Grandpa Is Hiding, Jesus Is in Police Custody, Sobyanin Won’t Burst

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Good evening, everyone. In Moscow it is exactly

8:00 p.m., and I’m not in the studio at all

but at home. With you is Alexei Navalny

hosting the program *Russia of the Future*

— or “some kind of strange fruit,” as

Vladimir

Solovyov called me this week.

Let’s immediately take a look at this

wonderful man: “Leshenka,”

“Navalny will sit there in your place,”

“and instead of proving himself as the best of all

time and peoples, he shows himself as

a completely incomprehensible fruit.”

So Navalny turns out to be some kind of strange

fruit, and Vladimir Solovyov this

week was practically tearing himself apart.

He’s hosting some gigantic five-hour-long

broadcasts every day, and over there he’s just

completely losing it. We’ll remember this

wonderful man again today.

Well, I mean, you can understand him.

Just imagine: at this time of year he’s used to

the delightful

early spring, and he’s used to spending it

at home, in his homeland, where he has

residency, where his children are — at Lake Como.

Instead, he’s been forced to stay in Moscow.

You can’t even walk the streets, and on top of that he has to go on

television and look at the disgusting

faces of his colleagues. So of course

Vladimir Solovyov is nervous, and by doing so

he is, of course, giving us a huge number of

very pleasant moments. Please send me

your questions on Twitter with the hashtag #RussiaOfTheFuture.

I’ll do my best to answer them.

Today I’ll also try

to answer questions from people who

became sponsors of our program. If you

look carefully at the bottom of the screen, you’ll

see a button marked “Sponsorship.” If you’ve

just signed up, that means you have the

opportunity to ask a question I

won’t be able to dodge — one I’ll definitely

have to answer. So there are questions like that

too, and I’ll be answering them.

Many thanks to everyone who becomes

a sponsor, and thanks to everyone who clicks the

link that lets your little

Dmitry Medvedevs appear on the screen

and thereby make

this program possible. As usual, I want

to start with the topics that everyone

missed this week. They are very

important, and

we absolutely need to talk about them.

We absolutely must not forget them.

But the coronavirus has swallowed up everything, so we’re

discussing only the coronavirus, quarantine,

and, to a lesser extent, some people are discussing the wedding

or divorce of Dzhigan — in short, something

is going on in the family of the rapper Dzhigan.

To my surprise, he turned out to be

— I caught a glimpse of some news item —

a completely Russian guy,

maybe from Perm, apparently named Vanya Ivanov

or something like that. Honestly, I always thought

Dzhigan was, I don’t know, a man of

some kind of Eastern background. But never mind what’s

happening with him and what people are discussing.

What we really should discuss is the development

of the story involving problems connected with

Russian officials buying

the FIFA World Cup. It was great that the

World Cup was held in Russia.

We all really enjoyed it. What was absolutely not

great was that we spent a completely

colossal, unimaginable amount

of money on stadiums that could have been

built for half the price.

But nevertheless, please, let’s recall

28 seconds of how, in 2010, everyone

was celebrating — Shuvalov and all the

other officials — when Russia

won the right to host

the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

Something like: “Ladies and gentlemen, it will be organized...”

...

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All that jubilation was, of course, very nice.

The World Cup itself was great.

I myself happily took photos in the streets

when there were crowds of fans. All of that

was very beautiful. But behind all of it

there was a very dirty and unsightly

story that will continue to unfold, and we

will see more developments. So right now

it is worth paying attention to the fact that

the U.S. federal prosecutors have already

directly — not just through some rumors, you know —

in April directly accused several

people, several FIFA officials,

of receiving bribes from Russia

and

from Qatar, because Russia bought

it — simply paid bribes to all these

football crooks — and then Qatar did

exactly the same in the second round, giving all these

crooks money and thereby buying itself the

World Cup as well. And here it is very

appropriate to recall that a few

months ago, *The Insider* published

a hacked mailbox —

mailbox, not kidney; fortunately his kidney is fine —

belonging to Sergei Kapkov,

the former deputy to Sobyanin, a man

quite close to Roman Abramovich,

who handles various little matters for him there.

So, Kapkov’s email was hacked.

and posted detailed instructions there

there was simply a chart with all

those FIFA crooks in it, and in that chart

it was plainly written there—you could see it from the emails

that all of this was being overseen by Shuvalov

the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian government

who needed to be paid off and how—this one could

be handled by Abramovich, while this one had to be

paid through a Russian state corporation

1.5 million euros—this one would take

it directly in a suitcase, and it was all

written out there, and all of this came to light

all of this will be discussed, there will be

charges brought, which is why we need

to watch this closely, to keep an eye on it

you see, it seems to me that here

this idea doesn’t work—"well, okay,

fine, they bought the championship, and

somehow gave people a great joy, and we

walked around here for a while, drank beer with

the fans"—no, that’s not how it works

in reality, it works like this: if the

state is acting systematically

at a meeting—just imagine, there was a meeting

with Kapkov, Shuvalov, Putin, Mutko, and they sit there and

literally draw up a chart of who

needs to be bribed

how much money, and through whom—that means

corruption has reached an extremely systemic

level. It wasn’t a case of Putin

calling in Abramovich and saying, "Roman, my friend,

do us a favor—you’re so rich,

man, please make it happen somehow

so that the World Cup is held in

Russia," and Abramovich would wink and

say, "I get it, sure—just give me another

oil field and I’ll take care of everything

nicely." That would have been disgusting

corruption, but this wasn’t even corruption

it was absolutely some kind of—well, it was

a function of the state. They sat down, listened,

made decisions, and assigned who gives whom

bribes. That means that for these people

it’s not a problem at all—not just to take

bribes or give bribes, but to discuss how to

stage-manage it. In other words, corruption is a kind of

everyday working tool for them, and

in that sense, it’s already simply

pointless to appeal to our government

with some complaint like, "there’s corruption"

they don’t even laugh at that anymore, because

no statements about

corruption make the slightest

impression on them, because they literally sat there together

with Putin

with the FSB people, with his entourage there

maybe someone like Bastrykin was sitting there—they literally

sat there discussing how to deliver money to some

football swindler—1.5

million euros—not to mention that they

have at their disposal such an

amount of cash that they can simply take

cash in a suitcase, basically, and go hand it over

therefore, please keep following this

please. A small and, it seems to me, very

funny development came out of

the conflict between Lyubov Sobol and

Margarita Simonyan—well, "conflict" is not quite the word

Sobol simply exposed Simonyan. She

pointed out that the

RT channel, which receives 20

billion—20 billion rubles

from the state budget

artificially inflates its video views, and Simonyan

thought and thought and thought, and in the end

I think RT has as many as three thousand

four hundred employees, and all 3,400 of

them

apparently pooled their

intellectual potential and came up with a response

to Sobol—and that response is simply

hilarious if you watch it

carefully. Let’s take a look

put it up on the big screen here, come on

let’s watch 38 seconds

and then please just

notice that when some

random guy who doesn’t even

introduce himself or state his position

is refuting the claim that Margarita

Simonyan is somehow a great

porn star because views are being boosted through porn sites

notice what they show

on the screen—let’s watch

there are lots of comments like this, or

these very strange comments. But jokes aside,

for a state channel

receiving billions to inflate views

through porn sites—you’d have to be

really something, Margarita, wouldn’t you?

"Disgusting." Stop, says Sobol

so let’s check. We open

the analytics in YouTube itself and look at

the traffic sources. And it turns out 94

percent of the traffic to that video came from

YouTube recommendations, from the same

algorithm

nothing special seems to have happened, but

really, these people—one of the reasons why, actually,

my jaw just about dropped for a second

because of this whole situation

today we’re going to talk in detail

about Putin’s measures, the ones

he is taking in order to deal with

the epidemic and cope with the crisis, and one of

his heavily publicized "super-measures"—which he

announced very proudly—was to give 10

billion rubles to all Russian

medical workers dealing with the coro-

navirus across the whole country. But that’s hundreds

of thousands of people. It’s already completely obvious: 10

billion rubles. Meanwhile RT

gets 20 billion rubles—twice

as much as all the medical workers—and this bunch of

idiots

while trying to refute Sobol’s video about how they

inflate views through porn traffic

actually show and open up the traffic sources

We’re watching the video, looking at the screenshot—this screenshot here.

Now let’s zoom in on the screenshot from the video.

Closer, enlarged—what do we see? Well, there it is.

But they really were there, even if only for half a second.

They showed the real traffic sources for

their video, and we can see all of it—the very

XXX, those very porn sites, I mean

the guys just went ahead and confirmed it

all in their own so-called rebuttal

video. My God. Of course, we can

rejoice all we want and call them

idiots—yes, we will call them

idiots, crooks, complete morons, and

the most broken people on earth,

examples of idiocy, and so on. Those are all

absolutely correct, appropriate, and

fitting epithets. But 20 billion rubles

—my friends, 20 billion rubles of our money

that didn’t go to doctors, didn’t go to

teachers, for example, or to anyone else,

that didn’t go to you as even a small subsidy for

housing and utilities—they gave it to this lady, who is, well,

just unbelievably stupid. On Wikipedia, in the article on

stupidity, there should be his photo and hers

and everyone else’s—everyone who works with her.

This is something we absolutely need to keep

an eye on, and please, let’s not let

her off the hook, because they really are pretending

that nothing is happening. Simonyan

has in no way

commented on either our

investigation into how she stole a huge amount of

money for the film *Crimean Bridge*,

or the previous investigation, *Parasites*.

She hasn’t properly commented on any of it. They’re pretending

there’s nothing there, and hoping that

all of this will somehow dissipate on its own,

blow over somewhere. We must not let them off the hook.

Especially looking at their simply

outrageous, ultra-mega stupidity. Let me

take one of the questions that

was sent to me by a sponsor of our channel.

That doesn’t mean I won’t take

regular questions too, so send them with

the hashtag #RussiaOfTheFuture. Personnel Twins

asks me: “Alexei, don’t you get the feeling

that Putin’s inaction and weakness in

the conditions of the epidemic and crisis will become

the beginning of the end for him personally?” Dear

Personnel Twin, and dear everyone else,

it could be. It all depends on us. That’s the thing.

I mean, we can see it.

Today we’ll discuss in detail that they are doing nothing,

they don’t want to do anything.

More than that, Putin is simply disappearing,

vanishing. They are absolutely incompetent and

they are behaving

just, simply, strangely—really

strangely and absurdly. But it all

depends on us, because in reality

what is actually happening is seen by 10

million people, maybe 15 million people.

The rest pay much more attention

to television—they’re constantly being fed

lies endlessly. But those 10

million people we have actually

—probably many more by now—who

understand what’s going on, we simply

have to keep pushing this every day,

telling people about it. Then it

will become the beginning of his end. If we simply

take, I don’t know, a more detached

or contemplative position, then it won’t.

