’ll say now:

“we will allocate at least something to everyone.” But let’s see.

As virology experts believe, the peak

of the epidemic worldwide has not yet passed, including

in our country. Therefore, I have

decided to extend

the non-working period until the end of the month,

that is, through April 30 inclusive,

while emphasizing that employees will retain

their wages. As we implement measures to combat

the epidemic, we must not forget that

it is equally important now to preserve

jobs and citizens’ incomes.

This is a shared priority for the government,

the regions, and business. An effective and stable

economy

is the foundation for solving our key

tasks, including those in the field of

healthcare.

Dear citizens of Russia, I ask you to continue

to pay the utmost attention

to the authorities’ requirements and the recommendations

of doctors and specialists.

Take care of yourselves and your loved ones. Extremely

important— and in some cases decisive— have been and

remain our shared responsibility and

mutual support.

Even this short period of the past week has shown

that when we understand the seriousness of the situation,

we are able to reduce the risks.

I am confident that we will continue to act

in the same coordinated and reliable way, and most importantly,

proactively.

Thank you for your attention.

Stay healthy.

What was especially damn impressive was the part about

“mutual support.” With those intonations, like,

you know— as if

it was in bold in his teleprompter:

“mutual support,” and especially, let’s hear it for

mutual support. “We ask you to pay the utmost attention

to the recommendations

of the authorities.” And people look at him and say: we’ve

already done our part. We’ve paid taxes our whole

lives. An emergency has happened— objectively, it’s an

emergency situation,

plain and simple.

Give us our taxes back so that we can

survive.

Normally— because we need to go buy

food, because prices are rising, and we have to pay for housing,

we have to pay utilities, we have to pay.

So here’s another measure I propose:

let’s introduce a moratorium on utility payments— people shouldn’t have

to pay money for that. If you introduced a moratorium,

a person would save 6,000 rubles (about 65 US dollars) at least.

But there’s absolutely no money for that, zero. And moreover,

this is even official: if in other

countries it’s 20 percent of GDP, 15

percent of GDP, 10 percent of GDP, here it is

less than one percent of GDP

that is going to support the economy, business, and

people. Here Tatyana asks me,

why doesn’t Putin declare a quarantine?

A state of emergency— what would be the benefit of that?

Aleksandra Khrapko asks:

“Alexei, why do you think Putin

won’t introduce a state of emergency?”

Another viewer asks: “Alexei, why does Putin

make decisions that do not

help the population and only make things worse?” He

is not introducing a state of emergency

because, if you look at the laws and read them,

a state of emergency means that

someone can shout through a loudspeaker outside your window:

“This is a state of emergency,”

and that means

“stay home,” after which you are obliged

to remain at home, and the state is

obliged to compensate you for all losses.

That’s why they are not declaring a state of emergency

and are calling a real quarantine

by different names, because they do not

want to pay you, because Putin

believes that these 10 trillion rubles

in the reserve fund, the National

Wealth Fund, are his

and his friends’ national treasure. So aid

will go to some Rotenberg or Timchenko (wealthy businessmen close to the Kremlin),

and all the others will get theirs, and they will

launch some giant construction projects where

half the money will be stolen. I mean, they will

finance another film like *The Crimean Bridge*

and steal plenty of money on that too, while you

are supposedly entitled to nothing. But I see

someone here—yes, Mikhail

Rachkovsky writes correctly: “Alexei, my father

was sent home into quarantine, with no

pay at all, because the company is private.”

They told him: let Putin pay out of his own pocket.

And now he’ll be sitting at home until

the end of the month with no money. What should he do, and who

should he turn to? They said,

let Putin pay—so turn to Putin. You simply

must not stay silent about this. I

believe the whole country should now

rise up on its hind legs.

Now, I do not mean: let’s go hold rallies.

I mean, really, every single person

should keep saying: we demand

that money be paid to us from that very

National Wealth Fund.

Again, it has been spent over and over

to support oligarchs many times. Give

people money now, because people have earned

that money, and they put it

there themselves. I mean, really,

how can you ask a

private company to pay wages while someone sits at home for a month?

The business owner will tell you:

“I don’t have the money, my friend.

You work for me, I value you very much, and

everything is fine, but there’s no revenue. Understand—where

am I supposed to get the money? I can’t even sell anything,

because the business has come to a complete

stop. There’s nothing.” They genuinely

do not care at all, and their calculation is exactly

this: they do not want to support you. They

want to control all the money, and they

want to control this police

machine, keep everyone in fear, and simply

wait for it to pass on its own. Putin,

by the way, already understands very well

his personal responsibility for what

is happening right now—his personal

responsibility. Let’s remember how

quite recently this man lied, saying

that the danger of the coronavirus

was all fake.

that it was all being sent to us from abroad.

[Putin clip: “fake…”]

As for these planted stories,

the FSB reports that these provocations

are mainly organized from abroad, but

unfortunately this is something we always face.