Then in a few months Putin will, you know,

—but I hope that, with some losses,

we’ll get out of this—and they’ll still be

celebrating a Victory Parade, the great victory,

of the great Putin over the coronavirus and

the Pechenegs and the Polovtsians (historic nomadic tribes often invoked in Russian rhetoric), I mean,

they distort everything,

they simply twist absolutely everything.

They’ll all be saying that

Russia handled the coronavirus better than any country in the world,

and they’ll simply be saying that on

television every single day, and

some grandmothers will then

repeat it. So our task is simply

to expose all of this; otherwise it doesn’t

work. Toni Moore asks me:

“Tell me, did I understand correctly that the millions

spent on disinfecting the streets

are just the traditional seasonal relaying of

sidewalk tiles?” Well, yes, it’s funny—there is a joke

about how

Sobyanin (the mayor of Moscow) will have to replace all the infected

current paving tiles with new ones.

Dear Tanya, we’ll discuss that a little

later, but it really is

a very big topic.

But before we move on to coronavirus

topics, I still wanted to

touch on another issue that, it seems to me,

is also very important and that no one

noticed, unfortunately—again because of the coronavirus.

Arkady Novikov,

the restaurateur, was on the air on Echo of Moscow, and there

he was talking about how hard things are right now

for businesses connected with

restaurants. He was saying genuinely sensible

things about it, saying

the right things.

Arkady Novikov, our restaurateur—I have

a small personal story involving

Arkady Novikov’s restaurants. It’s not directly connected to him,

except that he was once

a member of the Supreme Council of United Russia (the ruling political party).

So I personally, just as a citizen, kind of

boycotted his restaurants.

I simply didn’t go to them. If

some friends invited me, I would say, well, I can’t

go to that restaurant because the money will go

to a United Russia member. At one point, I think

back in 2012,

I said: let’s stop

using businesses owned by United Russia members, and I

tried to go as little as possible to places

that belonged to all those

United Russia people. But Novikov, I believe, left it.

Among those in Russia, it definitely came out.

From the Supreme Council of United Russia (the main pro-Kremlin political party), and I...

Let me clarify this—*cough*—please note:

It's awful. It's not as if I'm constantly going to

restaurants, but at least I didn't start

forbidding myself from taking communion or going into various

establishments.

Well, I always say this simply because

in principle, Novikov is a normal businessman.

But there is a very serious complaint against him.

We published

an investigation into how he was effectively

a middleman between Udodov, a businessman,

and a number of businessmen who

were involved in tax schemes, and Mishustin,

the current prime minister in particular.

He bought apartments in order to quietly

take them from Udodov and pass them on to Mishustin, but

in effect he legalized them, laundered them—and then

he was asked about this on Echo of Moscow (a Russian radio station).

It was quite interesting to listen to.

Alexei Navalny's investigation, where he

claimed that, through you,

apartments that were given away were being laundered

to Mishustin's children. Could you respond

to that? Well, let's put it this way:

in principle, this isn't the best time, but I

will answer you anyway. First of all, Alexei

manipulates words very elegantly.

First of all, I didn't give them away—I sold them.

And I can even explain why I sold them.

Specifically at market price, and there are

all the figures—he can check them. As for

that, I can even say that

I even made a little bit of money on it.

Not much—if it had been a lot, he would have killed me.

So everything there was perfectly normal, very

proper, and there was nothing criminal

about it. I bought the apartments for my

children, and then naturally my children

didn't want to live together because

my daughter was growing up, my son was younger, and

I simply needed to do that, and then I

gave them over—there is nothing

criminal in that whatsoever. Again, they

were bought at market price and

sold at market price, and everything there

is documented—those figures all exist, and

Alexei is in fact very wrongly

manipulating—and elegantly manipulating—

the numbers. That's not good. I thought I heard in

your answer—just in the intonation, I don't know—

maybe even some sympathy

toward Alexei Navalny. More generally,

regardless of this investigation, how do you

feel about what he does and about his

public role? Fine, positively—good for him, basically.

Talking about things that

exist, and if something illegal is there,

then he's right to do it. I view it normally, positively.

A full 70,000 people are watching us

live right now. You have just seen

the rather charming restaurateur

Arkady Novikov, who thanked

me for the investigation. Well, I take it

as praise for our entire foundation. Many

thanks, Arkady. But as you rightly

said, what we do is show

who has what illegally, and this is not some

private matter. It's not that I just want

to chat with Arkady Novikov and want

70,000 people to

watch it. No, we're talking about

the country's prime minister,

the second most powerful person. If tomorrow Putin

disappears again to who-knows-where, then quite

possibly Mishustin would become president.

And when it comes to a person who

gave, or sold, or transferred entire

huge apartments worth tens

of millions of rubles to his children, I want

to say: dear Arkady, you say

that I'm manipulating things, but in fact you

say you made a little money on these apartments.

No, I am not manipulating anything. We

stated clearly that there is an unexplained

transaction, which consists in the fact that

Arkady Novikov

buys apartments—we don't know for how much.

In our investigation, we did not

say anything about that. If you, dear Arkady,

publish the documents showing how much you bought them for

and how much you sold them for

to Mishustin, having made a little profit, that would be

wonderful. But for now, what we see is this:

Arkady buys two apartments, as he

says, for his daughter and son.

Well, these are very expensive apartments in

the city center, presumably.

It looks strange if you bought two

apartments and then, four months later, simply

changed your mind and immediately sold them. Moreover, one of

those apartments you sold to Mishustin's son on

the very next day

after he turned 18, so that the apartment

would not appear in Mishustin's asset declaration.

What's more, when we published

this investigation, it was also about the fact that

he bought them from Udodov, and we

described him simply as a businessman close to

Mishustin. But now it turns out

—and Udodov himself has now said this—that he is

Mishustin's relative by marriage. Dear Arkady,

this looks insanely strange. That is, take

Mishustin—back then he was not yet

prime minister, but head of the tax service.

For some reason, apartments are being sold from

one side to—good Lord—to whom?

To a father-in-law, to another in-law—anyway, between

Udodov and Mishustin's relatives,

who simply see each other once a

week and happily chat at family

celebrations, the apartments pass through Arkady

Novikov.

Well, of course, to me it is fairly obvious that this is

simply the legalization of these apartments, because

Udodov is involved in corruption and

tax schemes—that is, Mishustin...

The tax service is engaged in hellish corruption,

in fraudulent schemes, and that way they simply

kick money back to Mishustin, but not directly.

You can’t really pass kickbacks directly — it’s complicated — but

apartments are simply bought, and for that

Arkady Novikov may be used.

Dear Arkady, you were asked to do it, apparently.

Because someone clearly gave you — well, no, bought you —

an apartment. Take a closer look, all the more so.

Let’s consider a question from Alexander.

Timokhov, who is also a sponsor.

He clicked the “Sponsor” button

to sponsor our channel. In your opinion,

what actions should

the president — not necessarily the current one, just in general — take

for the country to get off the oil-and-gas

needle? Alexander, and everyone else: no

special actions are needed.

You just have to stop wanting to sit on that

needle. Right now, I think, 84

percent of the economy is controlled by

the state. And the state — Putin

and his government — wants

to deal only with oil and gas, and

so just look: basically, here

today they were discussing this oil-and-gas

oil deal with OPEC — that’s the country’s main

foreign policy issue. They do nothing

else, because oil

is easy money. The government’s task is

to lower taxes on small business, to lower

payroll taxes, really, for business in general,

to fight monopolies so that, well, so that

everything can grow. And then everything

will develop — from factories

to cafés with hipsters and paper

cups. People need to be allowed

to live normally, instead of crushing everyone and

supporting oilmen and oligarchs because

they send you a suitcase full of

money. Then everything will develop. In that sense,

there’s no need to reinvent

the wheel. This is how it works in

Germany, this is how it works in the U.S.,

in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, in China,

where does it happen? Everywhere. So in

reality, we just need to stop

twisting things here, and then everything will

develop perfectly normally. And before

the coronavirus, the topic that struck

not only me but, it seems to me, a large

number of people across Russia, because

I was watching these videos from

different airports in different countries, and honestly,

you know, there’s this very worn-out

phrase, “it hurts for the country” (a common Russian patriotic expression), and

every crook in our country actually

uses the image of Vereshchagin (a character from the Soviet film *White Sun of the Desert*) and writes

that they “hurt for the country,” but in fact

I think quite a lot

of us felt that way when

all week we were flooded with

tearful videos and messages from friends

and acquaintances about how Russia had simply

abandoned them abroad,

somewhere in other countries, and we

just weren’t bringing them home, and that is absolutely

outrageous. But on the other hand, I kind of

sat down, dug into it a bit, thought it through myself,

and I saw messages like, well,

a lot of people are annoyed: what are we

even talking about here? Some idiots

went off to Thailand during an epidemic, and

now they want us, with our own money,

when things are already bad here, when we’re all out of work

and without salaries — we’re supposed

to pull them out of Thailand, out of America,

from wherever — some emergency evacuation from

the Seychelles is supposed to happen, and we have to

bring them home. And I thought: what’s the analogy

in my head, what similar

annoyance do I feel every spring

when they show those guys on

the Gulf of Finland, those fishermen who, like

maniacs, go out to catch smelt

or whatever, and the ice floe always breaks off under them,

they drift away on it, and the country

has to spend huge human resources

and huge amounts of money

to pick them up with EMERCOM helicopters. The guys know

all this. They know the ice will break off,

that they’ll drift away, and they go anyway

because they know that for them

an EMERCOM helicopter will come flying.

So maybe they should be asked about that.

Let’s spend 26 seconds remembering these

guys — and this footage: 33

people found themselves this morning

stranded on an ice floe in the Gulf of Finland.

It all happened near the village of Privetninskoye.

That’s in the Vyborg district of the region. At half past

eleven, the fishermen gave up hope of

getting out on their own and called

EMERCOM. By that point, the people were already

separated from the shore by half a kilometer of open water.

Rescuers moved in to help and

in just 45 minutes transported

everyone back to shore. This time there were no

casualties, but the rescuers’ forecast is grim:

the season popular with fishermen is beginning —

fishing on the last ice.

What I want to say is this: I thought about it myself

and decided that it was important

to speak out. It’s wrong to attack these

guys who got stuck in

airports around the world. They really didn’t do

anything wrong. In fact, a country of

150 million people means that

when you go abroad anywhere, you

constantly say, walking down the street with your wife,

“Damn, it’s all Russians here,”

“nothing but Russians” — because there are Russians everywhere.