The purpose of such reports is obvious: to sow

panic, panic among the population.

You understand—to sow panic among the population.

What was being called “fake” was simply objective

statistics, and everyone was saying—lots of

people were saying: look, since March 2

there has been quarantine all across Europe; it will come

to you too, and before you know it

the roads will be closed, and you will

be sitting at home—how will you sit at home

without money? So they needed to start doing

something right away. They did nothing.

You say something—and it’s called fake. That mustached creep named

Dmitry Peskov said on March 26:

“The only thing I want to remind you of,”

said the president’s press secretary, “is that we

de facto do not have an epidemic. That is thanks to the

measures that were taken in advance

by our government, and

thanks to that effective system of, damn,

countering the coronavirus that

was created in the Russian Federation. For now, the president

is proceeding from that assumption.” In other words, there’s nothing.

There are no masks, the country is basically unprepared for

anything, there are no ventilators, there is nothing—and yet they

come out and say

there is no epidemic, while all over the world it is obvious that everything

will reach Russia too, and everything

will have to be shut down. And this man comes out—

he is the president’s press secretary, he is

shown on Channel One, and he says:

well,

“de facto there is no epidemic thanks to those

great measures that were taken.” And now

they do not want to pay anyone.

So of course everyone should rise up.

Everyone should be outraged, simply—

just talk to each other, write

on social media. Putin must

feel that a revolution could happen in the country

if they finally do not

pay people what they are supposed to be paid,

what is being paid all over the world. This is what

really works at a time like this. There is

this argument that it is populism.

Like, you say: pay everyone

20,000 rubles and 10,000 rubles per child

because that’s just some populist nonsense.

It is not populist nonsense.

If even highly capitalist

countries are doing it, that’s the first point. And second,

people need this money so they can

receive it and go spend it in stores,

not so they can spend it, you know, in

casinos or on some luxury hotel getaway

or entertainment or something like that. I mean,

most people are not going to buy

a Netflix subscription or anything like that.

Most people will spend it on

their children, in order to survive right now,

because expenses are high. Today I saw—and

they probably did not prepare this slide—but I saw

it for real.

What also infuriated me was *Rossiyskaya Gazeta* (the Russian government newspaper).

It’s the government’s official newspaper, and they

published this unbelievably tone-deaf article

saying that studies showed that being in

self-isolation helps everyone

save 3,000 rubles (about $30–35). Seriously.

What brazen scoundrels.

I mean, the whole country is sitting there with no money, and they

say, wow, how great—you can just sit it out

and you have no expenses. You’re not going anywhere, you’re not

buying yourself, I don’t know, a leopard-print fur coat

because you have nowhere to wear it,

so thanks to self-isolation you’ve really

saved a lot. But people—

I’ll repeat it like a parrot, I keep saying it, but

still, a huge number of people, especially

outside Moscow, and many within

Moscow too, are in a quiet or very loud

state of horror because they have no money

and no one to borrow from, because everyone is in the same

situation: no money, no work.

Businesses, businesses are going bankrupt.

Tomorrow half of them will collapse—if, say,

restaurants, venues, any businesses

have to pay all that rent

while doing no business at all for

two months, then of course they’ll all

go bankrupt. The whole world understands this, and

everywhere they’re giving people some money. Only here

those 10 trillion from our oil and

gas revenues somehow aren’t for us; we’re apparently

not entitled to a single thing from them. Now they

say they’ll pay out—I don’t even know whether they’ll

actually pay what they’re supposed to pay.

Right now it’s 20,000 rubles per person (about $220), and then

10,000 rubles (about $110), then 10,000 in May, 10,000 in June—but they

will only pay at all if the whole

country demands it from them. Otherwise they won’t

do anything, and they won’t lift a finger for

a second, they won’t stir at all until

they feel that by tomorrow

their approval rating will be at zero. So whether you love

Putin or don’t love Putin, you need to understand

that in the National Wealth Fund

there is at least a small share of your money, and that

money has to be demanded every day. Then

they’ll return it. But while we stay silent, this

nonsense keeps happening—like this story about aid to the U.S.,

which of course made everyone furious.

It made me furious too, and for almost two hours now

live on air, I—I just can’t not

talk about it, because

I saw that many people reproached me

when I criticized the aid to Italy. My point was:

fine, send some medical

masks to Italy—even though we don’t have enough here—and some kind of

equipment.

They sent it, and I spoke out against it. Many people

wrote, “Come on, Navalny, you’re acting

like a petty, small-minded person. We

should help Italy.”

There’s a huge problem there, and all of this

is very good.

The Italians appreciate it—sure, it’s a kind of

demonstrative diplomatic gesture.

It turned out later that all of it was completely

useless, because it was basically junk.

But still, from the Italians’ point of view, a plane arrived

from Russia. On TV they said,

“Even Russia sent a plane with

masks,” and the Italians say,

“Grazie, thank you very much, that’s very kind.”

“Russian people, you love us, and we won’t

forget it.” All of that is very nice, but

okay, and in exchange Putin supposedly

wants sanctions lifted. Of course, the sanctions

won’t be lifted. But what’s happening now

with aid to the U.S. takes this to another level—

it just looks insane.

So, the U.S. is an enormous, super-rich

country with many problems, where of course there aren’t enough

ventilators, but where there are

still incomparably more of them than here in any

case. And hospitals there—I mean, a hospital in the U.S. and

a hospital in Russia, despite the fact that

healthcare is a complicated, contentious

policy area that everyone debates in the U.S.—

still, comparing any hospital in the U.S. with

even the very best hospital in Russia is simply

impossible, let alone a regional one.

There’s video of a person lying in

an infectious disease ward with coronavirus in North

Ossetia. Let’s watch a few seconds of it.

It looks like something out of wartime footage.

If you showed that video to the Americans

we’re sending aid to, they’d

be stunned and just send it all

back, maybe with a little bread tucked in

or something else, I don’t know, because

this is just a nightmare.

We have nothing. Officially, in our

Moscow Health Department guidelines, it says

that coronavirus should be treated with Kagocel,

which is what doctors call a fake remedy,

basically quack medicine.

It’s a bogus, nonexistent drug

that, by the way, Chubais started

producing and called some kind of

great achievement of Russian nanotechnology.

Our doctors—I’ll show you right now, actually,

a fairly long clip, 2 minutes

18 seconds, where they’re practically

shouting at the top of their lungs that God will punish those

who include Kagocel in recommendations for treating

coronavirus.

That’s our government for you: they have nothing else.

Run-down hospitals, no protective

equipment, Kagocel that we’re supposedly offering

to treat people with—and meanwhile we’re sending aid

to America. Here are 2 minutes 18 seconds about the

recommendations of the

Moscow Health Department, in the richest

city in Russia.

It just pains me. May I ask a question?

You just mentioned the recommendations

of the Health Ministry.

Over the past couple of days, we’ve been seeing this kind of

surge on social media, with authors...

of the methodological guide

published a list of immune-boosting

drugs that supposedly provide mass prevention against

coronavirus. Please, I really want to

ask you to share your opinion

about the fact that Moscow included itself in

the honorable list together with Pushkin Hospital

and the Ministry of Health. This is, overall,

despite the fact that Moscow has been

responding to the epidemic fairly successfully

of coronavirus, a shameful page in the

history of Moscow healthcare.

Recommendations for drugs that affect

the immune system — all these unproven

homeopathic remedies that

are known for biased clinical

studies, supported by

some dubious figures with

titles and regalia — it’s disgraceful.

This goes against federal recommendations.

A local recommendation

may possibly have

local significance.

But this is not some local matter.

This is Moscow.

This is visible in advance, this is out in the open,

people see it, you understand? This is not normal.

This is categorically

a gross violation of medical ethics.

I cannot recall in my entire career a case where

people went so far as to make money

on blood. This is blood money. People who

come in — first of all, they will spend their own

last bits of money, clearing these drugs off the shelves.

They will think they are

protected by taking these drugs. This may

delay a patient’s visit to the doctor and

let the situation worsen, causing them to miss pneumonia.

I think that if there is any justice,

then these people will be among the very first

to end up there. They

know perfectly well that these drugs do not

work. Everyone knows they don’t work. If

they did work, then right now

China would be using them, absolutely.

They are ineffective. There are no grounds

for saying that such drugs as

homeopathic remedies, Kagocel, Ingavirin,

or Arbidol have any basis whatsoever

for being considered effective. None.

That was the opinion of the well-known doctor

Yaroslav Ashikhmin. In other words, a doctor

is already saying, you understand,

that the people who do this will burn in hell.

That is, we have nothing,

yet we have Kagocel in the recommendations,

which they are also making money from.

There are no masks, but we are sending things to America, and

this was a double blow, a kind of

double betrayal. I don’t

know — call it an exaggeration if you want,

but I absolutely believe that what

is happening with this PR campaign around

sending giant Ruslan planes (Antonov An-124 cargo aircraft)

— the largest cargo planes in the world —

carrying equipment there, to America, and this

being presented as some kind of super-mega

humanitarian aid.

Well, this was taken away from our doctors, and then

it turns out it was also sold. That is,

we literally took it and sold this

equipment.

We learned this solely because

the U.S. State Department issued a statement saying that

in fact, the United States, well...

they need ventilators, they need masks.

They have far more than we do, but they

take care of their citizens, so

they buy everything all over the world, and then

Putin called and said, roughly, do you have

any ventilators? And the response was,

of course, we’ll gather them right now from those

who are over there suffocating somewhere on

their hospital beds, we’ll collect them now and

send them to you, sell them off to you.

This is a truly vile, immoral act — selling out

your own citizens. And the report is presented as if

— let’s listen.