It’s a big country: Russians everywhere, and everywhere

Chinese too. Out of 150 million people,

if 15 percent of them travel abroad regularly,

that means that in any given

country, at the same time, there are

several hundred thousand, or at least a hundred

thousands of Russians, and that means that at any

time—during an epidemic, a war, or I don't know,

anything else—there will be several thousand of our

fellow citizens in every country who

haven't done anything stupid.

They didn't go on vacation during an epidemic just

because—they simply had business there, or

some kind of family circumstances

came up; maybe a wife ended up there because of her husband,

or something like that—so that's how they ended up in

these countries, and they need help with

evacuation. What's more, the overwhelming

majority of them—I looked through quite a

lot of these Facebook posts—they

are all ready to pay for their own evacuation. More than that,

they had already bought plane tickets on

flights that were supposed to take them out, but then

at one fine moment Russia said:

stop bringing people out. These people

were left abroad, and they're, damn it, living in

the airport. I mean, this is just—

here's the video, and honestly

I was so outraged I practically froze.

Excuse me, but I really

watched this video of them at the airport in

Korea. Can you imagine? Koreans are watching,

and these Russian guys have lined up in a kind of

wall and are recording this plaintive

video appeal to the president and to the world:

get us out of here. Let's watch it.

It's a disgrace. It's one minute and fifteen seconds long.

We, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, we

citizens of the Russian Federation, appeal

to you and ask for your help. We are in

a hopeless situation at Incheon International

Airport in the Republic of South

Korea.

Because our flights were

abruptly canceled and the airspace was

closed by Russia's aviation authorities for the entire month of April,

we ask you, as president, guarantor of the

Constitution, and leader of the country,

to allow Russians to fly home and not

abandon us in this difficult situation.

Right now, hundreds of Russians whose flights

with Aeroflot and Aurora Airlines were

canceled are literally forced to live in

the airport.

Abandoned by the state, among us

there are pregnant women, elderly people in

poor health, small children requiring

care, and insulin-dependent people who

need

medication. Our flights were canceled

because the Russian Federation introduced

restrictions on the number of passengers flying into

Russia. We were provided with neither

housing nor food. People have been in this condition

since March 31. Specific

information about the organization of evacuation

flights is unavailable. We, citizens

of the Russian Federation, are in

dire straits.

We ask you to arrange the possibility of

opening the airspace so that we

can return to Russia. Do not leave us

in trouble.

Bring us home.

80,000 people are watching all this live.

And this is just truly

a national disgrace, a national humiliation.

They all paid for their tickets and

would probably be willing to pay again.

But instead they have to—it's as if they were some kind of

Arabs—no, as if they were

nobody knows who, from some kind of, I don't know,

destitute country with a zero budget. They're from

the Russian Federation, where there's a sea of money. They

have to stand in the airport in a rich country, South Korea,

so that

smirking Koreans can look at them, and

they have to chant together: bring us home.

Because they're counting on the idea that when

we record a little video and talk about

pregnant women and about how our

situation is so desperate that we're surviving in the airport,

then maybe Maria Zakharova

or, I don't know, that whole crowd of crooks

from the Russian Foreign Ministry

will finally start doing something. They have

planes flying to Italy, to the U.S., to Serbia; today

there was a statement that they would fly to Bosnia and

Herzegovina—we'll be providing

assistance, planes are flying all over the place. Why can't we

bring these people out at their own expense? They bought

tickets. There are a huge number of stories like this.

I wasn't too lazy, I went and looked—or rather, no, that's not quite right.

First I read, I think, on some journalist's page—

maybe Barabanov or Talibov,

or whoever—that if you go to Maria

Zakharova's Facebook, the main

foreign-policy propagandist, and there

at first, under every Facebook post,

so you'd know: everyone truly matters,

she writes that she'll save everyone, yes, so that you

know—she writes, for example, on March 28,

about how she's saving everyone, practically taking off

her last pair of red boots and selling them.

In the next post she writes: we're all working on this

together around the clock, says Maria

Zakharova, with such theatrical anguish.

And then it all stopped. There's nothing.

Nothing is happening because Russia

stopped evacuating its citizens, and these

citizens

are recording these heart-rending

videos, but no one even notices them anymore. Yes,

why can't we get these people out?

They paid for their tickets.

Well, aren't they our fellow citizens? And even if

some of them are super

careless people—yes, let's call them

honestly, idiots—who in the middle of

an epidemic went off to Thailand—yes, there are people like that too.

But I'm sure most of them are not like that.

They were simply working there somewhere, or

again, they have relatives living there, or some

other circumstances. I read people's posts.

People can't fly out of New York.

They bought tickets several times, but the flights

were canceled, and then the last flight was taken away

for only those who live in Moscow and

the Moscow region. And there is a 16-year-old

girl from Novosibirsk who was there on an

exchange program. She came to study.

She was studying, but the educational institutions

closed. The girl said she had been living

with a host family, and they told her,

"Your stay is over, fly back home to Russia."

The girl can't leave; she's 16 years old.

Her parents can't fly in to rescue her.

What the hell is going on? Where is the Russian Foreign Ministry?

That plane arrives,

and they say, "We'll only take Muscovites," and this

girl is left there. And from some countries,

like Israel—but you understand yourselves,

Israel is obviously a place where

there is constantly a huge

number of Russian citizens. Why

can't they be brought back? They are definitely ready

to pay.

Let's watch a video from Israel, from 1 minute to 1

second: by the toilet,

in the Spartan conditions of the waiting hall,

Russian tourists have been living for almost a week. On March 29,

they were supposed to return to Russia

on an Aeroflot flight.

However, the flight was canceled. Some

of the travelers went off to

hotels, but those who had no money stayed at

Tel Aviv airport, in the deserted halls

of Ben Gurion. Sixteen Russians are living there, including

people from Chelyabinsk.

And there's a woman after surgery—she's really

in very, very bad shape.

Poor thing, she doesn't even know how

to lie down, and she has had her entire

stomach removed. They were supposed to fly out, and there's

absolutely zero attention even to her.

Because of the coronavirus, Russia suspended

international air travel. Those who

remained abroad are being evacuated by charter flights, but

not on a mass scale—there is a limit, according to

a government decree. Moscow

accepts up to 500 fellow citizens a day; in

airports in other regions, the limit is

200 people a day. Yes, yes, yes—I do not want

Russian citizens spending the night

next to a toilet in some airport. I

forbid this eternal thing where we have to

ban everything—but this is really just

abuse, just disgraceful. Do we really need

this kind of cruelty toward people?

And returning to my point: even if there are

super-mega-stupid people who went off

in the middle of an epidemic,

they are still our citizens. There aren't that

many of them—they need to be brought back. Fine, yes,

you can say, "Guys, you're idiots, we'll

bring you back now at the state's expense,

but then within, say, a year, you must

pay for the ticket," or immediately, those who can

pay for the ticket. But that's not even

the problem, because all of them bought

tickets and are ready to pay for a ticket,

but we're not bringing them back. Take the foreign minister—

whose surname is Vinokurov,

our foreign minister's surname is

Vinokurov—ah,

sorry, please, the stress of a live broadcast.

My wife is standing here next to me, prompting me

that it's Lavrov. Sorry, please, I remember

Lavrov.

Take Vinokurov—

a multimillionaire earning money through a very

dubious business.

He himself, with his own money, could bring everyone

out.

It would be a grand, beautiful gesture. In any

case, we have enough money in the budget

to bring everyone back. Why should we be so

humiliated? Why should these people be so

humiliated?

Why should they live in an airport for a week while people

walk by? Maybe someone will say that

this too reflects some kind of

chauvinism in me or something, but I absolutely

it really infuriates me that some

people walk past us in transit and think,

"Oh, Russians are lying around here,

they've made themselves a little nest here in the corner

by the toilet." Koreans, Chinese,

all sorts of people pass by,

Arab sheikhs—or not sheikhs, just ordinary people—

they walk by proudly, and here are Russians

lying around like homeless people.

No, this is absolutely impossible, and

we most certainly have the money, and we definitely

should not be engaged in this nonsense—

sending to all countries of the world

some Boeings, some military

huge aircraft, and yet not bring back our

people. Just send planes for

these poor people in South Korea,

pick them up. Is that so hard? Yes, probably

there is a problem, because they would need to be

brought back and put into quarantine.

Then bring them back and put them into quarantine.

Because otherwise this is simply

real national betrayal.

And it is being committed precisely by those

Foreign Ministry employees who, I believe,

lie every day and boast about how they

never abandon their own, how they do everything, how they save everyone.

As usual, you abandoned everyone.

You humiliated everyone, insulted everyone. And as if that weren't enough,

later, when they finally do get out—

you'll also lie and say that

you never abandoned your own. So let's

pay attention to this situation too.

88,000 people are watching live.

They watched live my embarrassment, how I

couldn't remember the surname of the foreign

minister on an actual live

broadcast.

Sometimes you just blank out terribly, Anatoly.

I’m continuing to answer questions from those

people who became sponsors of our

channel by clicking the “Sponsor” button.

Anatoly Myvrynkov asks me:

“Alexei, how are you coping without your morning runs?

Do you run around the apartment, or

do you still break self-isolation for

that?”

Anatoly, even if I wanted to break

self-isolation—which I do not—I wouldn’t

be able to go running without you noticing it

right away. Around the entrance to my building,

there are always several of these

idiots on duty—Prigozhin’s trolls (supporters of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Kremlin-linked businessman).

They constantly stand there

waiting for me to break self-

isolation. When I go to the store, they film me

walking to the nearest shop.

They don’t post it because the footage would be

not very interesting from the standpoint of,

“Navalny, carrying a shopping bag, goes to the store.”

If I went out for a run somewhere—which I’d really

like to do, because I’m suffering stuck in the apartment—

you can’t really run enough indoors. I mean, in an apartment

you can walk around, and of course it’s hard to make yourself

pace around the apartment, and every day you think,

“Today I’ll do 40 minutes,

I’ll exercise,” and

of course I’ll get back to it. Unfortunately, like all

of you, I don’t end up doing those physical

exercises—you have to force yourself. In other words,

I’m like everyone else: I miss running,

but I’m not breaking self-isolation, and I urge everyone

not to break self-isolation either.

Because the situation with

coronavirus—let’s now move fully

to that topic—is not

very good. I’d say it’s quite

bad. We see different charts, but I’ll

give you just one number.

I’ll give you several different figures, but I’ll start with

one. You know, I’d like to ask you:

where was there a high number of coronavirus cases

per

capita? You tell me, or I’ll

tell you. And also—

you answer me: China. And here’s

the news, my dear friends: this morning we had

an announcement that more than ten

thousand people are infected with coronavirus in

Russia, according to Russian statistics, which we do not

believe. And that means that per

capita, we now have more people infected with

coronavirus than China does. In

China, recalculated, it was 57 people

per 1 million.

For us, it is already 69 people per million.

Sixty-nine people per million may not sound

like a very large number, but in any

case, the scale of the problem here is already

greater than in China, and we of course

absolutely must stay home. And those who

are forced to go to work one way or another,

or simply have to go to work because

they are a doctor, or because they are a cashier in

a store—right now that is truly a very important

profession. It has always been a normal profession;

now it is a profession for brave and

noble people. Everyone who works at

retail outlets, who handle food there,

who produce and sell it—all of that

is important, and these are very important jobs right now, and we

should be proud of these people. If you

have to go out, take care of yourself, because

it’s hard to imagine what the real

percentage of infected people actually is right now.

Because, as I said in the previous

program, about statistics: you should not, cannot, it is simply impossible

to trust the statistics

they are giving us.

Last Thursday they said that 670,000

people in Russia had been tested. I

even ran a poll here on YouTube.

Several tens of thousands of people

voted, and all of them said: we don’t

know anyone around us

who has actually gone through this

testing. So it’s all lies. This

Thursday they are already claiming the figure of 1

million people tested. We

of course simply understand objectively

that this is a lie. On the one hand, we

understand that it is a lie; on the other hand,

today the Moscow Department of Health—

the region with the highest

number of cases—finally, out of this

enormous stream of lies, very harmful

lies—I would like to dwell today

on how these lies

will do us great harm—finally

said one tiny word of truth.

The head of the department

of Moscow’s Health Department, a man named Khripun,

a person I find completely unsympathetic,

whom I consider corrupt, sent out

a fairly candid letter in which he very

clearly wrote: guys, these our

tests—obviously meaning

the domestically produced tests

made by Vector in Novosibirsk (a Russian state virology center)—

because others are not certified

here—they show nothing; they produce

a large number of so-called false

negative results. Volkov

wrote an excellent post on this topic

on Facebook. Indeed, if you

read Facebook and VKontakte, your

acquaintances tell their stories

about how they ended up in the hospital with coronavirus.

That story

in 99 percent of cases begins like this: “They took a sample from me,

and it showed

a negative result.”

Then they took another sample from me, most often a second one,

and it showed a negative result too. And

only later, when I had already basically started

dying, they did some other test

and it showed a positive result for

We don’t know for sure whether

these tests really were as terrible as

the ones produced by our domestic

industry, unfortunately, or whether they

manipulated the statistics. But by now

it is absolutely clear that a huge number

of negative results among those who

came in for testing were simply wrong.

They were producing false negatives. This

isn’t just my opinion — it’s the official position

of the Moscow Health Department, and

that probably helps explain, at least in part,

why we are carrying out

additional testing. But

the main reason, of course, is

massive, extreme corruption, which even

here continues unabated, and in general it’s just

a massive scam. Afterward I saw

a person on Facebook who carried out a very

simple experiment,

He took a calculator and the official

statistics from different countries: how many people

had been tested, how many infected people

had been identified, and worked out the ratio of how many

tests were used per one infected person. In

every country in the world, several

tests are used per infected person, because there

are so-called false-negative

results, and then any person

while they are ill needs several tests

to be done — first one, then confirmation,

then a check whether the illness is still present,

and so on. That’s obvious. And the statistics show

that in the United States — show that post if we

can — yes, in the U.S. they do 5 tests

per infected person, in Spain 2, in Germany 9,

in the UK 4, and in Russia 129. That is,

per one infected person, if we take

the official testing statistics. And now

it has become much higher still, because

this supposedly one million

tested people — those are very recent

figures — 129 tests per infected person. Well, we

both understand that this is a lie,

a complete, absolute lie. If

you took 129 tests from every infected

person, that would mean they had no time

to be sick, no time to cough, and

no time to die — they’d be taking a test every five minutes.

But that obviously wasn’t happening.

Each of them gets one, two, three, four, maybe five tests, while in

other countries it’s five tests. Can you imagine

the scale of the lie? And this woman,

this disgusting woman, who I believe

should get what she deserves, with the surname

Popova, from Rospotrebnadzor (Russia’s consumer safety watchdog), she is simply

endlessly talking about the number

of people tested, and

it’s just — it’s a lie that is impossible

to tolerate.

Because the consequences of this will be

monstrous. They say that we

tested this many people and identified this many

tested this many and found this many

infected people, but in reality they

tested this many and found this many

infected people, and about all the rest

they lied. And there too, possibly, those

infected people, instead of — they don’t necessarily

need to be in hospital, because when

a person is told, “We tested you,”

“you’re positive, stay home,” then

a normal person will, more often than not,

remain under a much stricter

quarantine than just some guy under

suspicion. But that isn’t happening. This is

a lie that leads to the fact that

the disease keeps spreading.

For the young, it may be manageable; for the elderly,

it is deadly dangerous, and this deadly

danger is being created, unfortunately, by

our Rospotrebnadzor, which now

is one of the key

agencies

that is supposed to be fighting the coronavirus.

Actually, I ended the program

with a funny video — well, maybe not

that funny, maybe sad instead. So,

the speaker of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly,

a man named Makarov, says from the podium

that the city on the Neva, our beautiful

St. Petersburg, will be protected by an icon,

some icon of some saint or

some Mother of God,

which was taken up in a helicopter and flown around

the city.

They would fly around St. Petersburg with it, and

an invisible dome of holiness would protect it from the

malicious virus. Everyone laughed at that, but

that’s what Makarov said.

Then, a couple of days later,

almost the very next day, we quite seriously

saw this. Let’s watch:

a black Mercedes,

flashing lights, an icon — all of Russia was in this video.

I

[music]

Scheler

[music]

the very

our

Vanya

[music]

foundation

Apple

I showed you the wrong video, sorry about that.

Please excuse the mix-up. That video really does show

how they fly around in a helicopter —

with clergy singing — but

there is a much more colorful video. If

you spend a lot of time on social media,

especially on Twitter, you’ve seen plenty

of photos — very clear ones — showing some kind of

Mercedes, with Patriarch Kirill sitting inside, holding

an icon there in that black leather interior,

with flashing lights blinking from all sides, and they are reading

and singing a prayer at the same time as he drives

along the MKAD (Moscow Ring Road). It’s interesting that he’s circling Moscow like this.

So I went around that way, and I didn’t go into New Moscow (the expanded administrative area of Moscow).

I didn’t drive in there — I went around via the MKAD (Moscow Ring Road).

And on the one hand, that really is...

...nothing all that bad — there are religious people,

and maybe it somehow makes things feel better or

easier for them. Fine. Believers can be different,

faith comes in different forms too. I’m a believer myself,

but this, this whole thing here,

these icons in a Mercedes on the MKAD,

it only makes me laugh. If it makes someone feel

better, then fine. But no, there’s no video of it,

unfortunately. I won’t be able to show you that video,

but it really, very clearly

shows everything that’s happening in the country.

If it were, let’s say, anyone at all in

any Mercedes — though of course I’d prefer

fewer flashing escort lights around them — but if

all of this were accompanied by some kind of

real effort by the federal authorities toward genuinely

fighting the epidemic, actually fighting it for real,

and providing real help to the public,

I was going to say, to hell with it, let them be,

let them drive them around — but that’s not what’s happening. And the main thing is,

the main thing for us is this:

right now it’s just obvious, I mean,

there’s a gigantic gap between how

officials ought to understand the situation, how

they actually understand it. And these two videos from this week

illustrate

how the Russian authorities perceive

what’s going on. First of all, there’s

that icon in the Mercedes, and second,

second of all,

there’s this photo of my mustachioed favorite,

the press secretary. Maybe, if you can,

put it up full screen.

Putin’s press secretary,

Dmitry Peskov, came to a meeting wearing a badge

that supposedly repels viruses. I mean,

at first I thought it was

some kind of mistake, just a badge with

“Peskov” written on it. But no — then

he confirmed it, he actually confirmed it himself. He’s not even

embarrassed. He really bought a clip-on badge

that drives away viruses. This is the kind of thing

all sorts of scammers advertise on Instagram

for half-senile old grannies and people with

three years of schooling. It literally says there

that there’s this kind of

little device, this gadget, that repels

viruses if you clip it on.

Maybe you can also get a zirconium

bracelet from them, or something else, and the viruses will

just fly away from you. And Peskov, in complete

seriousness,

is using this as protection against viruses.

And this is not a joke. It just shows — I would’ve

forgiven Peskov

more readily for wearing a necklace of garlic,

or, you know, if he had shown one of those

photos like in kindergartens,

where they take a Kinder Surprise egg,

poke holes in the little Kinder Surprise container,

put garlic inside, and hang it on children

around their necks so they won’t get sick,

so they’ll stay healthy, because

the amazing garlic fumes kill all

the germs. I mean, I’d forgive him that

little garlic thing, because I eat garlic myself

when I’m sick. But come on, seriously,

this is the president’s press secretary. He showed up

wearing this thing, and first of all, it

shows that these people reject

the scientific approach.

They reject medicine. And these aren’t just

ignorant cave people — they’ve stolen

a lot of money, he has a watch worth 37 million rubles,

a yacht, and everything else. But really,

these are the kind of people who, by any

logic, ought to be somewhere

hanging around some back alley. It’s just that

fate turned out in such a way that they

became the masters of this country. And we shouldn’t

underestimate what’s happening,

because Peskov with this little badge

is a demonstration that even within

the innermost, most important circle,

they genuinely do not understand what needs to be done.

They believe any kind of bullshit, they don’t read a single

proper article. I mean, right now,

of course, we’ve all become virologists,

there are lots of jokes about that, but

that’s normal. I think people are reading a lot

about this topic right now. Ideally, if they’re

reading in English — lots of people are translating things now —

but at the very least you should have a

responsible approach to all of this,

especially if you’re an official, especially

a public official. But you’re a public

official, the aide to the most important person in the

country, and you walk around with a badge that

supposedly drives viruses away from you — so then

what can we expect from other people?

Why would we even be able to demand

anything from anyone? Of course we can’t, if

our president’s press secretary is a [__].

A public [__]. You know, there’s such a thing as a public

intellectual — someone who writes

all kinds of smart columns — and then there’s a public

idiot.

That’s Dmitry Peskov, walking around with

a gadget that repels viruses. That’s how it is, that’s

how it works. And they — I mean, it’s not like

he came in and someone said,

Putin or maybe Golikova (then Russia’s deputy prime minister for social policy) jumped up

and said, “You idiot,” slapped him, “get out of here, you’re

setting a terrible example for people.” No one

did that. He sat there proudly, sat there proud

of his badge, then gave an interview and said,

“This is such a cool little thing, I use it to drive away

viruses.”

Let me take another question from those who

became sponsors of our channel.

Mukh Lyudmi Mukh Rifme asks me:

“Alexei, what channels do you watch on

YouTube?”

Well, listen, probably the same ones you do.

I watch all sorts of things. Timecodes are a wonderful thing.

I love video no less than text.

Because I read very quickly—much

faster than people can manage to say anything

in their videos.

Ever since I discovered timestamps, I watch

almost all interviews that way, because down below

I can see what's interesting there.

You just jump to it and watch it, and that's why for

my own videos I often add timestamps,

because I understand: I'm sitting here talking for two hours,

some people will watch the whole thing,

and some will watch by timestamp, so I

just

well, I go by the same principle: when I'm on

social media and I see someone write that

something is interesting, I click through and watch a snippet

of what they're saying. Right now I watch

all sorts of our people there, Volkov among them.

He launched a YouTube channel—subscribe to

it. I watch everything that comes out live, and

I watch various interesting

social and political channels. I just

set up my feed properly, I think,

my Twitter feed, and everything interesting happening

on YouTube, sooner or later, including

shows up in my Twitter, and I

can click and watch the interesting

part of it. Last Thursday I told you

quite a lot, in a fairly

outraged voice, in raised

tones,

about the raid—well, not a raid exactly—

about the actions of the Doctors' Alliance, a trade union

of medical workers that raises money

and delivers masks and protective equipment to doctors,

personal protective equipment, to those

hospitals where there is absolutely nothing. The authorities

do everything they can to obstruct this, and it so happened

that exactly

while I was doing a live broadcast,

I couldn't have known about it yet—you probably

may have seen it happening somewhere in parallel, but I

couldn't have known about it—some kind of

completely insane, total nightmare was going on, an absolute mess,

because during this first trip, when

they went to one of the most

impoverished hospitals in Novgorod Region,

which is a very poor region—if you've

been there, things are really bad there, and there are

truly destitute hospitals where

very good doctors work—they

brought them a small

amount of protective equipment, and they really

just detained everyone there. What's more,

they started beating them. Let's watch this.

One second—what are you doing?

[music]

I spoke and wrote a lot about this

last week, and really, it

just looks insane, and you see,

even by the standards of the current

authorities, it looks wildly inappropriate. We're used

to them acting a certain way, I mean, we know

that they hate

the Doctors' Alliance because it's an independent

trade union. They hate anything independent.

They are constantly going after these people and

constantly trying

to discredit them, lying about them all the time.

They always operate according to some specific

tactic, within a certain framework,

with everyone who doesn't bow down to Putin. If you don't

bow down to Putin, then

Vladimir Solovyov will go after you, and all

the others will endlessly

smear you, and Prigozhin-style bots

will write about you. But even if they

don't like you, this is clearly just not

a proportional response. People raised money,

bought a few boxes of these miserable

masks, and took them

there—and they drag them to the police station, saying they are

illegally present on the territory

of Novgorod Region, that they arrived illegally,

like Pechenegs (a historical nomadic people often invoked in Russian rhetoric), and

they just left this

and Vasilyeva, who has two

minor children,

to spend the night at the police station, which

is absolutely illegal, because

the law prohibits

arresting women or detaining for 24 hours

women who have

minor children. Nevertheless,

that is what happened, and I kept thinking,

trying to figure out how to explain

my view of why this is happening

in this way. There is, in principle,

an explanation, and I gave it before in general terms:

they are simply afraid

to show the real picture.

When a person watches live, and in

our authorities' case, what really upsets them is not that

doctors don't have protective equipment, but that

someone might find out that doctors have no

protection. Because when a trade union

is forced to deliver these pitiful masks,

it shows that Russian healthcare has suffered a complete

failure. But today

the most precise, absolutely spot-on

explanation was given by

a doctor from that very hospital where

the protective equipment had been delivered, because

the story continued there in that

those masks and gloves and everything else

were brought in, and then the chief doctor came

and said: I forbid anyone from using this.

It's all contaminated

with coronavirus. I forbid anyone from

using it. If I see that this is here—

They really have nothing there, objectively.

After all this scandal, objectively, it's not as if

they were suddenly flooded with supplies—no, they were not given

anything of the sort.

They still don't have a damn thing,

they're still talking about gauze bandages,

but if you use what was

brought to you, we'll really...

We'll tear them apart and kill them, and the governor...

of the Novgorod Region said that, well...

if it concerns humanitarian aid,

if it were brought to United Russia,

then there would be no problem — I would personally distribute it.

Let's watch this doctor — you all know her.

Apparently, on April 2, personal protective equipment was being brought to us

personal protective equipment at the

request

of healthcare workers from Staraya Russa and Okulovka

and Borovichi — meaning that right now

with these supplies here, we had to

step in.

All of this had to be unloaded, instead of being distributed among different hospitals,

unloaded in Okulovka in the presence of

the police.

We unloaded these supplies and the medical workers took them home,

the medical workers took them home because the chief doctors

of the emergency hospital

refused to accept these supplies.

Moreover, they spread a rumor that they

were contaminated with coronavirus. In fact,

today I got a call from Borovichi

asking

for at least some respirators like these,

because at the district central hospital they were told

to sew masks out of gauze.

At the Okulovka Central District Hospital, there was another story yesterday:

I was called and told they were being forced to sew masks, and

none of this exists. What's more, doctor

Vadym Yuryevich Bodyagin said that if he

saw anyone

with supplies brought by Anastasia Vasilyeva,

I would confiscate them and take them from the hospital for disposal.

Thanks to the actions, I believe,

of our governor, Nikitin,

the governor of the Novgorod Region,

he decided that only he, officially,

and United Russia can

distribute humanitarian aid.

You see, that's exactly where

the problem lies. They robbed all of us, they failed at everything,

and if there is some problem in the country,

then it must be resolved through

United Russia, through United Russia's volunteer centers,

the ones they hastily created.

They keep announcing it constantly;

we keep hearing about some United Russia

volunteers having appeared, but nobody sees any

United Russia volunteers or any other volunteers.

But you have no right, even if

you want to do a good deed, you have no

right to just go and do it. You must

first go to the governor

and to United Russia and say: I want to do

a good deed, I bought a box of masks here.

Fine, give it here, we'll stick

a United Russia label on it and then donate it

as a gift from United Russia. That's the kind of

help they welcome. But if you

do it directly, that's it.

And Vladimir Solovyov, whom

I mentioned at the beginning of the program — he was simply

there was a whole 10-minute segment where he

was genuinely losing it and raging about

the Doctors' Alliance. I'll play you just one minute

that I clipped, where he's talking

about how, my God, an ophthalmologist

— how does she have the right?

An ophthalmologist who, supposedly, treated Navalny

— how does she have the right to go around saying things?

You understand, the person realizes

how absurd and dishonest this is.

A medical trade union — an ophthalmologist in

a medical trade union can purchase

masks and bring them to any doctors, including

ophthalmologists, who can

catch coronavirus and then

infect elderly women who come in for

cataract surgery. Let's watch.

So, this woman is driving there,

it's unknown whether she was tested or not, and she's going

and causing a scene, while at the same time she

is going to inspect some hospital. She

hopes to explain something. Tell me, in

secret, what can an ophthalmologist who doesn't understand a damn thing

about virology, who knows nothing

about it at all — and how can

an ophthalmologist who diagnosed her

only patient, whose last name was

Navalny, through a door, and said, 'You've been

poisoned' — how can this person claim

to any authority on anything?

She was bringing some kind of protection — what, 500 and one

different masks, protective gear?

Are you people crazy? Have you seen that

Spanish video they made? I don't know

whether our guys saw it, where they tested

different masks.

That mask does nothing. Five hundred disposable

masks — maybe just so you don't touch your face. If

you really wanted to bring something, you should have bought real

protective suits and ten of them.

What made you decide, anyway,

that you could bring anything? You have no

authority whatsoever.

You're an ordinary crook who understands nothing about

medicine. What kind of Doctors' Alliance is that?

An alliance of crooks, grifters, scoundrels, and

villains, you understand? You see, there

the key phrase is this: sure, there are lots of funny

insults, but 'you have no authority' — that's

the point.

She brought something, 500 masks, but you can see

these doctors yourselves — they don't even have 500 masks,

they don't even have five masks, they have nothing, they're making them out of

gauze.

But if you're bringing something, then what exactly are you

bringing, and where? You needed a whole bunch of authorizations.

What right do you have to bring it? What authorizations

are required — some kind of license or what?

According to Vladimir Solovyov, you need to come here, and here

there's some

United Russia member sitting here, and Vladimir Solovyov from

Lake Como (in Italy) sitting here,

and here sits a representative of the authorities, and

it's like you've come before an admissions committee,

and they look at you and ask: what was it given for, and for what purpose?

You decided to send your five thousand

rubles to help doctors.

Are you even worthy of doing that? Did you get

permission? For what purpose did you

decide to buy 500 masks and take them not

to a hospital in Novgorod? No, first you must

to begin with, join the United Russia party

(the ruling political party in Russia), please fill out a form,

tell us how many rallies in

support of Vladimir Putin you've attended, wow, how often

and after that we'll license you, and then

you'll be able to help everyone officially under

our label. That's exactly

how all of this works. But the thing is

that they don't help anyone at all. They

won't let us help, and they don't help themselves.

But then what does it mean to 'help'? United

Russia is the ruling party. United Russia

should simply allocate money to purchase

these damn protective supplies that

we've been talking about here endlessly already.

I'm sick of the phrase 'protective equipment,'

but it's super important, super important,

because hospitals

without protective equipment turn into

breeding grounds for coronavirus. I've talked about

this in probably the last 34 broadcasts, and

that is exactly what's happening now. It

is happening right now, and we can see it.

Something absolutely—well, you saw it—happened.

Last Friday there was an appeal from

Pokrovskaya Hospital

in St. Petersburg. Let's take a look

at that appeal, to which the authorities

in St. Petersburg later said: it's all lies.

They said they have all the equipment, that they

weren't even doctors—not even doctors, just

some people. Let's watch: 'We, the staff

of Pokrovskaya Hospital, are appealing for

help to the media, and what prompted us to do this is

that as of yesterday, our hospital

has been admitting all patients, including those with

coronavirus.

We have no protective equipment. Working in such

unprotected conditions is unfortunately

not possible. We appealed

to our management in writing, with a

written request to provide us with

personal protective equipment, and due

to the hospital's response, unfortunately we

were refused.

The department has been allocated 12 respirators

for working with infectious patients. That is

clearly not enough for treating viral

cases. First and foremost, what is needed is

oxygen. Our wards have not been equipped with

oxygen, which means we cannot help

patients in that respect. And if they have already

repurposed us for this, then we want

to be provided either with oxygen

cylinders or to have oxygen lines installed

as urgently as

possible, because that is also very important.

Help us.

Provide us with protective equipment

so that we ourselves do not become infected,

and with something—at least some kind of,

I won't even speak about highly specific, but

some medicines, medications

that are necessary in such conditions. Please provide us with them.'

Why do I say that lies

kill? Because now, without any exaggeration,

they do kill. People are dying because of this, because

everywhere the pattern has three parts, and here

we saw it plainly. Ideally, step one:

the doctors and medical staff of the hospital—

a hospital in St. Petersburg, not in some village

somewhere—say: hey, we

don't have protective equipment, we're all going to

get sick here now and infect others. Step

number two: the city administration

of St. Petersburg—almost Governor Beglov himself—

comes out and says: what lies, everything is there, everything is

wonderful at Pokrovskaya Hospital. These are

some people who aren't even doctors

or nurses; they're misleading everyone. Step three:

what happens to the hospital? That's right, it

is closed for quarantine. People there got infected,

staff got infected, and the hospital was shut down. And

step four: someone will die because of this, because

the hospital is closed for quarantine.

Accordingly, an entire medical—some kind of

medical—unit,

a medical facility that people badly need, can no longer

function properly. It was closed for

quarantine because these people

lied. Why do they lie? Why not just say directly:

'Y-yes, can you imagine, guys, thank you

very much,

dear doctors of Pokrovskaya Hospital, for

bringing this to our attention. We will immediately

take action, allocate from some

emergency budget

some urgent funds, buy you

what you need'? No, they don't do that. They don't

say that. They say everything is there, and then

the hospital is closed for quarantine. And I'm not

just picking on this particular hospital,

Pokrovskaya—this is happening now

all the time. Right now, we have

several hospitals in Russia that have become

centers for the spread of coronavirus.

And this has happened just now; it is

happening in Bashkortostan (a republic in Russia). What is it called there?

That hospital—it is the largest

Republican Clinical Hospital

named after Kuvatov.

A huge, gigantic hospital, and from there

doctors have been writing for the past several days

that people are coming in, and they're being

diagnosed with pneumonia. We understand that

it's coronavirus, but we're forbidden to write

that it's coronavirus, and we—we are

trying to treat them.

They have no protective equipment. Please show

the letter from that

hospital in Bashkortostan, the internal one—who

can get it a bit closer?

And just read this—it's absolutely...

a completely typical situation: they kept forbidding it, forbidding it.

They forbade doctors from diagnosing coronavirus.

They even forbade people from getting CT scans, because, well, because...

because on a CT scan—on computed tomography—

you can actually see it right away.

You can make a virtually certain diagnosis from the scan.

They forbade using tomography for this.

They forbade prescribing CT scans. And what did that lead to?

Everyone knew there was no real protection. What did it lead to?

It led to exactly this.

Several doctors there—already now, a couple of...

dozens of doctors have fallen ill.

They're hospitalized with pneumonia, and the hospital is under quarantine.

The hospital is closed. Look, when I saw...

the video of people climbing out...

of a hospital window, I honestly...

was stunned. It all looks like terrorists...

have taken over the hospital and someone in there...

is trying to escape. Let's watch—22 seconds.

You can get out from there from the first floor...

...

So people are fleeing from the hospital through the windows.

A hospital that has been put under quarantine. Once again, this is...

a huge hospital, the biggest hospital in...

Bashkiria (Bashkortostan, a republic in Russia), the biggest hospital in Ufa...

a city of over a million people. It's under quarantine.

They shut it down. And they're lying about it, saying...

that there is no quarantine, that nothing...

has been closed, that they haven't locked anything down.

The Investigative Committee in Bashkiria—lackeys...

who obey this crook...

Khabirov, who organized all of this,

by the way.

They're trying to hide all of this and sweep it under the rug.

They're opening criminal cases and saying this is...

fake news, that there is no quarantine right now.

They say, now we're going after people who spread...

this kind of information and videos like this,

and we'll prosecute them criminally. But there is...

video evidence, and people are climbing out of windows.

Doctors are writing letters to all kinds of authorities about...

how everyone here has fallen ill, how they...

were forbidden to do all this...

to diagnose it. And what did this lying lead to?

What did the lies of this very...

Khabirov lead to? Because of course this was...

his personal order—I don't doubt that...

for a second—because he needed...

the number of cases in Bashkiria to look smaller. And so...

what did they end up with?

The largest hospital is under quarantine.

Doctors, instead of...

treating people, are now getting sick themselves. Why did you lie?

And on top of that, this man still has the nerve...

to go on the media and say, hey...

doctors, stop begging.

Quote from Khabirov: 'I appeal to the chief...

physicians of all our hospitals, to the heads...

of our medical institutions. Colleagues, we are a very wealthy...

republic, and we have a serious budget.'

'Let's stop this begging.

Stop this whole story of: give me...

fifty masks, give me a kilogram...

of cucumbers. If help is needed, we allocate funds immediately.'

It's shameful? Then allocate the money.

That's the whole point—you allocate nothing.

You've stolen everything there, spent it on black...

Mercedes cars, and you're giving 0 rubles—zero.

Not a kopeck. And you forbid people from telling the real...

truth about the coronavirus.

And what is the consequence of that?

More sick people.

Doctors in hospitals are getting infected.

Hospitals are ending up under quarantine, and you still want...

to say, 'Stop begging'?

Well, if you don't want people to beg...

then give them money. But they don't, and these lies...

are killing people. I am absolutely convinced of that, and...

it seems to me this is an important point that everyone...

needs to understand: in the problems...

with coronavirus that Russia has now...

and will continue to face in the future...

at least 30 percent of the blame—probably even more—

belongs to the stupidity of our...

officials, who lie for some reason. But why...

does Khabirov need to lie? What is the point of it?

Why do this? But I'll repeat: no one is...

blaming Putin, or Sobyanin, or...

Khabirov for the fact that the coronavirus appeared.

I'll say this honestly: we were not prepared...

for this. The whole world was unprepared...

The U.S. has problems, Italy has problems, and...

even the richest countries have problems.

So why is this lying necessary?

Remember how everyone endlessly discussed...

that cruise ship, the *Diamond Princess*, where there were...

huge numbers of sick people?

Those sick people simply were not allowed off the ship.

Well, the exact same thing is now happening here...

in Ufa, in one particular...

hospital building. And for what reason?

Why are these idiotic visits...

by governors necessary? It's obvious why.

Because Putin went, put on a yellow...

protective suit, went to Kommunarka (the Moscow hospital complex),

showed himself off there, staged a PR stunt.

It's forbidden.

According to the rules, officials are not...

supposed to walk around infectious-disease hospitals.

But of course the old man went, and so...

now every idiot in the regions, every...

governor, wants to do the same thing.

And in Pskov Region, one of them barged in too. Let's...

watch this video, and pay attention...

to what kind of suit the governor is wearing, what all...

his entourage are wearing,

and what the doctors are wearing.

Little shoe covers for themselves...

...

What's interesting is that they themselves didn't even...

realize it, didn't understand it. I found this...

video online too, and all...

the comments—every single one of them—

were saying that...

the officials and their attendants...

and the journalists were dressed like some kind of ultra-mega...

deep-sea divers in super protective suits.

while below them, doctors are walking alongside in body armor

with just a mask, or even no mask at all, just a gown and

a cap on their head. They themselves didn’t even notice

that they had barged into an infectious disease

hospital in order to show

essentially that your doctors are walking around without

proper protective equipment.

You went in there and interfered with their work, and then

it started — why? Because, apparently, Putin

went there in that pearl-style stunt, and everyone wants

to get some publicity.

The same with Minnikhanov in Tatarstan, of course

of course — don’t feed him, just let him put on

a suit and walk into a hospital to make

a report about how everything is under control, what a

brave Minnikhanov he is.

He wasn’t afraid of the coronavirus and went into

the hospital. Fifteen seconds — Minnikhanov,

what are you even doing there? You have no business

being in that infectious disease hospital. There is

no courage there, no bravery at all,

and no intelligence in

getting infected with the coronavirus. Take, for example,

the chief doctor at Kommunarka (a Moscow hospital).

That was, in fact, his real

mistake: he got infected with the coronavirus and

now he should be in strict

quarantine,

full quarantine, but instead he’s sitting in his office.

And now these United Russia people are already saying, let’s

nominate him for the Hero of Russia star

in all seriousness — for the Hero of Russia medal.

For what? For catching the coronavirus?

For not following quarantine

rules? For bringing these people into

the hospital for reasons that are completely unclear?

What is all this for? It’s an infectious disease

hospital. People are sick there; you can get infected

with coronavirus there — what exactly is

good about that?

If we consider that, you know, to be a

heroic act,

then we already officially have 10,000

such heroes, and in reality God

knows how many — maybe 30 percent of the population

will go through this sooner or later.

Should we give every one of them a Hero of Russia star? And as for

these idiots who barged into

an infectious disease hospital, why don’t we just also

give them the Order of Glory in all three classes — why not?

Well, as I said on the previous

program, if there is idiocy at the top, in power,

then this is what happens: they put on yellow

suits and walk around with badges like some kind of

coronavirus command center, of course.

Governors and city mayors will do the

same thing, because this kind of wellspring of

idiocy flows downward: if there’s a fool at the top,

then down here you’ll get an idiot, and over there a cretin.

It’s completely unclear what is going on here,

and that’s not even an exaggeration — you

can see it yourselves. I mean, take this video from

the Pskov region, where the governor is in

full gear while the doctors are without it — it simply

amazingly confirms it. Let’s take

another question from our sponsors. Basir

Sherman Madina asks me whether there are

legal, transparent ways to return

stolen money to the state treasury after

a change of power, including money that has been moved

abroad. Of course there are. I’ve said many times

that

even African countries have recovered money.

All of this is fairly easy to get back. Look,

all these people like Abramovich

and Usmanov, not to mention the official

Shuvalov — his money is obviously illegitimate.

We issue an arrest warrant for

Shuvalov, or simply arrest him here

and send him to a fair court.

A fair court tries him fairly and orders

his assets confiscated. The assets will be

confiscated. I assure you that

the United Kingdom and Austria, in Shuvalov’s case,

and, I don’t know, Switzerland, wherever

his bank accounts are located, of course will

return that money, because this is

normal practice: if a country

requests it, other countries

generally comply. The only thing is that

right now Russia recognizes nothing,

admits no losses, and does not ask for stolen

money to be returned. But in the Beautiful Russia

of the Future, we will of course ask for that.

Now let’s talk about who

is completely happy right now. The happiest

people in the world right now are our

our

varied and numerous

security forces, because at last their wish has come true:

they can now simply

arrest us and chase us around for

going outside. They could only dream of this.

Because before, they had to invent some

pretext in order to harass people

and extort some 100, 200,

or 500 rubles from them. Now, though, now

you really can just go out — you’ve got

your uniform, your shoulder straps, and you can

walk down the street, I don’t know, smoking a cigarette, and then

see some guy walking by and say to him:

you have no right to be here — detain him,

take him to the police station, lock him up for 15 days,

fine him — with absolutely anyone.

And this is now happening like an avalanche

across the whole country. We are seeing

absurd, completely absurd

reports and videos about how

a person was detained for going 100

meters from home, even though the rule says 100 meters from

home — that’s for walking a dog — he wasn’t supposed

to go that far, so apparently he was going the wrong way, that’s

not allowed. And in the overwhelming majority

of cases, in almost all cases, it’s just one

person walking — not, you know, a group

having a street party and refusing

to obey, so the authorities had to

break it up and detain them. No.

One person, one elderly woman. The elderly woman was sitting

at a bus stop. Six police officers in Kazan

— this is what Minnikhanov (the head of Tatarstan) is busy with,

this nonsense. An elderly woman is going to the hospital, sitting at

the bus stop, and six police officers are carrying out

a special operation against this elderly woman.

Let's take a look.

Here, too, everything is

no, either just once by right of words, because

ID and

[music]

No, no, no, no, we're not filming.

You understand, a certificate or... an old woman,

alone with a bag, either to the store or on some

personal errand. It's bad that she went out, she at night

— she clearly went out on business. It's bad that she

went out; she's in a high-risk group. Six

police officers are detaining her, you understand.

Instead of saying, "Ma'am, where

are you going? We'll give you a ride in this

vehicle so you can get

home faster, so that you spend less time out there

and are less likely, probably, to encounter it," they

detain her. Really — six. Did you count these

people? Six people.

Well, Kuban (the Krasnodar region), of course — Krasnodar — all

of this is now turning into complete trash there,

I mean, Kuban always remains

Kuban. Here's how a detention happens in

Kuban: a person who was sitting on a bench

near the apartment entrance, specifically because he had come and

— let go, I'm saying, you lawless thugs.

Guys, he came to visit. Why are you doing this?

Seriously.

We live right here.

I'll put on the next one.

What fascist bastards. Fine, even

so, we understand that the guy came there

— you can hear it — he came to visit, and we live here.

He lives in the neighboring building; he came to visit.

That's bad, but he isn't observing

quarantine. He really shouldn't have come to visit, that's

truly awful. But to wrestle him down,

twist his arms, put him in handcuffs for

sitting on a bench — come on.

Whether we like it or not,

a huge number of people are visiting each other.

They need to be persuaded otherwise. You need to drive up

there and say, "Man, what are you

doing here?" He'll say, "I came to visit.

Please don't visit people. It's very

bad." Suppose he's also really

reckless or drunk and says, "Ah, go

to hell, I'll keep visiting people."

Then get out of the car and say,

"Show your passport. We'll fine you

300 rubles," and then he won't go visiting

anymore. But, I mean, this is not how it

works. It's just that right now this crowd

of sadists has finally been given maximum

power: literally any person — if, for some

reason, they don't like his face — we'll walk up and

ask him for a pass, and now you

have to show it. What pass? For

what exactly? For example, I still don't understand.

I have a store near my house, and there

is a market nearby. To the market I walk

about 250 meters, probably, and there's an Auchan

in the shopping center — that's the nearest Auchan there.

It's probably about 800 meters away. So if I

walk 800 meters, will I be detained? And if I

walk 300 meters, will I be detained or not?

I genuinely don't understand. There's a store right

in my building, a small one, but in it I can't

buy what I want to buy. So what

am I supposed to do? Where am I allowed to go?

There is no explanation for this at all.

In fact, across the country there are wandering around

huge numbers of people.

But nevertheless, for someone sitting on a bench, they

have to twist his arms, wrench them, and

put handcuffs on him — this is

literally legalized brutality and

legalized — I don't know — the worst

that existed in our law enforcement

system is now just rolling out into the open.

Completely out in the open, and in that sense

of course one of the most, probably one of the most

high-profile stories this week

was the story of Jesus, because he was also

Jesus on Patriarch's Ponds (a famous area in Moscow).

That was simply the biggest hit. I mean,

the man lives at Patriarch's Ponds,

and it turned out he has a rather unusual

name, Jesus, and this man went out to walk with

his dog, went with the dog onto the boulevard.

The boulevard had been taped off with ribbon,

like it was closed, although on the list

of closed parks there are no boulevards at all.

It's completely unclear why the boulevard should be

closed. The man was walking his dog literally

100 meters from his home when

a patrol drove by, and exactly, exactly

in this logic: they were driving, driving,

got bored — let's hassle him, like

his face looks wrong, and the boss told us

we need to fill quotas, we have to

bring people in, so let's go over

and pick on this guy. There he is,

walking his dog. Obviously he's alone, not

in a crowd of ten, hooray — he's walking, he's not

spreading his deadly bacilli.

He was alone, walking his dog. They came,

and detained him.

The dog was left behind. Naturally, a huge

scandal broke out, and I was involved in it too,

because, I mean, they took

the man away, and the dog was left

on the street. Fortunately, the dog knew the way

home — it was nearby — and ran back home.

If it had disappeared, that dog

Look at how they detained Jesus — 32 seconds.

[music]

This.

You see? And he's shouting, "Yes, I'll take the dog," and

they drag him into this van. What exactly

did they pick on him for? What bad thing did he do?

Fine, he stepped onto the boulevard, tore off

I've seen a lot of discussion about the tape, and

people saying, like, well, here he broke the rules

because he tore down the tape and went onto the

boulevard.

And here, of course, the police were in the wrong

because they didn't take the dog, and there was

this other legal opinion: were the police supposed to

whether the police should

detain the dog and catch it while it was loose,

because, well, if, say, another

person killed someone with a dog, should the

police officer catch the dog, kill it—

probably not.

And all of this is abstract theorizing and pointless hair-splitting

because the main issue here

the key point isn't whether people should

or whether the police should catch the dog—the main thing is

whether the police should be bothering a person

who is walking a dog. What is the public

danger, even if he was walking a kilometer

from his home, a kilometer away from home?

If that's so terrible, you can walk up and ask

him, "Excuse me, do you live here

or do you live on the other side of Moscow?"

If he says, "I live on the other side of Moscow,"

then they should have said, "Please don't

come here again." That's what the function

of the police is, because the public

danger from a person who is alone, at a

distance—as we can see there, 100 meters

away from everyone, walking by himself—is zero. The police

shouldn't have been paying him any

attention at all. But nevertheless, they dragged this out,

then started issuing press releases, and

the next day they hauled him to court, and in court

he was fined. They would have jailed him if there hadn't been

a huge scandal. If it had been called not Jesus but Kolya (a common Russian male name, like "Nick"),

not Jesus but Kolya,

and especially if he hadn't had

a dog, then absolutely no one would have paid

any attention. But if, I don't know,

he had carried the dog in his arms,

people wouldn't have started getting upset that

the dog had been abandoned in the street. They would have

locked him up for 15 days. So the police,

the judges, then the detention center—everyone would have been

involved in this super-mega

law-enforcement operation that arose

because of what? Because of nothing. Out of zero, out of

thin air. None of this needed to be done at all.

And the reason I'm saying now that this is

a holiday for all law-enforcement officers

is because our law-enforcement agencies, for the most

part,

are basically fake and spend their time on

useless nonsense, and right now they're simply in

ecstasy over the fact that this useless

nonsense gives them ready-made case files,

ready-made criminal cases, ready-made clearance statistics,

ready-made administrative case materials.

You can walk in and say, "Today we

detained 18 people,"

and they say, "What a good job, top marks for you, you'll get

another rank, or you'll get a bonus."

And the stupidest thing in this whole series

that I've seen is, of course, the opening of a

criminal case. On the website of the Investigative

Committee (Russia's main federal investigative body), there appeared this proud, very proud

statement from the head of the press service

of the whole committee, saying that we

have opened a criminal case against

citizen Thorn. I saw that I was asked here

a question specifically about Thorn, so

someone here under the nickname Version20 asks:

"Tell us about Alexander Thorn, against whom

a criminal case was opened."

The Investigative Committee solemnly

announces: we have opened a criminal case against

this person because he

is spreading fake information about the coronavirus.

This is a comedian who recorded a parody

video, a joke about the coronavirus, and it's

absolutely obvious to anyone that

he's a well-known comedian. Go to his

Twitter and you'll see he constantly posts

little humorous videos. Let's watch this

joke, for which they'll probably later open a

criminal case against me too, because I

shared it. Friends, I ask everyone to

spread this video. The information

came to me from firsthand sources. So, that

September explosion at the laboratory

at Vector in Novosibirsk (a Russian state virology center), which you've all

heard about, where the coronavirus was developed—

it was blown up deliberately so that the

virus would get into the air. And note that

that was exactly when the forests in Siberia were burning. They

were also set on fire deliberately so that this

smoke from the fires would pick up the virus and

carry it to China, so that from there all of this would

spread. It was an operation by the shadow

world government,

the Freemasons, and I hope it's clear that this was so everyone

would start talking only about the virus, while the truth about

the fact that the Earth

isn't round would stop spreading,

to drown it out,

so that all of us, like sheep, would now beg for

a vaccine—in other words, to get us hooked on

vaccinations. You understand, I think it's already

clear enough that this is mass

microchipping to control the population.

This is being pushed by Bill Gates and George Soros.

They're also forcing us to eat GMO

products so that we get sick and need

their vaccines with chips, you understand, and

then the microchipping becomes a game—

it all turns into complete nonsense, I mean,

you understand, there are literally officers from the

local committee sitting there in their offices,

with Bastrykin (head of Russia's Investigative Committee) peering through a magnifying glass at the

laptop screen—on the laptop screen

a guy is saying that the Freemasons

set the forest on fire so the smoke would carry the corona-

virus to China, so that everyone would start talking

about the coronavirus and stop discussing

the fact that the Earth isn't round. I just can't

deal with this, and it seems to me that this

Like, as a joke, they open a criminal case.

They open a criminal case, and then another criminal case, and

they also put out some pompous press release on

the website of the Investigative Committee (Russia's main federal investigative agency), and then

Putin will read out, at one of his regular addresses, this

statement from a piece of paper and say, "According to information

from the local committee, there have been

such-and-such number of criminal cases opened." True, they are fake cases, and

many of these so-called offenses were spread

abroad. So, for example, Thorn lives

abroad, and they have now opened

a criminal case against him. He will plainly go into

these statistics: he spread a dangerous

fake, the purpose of which was supposedly

to cause panic among the population. He lives

abroad, but obviously, of course, it was exactly those

same Masons, 5G, and Bill Gates

who did all this. I mean, that's what they do,

that's what this is, and there's no

and it even seems absurd to me

because they genuinely enjoy it, they

revel in the opportunity to do super

idiotic things two hours before this

program.

I mean, we still assumed

that the Investigative Committee under the leadership of

Bastrykin (Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Investigative Committee) is certainly

an organization incapable of fighting

corruption, with a leadership that is totally

corrupt. I mean, it's really packed with

crooks and swindlers, and yet it does

things like this. But today they also

opened a criminal case—guess what

for—over events from 1942–43,

over the mass murder

of residents of the Rostov region by SS troops.

You probably think I'm joking, that somehow

to some extent you think I'm not

serious.

I'm telling you, do you think I'm joking?

I'm not joking at all. This is official

information: the Investigative Committee opened

a criminal case against SS troops. You can

laugh at that,

but at the same time, remember—remember at

the Raspadskaya mine, 91 people died less

than ten years ago, and they closed that criminal

case because the statute of limitations had expired.

Do you understand? Ninety-one people died,

and not that long ago—less than ten years ago—

they closed the case because of the statute

of limitations. Well, because money changed hands there,

they "settled things," but of course they

opened a criminal case against

SS troops who committed war

crimes. That's how our

law enforcement system works, and we

are supposed to keep feeding it when we don't have enough

money for masks for doctors—we're supposed to feed

these idlers and louts. Let's

shame them, really. What needs to happen is simply this:

everyone who knows an investigator or someone in the FSB (Russia's Federal Security Service)

or anyone else should just go up to them,

show them this, and say: you should be

ashamed that you work for this system.

You should spit in your boss's face.

If you're afraid, then go into the office and spit on

the portrait of your, I don't know, superior,

the head of the Investigative Committee, and the President

of Russia, because you are engaged in this shameful

filth while Russia has monstrous

crime and an enormous number of problems,

and you have turned yourselves into a pack of parasites

who паразitize within

the law enforcement system. It is genuinely

very, very shameful.

Aidar Latypov asks me: "Alexei, in your

opinion, how much longer will

self-isolation in Russia last?" Well, listen, I

think it will last until summer. I

think that, judging by the dynamics we're

seeing now,

this definitely will not all be over

that soon. Well, we can probably see that our

government is now gradually

lifting this self-isolation, and in general

the quarantine measures—more and more

factories are starting to work again. For example,

in the Moscow region they said:

we are allowing all factories, all

manufacturers, all foreign companies

to operate. Well, basically all the factories

in the Moscow suburbs are factories of foreign

companies, and in that sense, I mean,

it's just

completely obvious that they will

be easing this quarantine

because they do not want to give people money

and are forced to send them back to work.

But from the point of view of fighting the epidemic,

I'm not sure that's a good idea. At

the very least, we can see that in countries where

the epidemic began much earlier,

in European countries, nowhere has the quarantine

been lifted. So it probably should

remain in place until... Well, it's already 21:39 on the clock,

I've been on air for more than an hour and a half,

and yet people are still watching,

there are still 100,000 people—wow,

100,000 people. Thank you very much for watching,

so I'll chat a little longer.

I actually wanted to draw attention to

one thing here. On the one hand, we see

something absolutely—this is complete

police lawlessness, including toward

an ordinary person whose arms are being twisted behind his back.

On the other hand, as I said in the last

program—and I'll repeat it—

because this is only going to grow—we

see some hellish, utterly

dismissive attitude from all these

people in power, especially those who

are passing the most repressive laws against us.

The Moscow City Duma, for the last two weeks,

has simply been bending over backward

so that the United Russia faction in the Moscow City Duma

could introduce as many fines as possible

and as many kinds of measures as possible.

So, QR codes for Muscovites are like this:

passes, these kinds of passes.

We’ll arrest these people, disperse those people — a system

of video surveillance that will be watching

all of you. And as for these deputies, it turned out

that inside the Moscow City Duma (Moscow’s city parliament), there are only

45 people — forty-five deputies — and there,

according to official data already, four

have fallen ill, that is, ten percent of

the Moscow City Duma deputies are infected

with coronavirus. This happened because

at the head of the Moscow City Duma is an idiot named

Shaposhnikov, who simply spat on quarantine

measures. He knew he had infected

deputies, and nevertheless he held

meetings. That’s exactly the kind of thing people should be jailed for

under the new law — any one of us, really,

if you know

that you have coronavirus and you

throw a party, you can be imprisoned for that.

Imprisoned.

He knows he has sick deputies, and he

holds a meeting, and that’s apparently fine. More than that,

after that meeting, he knew that he had

been in contact with infected people. Under the law

that you, damn it, are supposed to obey, he

was supposed to go home and spend two weeks

in strict quarantine. What does he do? He goes on

television and speaks, and tells people

about how, supposedly, we need to

punish and fine them. Here’s a short excerpt from

our team’s investigation,

which is absolutely right, and I

join this demand, saying

that criminal charges should be brought

against Shaposhnikov.

He gathered the deputies for emergency meetings

on April 1. At that meeting, he said that everyone in the hall

was healthy because the day before they had taken

coronavirus tests. However,

the speaker lied: the test results only became

known several days later, and

many of them turned out to be positive.

At the meeting, there were at least

two people who actually, at that

moment,

had coronavirus. Moreover, already on

April 2, it became known that Stepan Orlov,

Shaposhnikov’s colleague in the United Russia

faction, was also sick with coronavirus. But more than that,

Shaposhnikov not only continued

to actively interact with people, he

refused to close the Moscow City Duma for

quarantine, even though there had clearly been

an outbreak there, with a lot of sick people, which

only became known weeks later

because the tests provide inaccurate

information. And only several

days later, I filed a statement with the Investigative

Committee, demanding that it open a case

against Shaposhnikov under Article 236

of the Criminal Code.

Objectively, I don’t like

Shaposhnikov. He’s an absolutely disgusting

United Russia politician, he leads the United Russia members,

and he lies endlessly. This week he gave

an interview to Echo of Moscow (a Russian radio station),

to Yegor Zhukov. Watch it — I assure you,

you won’t be able to get through even half

of that broadcast before Shaposhnikov’s behavior

drives you mad.

I mean, we don’t like him, but let’s forget that

for a moment — let’s say he isn’t even a United Russia politician.

This is an objective situation: there are

at least four people there — 10 percent of

the official roster — plus staff members

who are sick with coronavirus. Judging by

everything, there are more. Today I read a post by Shuválova,

and there are also several

deputies who, as far as we know,

are in the hospital, but they still won’t admit

that they have coronavirus. In other words, there’s

an outbreak there, and all of them should be in strict

quarantine. What does Shaposhnikov do?

He goes on television, appears publicly, lives

his normal life, goes to work, and so

on and so forth, passes laws

and resolutions under which we’re supposed to have passes

and under which we’re supposed to be fined.

But for him personally, everything is just fine.

So if he wants

to spit on the law like that, then against him

a criminal case needs to be opened. My question is

for Sobyanin (the Mayor of Moscow):

you’re the one who, of course, put Shaposhnikov there —

do you think this is normal? Today there was

a statement — Sobyanin said before

the program that Muscovites had started to

observe self-isolation poorly, and that

is true.

People sat at home for a week, but they need money,

so they started going to work, and now he’s like:

now we’re going to fine everyone, now

we’re going to punish everyone. Start with

your own Shaposhnikov — punish him first, start with yourselves.

This isn’t just some ordinary guy off the street — this is

one of the leaders of the city

of Moscow, who publicly spits on

quarantine and who publicly, in fact,

is committing acts that constitute

a criminal offense.

And you just ignore it all, carry on

as if absolutely nothing

is happening. One of the deputies, a very

good deputy — I’ve shown him here several times —

Stupin. There are also deputies who got sick,

like Gubenko and

Stepan Orlov, and I wish all of them

a full recovery.

Of course, I hope they get better. It’s very telling

that when Stupin fell ill — I’ll just

play this for you — we asked him to record a little something

for our program. Just

take a look: this is a Moscow City Duma deputy from

the opposition faction, who understands perfectly well that

if anything happens, he could

make a scandal out of it.

He says himself that he even ended up being...

The test comes back negative, they do the test,

negative, and you’ll just keep running around and

begging them to start treating you.

And that won’t happen until

— I don’t know — until you practically start dying. Let’s watch.

Stupin.

Minute 43. Hello, friends, my name is

Yevgeny Stupin. On March 30, I took a test

through a doctor at our city Moscow

outpatient clinic for coronavirus. By that time,

I had already had a fever for three days. After

I took the test, the fever went away. Overall,

I was sick for only four days in total.

And on March 30, they told me that within 72

hours there should be a result. On the sixth day,

the clinic informed me that, after all,

my test was positive. By the time

I found out that I had tested positive

for coronavirus, I had basically already recovered

and was feeling fine, and the fever

and cough were already gone by that point. But at

that moment, they started calling me.

From 10 to 18 calls a day — and it’s now the third

day this has been going on. They call from the

telemedicine center,

from Rospotrebnadzor (Russia’s consumer protection and public health watchdog), from Moscow City Hall,

from various clinics — from all sorts of places.

I don’t even remember all the institutions

anymore, and they all ask the same questions:

who do you live with, have you been abroad,

what’s your temperature, what about your children,

and so on. Just imagine — every

half hour, some call with the exact same

questions. ‘Why are you asking me

the same thing every time?’ ‘We don’t have

a unified database. That’s just how we

work — everyone is on their own.’ Which

shows that the real work right now

to combat coronavirus is

effectively not being coordinated by anyone. And the

people formally leading this fight —

right now that’s Sobyanin and

Mishustin — in reality, they are not getting into it

at all, they have no real idea

of how this is actually happening on the ground.

You understand, this is a deputy of the Moscow City Duma

who, obviously, should receive

some degree of attention — and even he takes a test

and only on the sixth day does

some actual result come in. We understand perfectly well

— and it’s not because we’re especially smart —

we understand this from the real experience of different countries:

mass, rapid testing. What should

have happened with Deputy Stupin, who

felt unwell and took a test?

He should have been checked immediately, and it should have been established that he had

coronavirus within a day —

or better yet, within a few hours — and

they should have told him: ‘Yevgeny,

you’re not feeling well. You need to

stay home, stay home alone, do not leave

your apartment. You and your family are under strict

quarantine.

In a few days, we’ll come and check on you

again. If you feel worse,

you’ll be hospitalized.’ That’s what needed

to be done, you understand. Not this thing where they sort of

test you and say the result will come in a week,

and in the meantime the person is, well,

still living their life — went to the store,

went here, went there.

But wait — in Stupin’s case, no, he started

behaving very conscientiously and wrote

posts on Facebook about how, basically,

even taking out the trash was difficult, and things

like that.

But in general, that is exactly how it should work:

a person gets sick, and you need to immediately

determine, as quickly as possible, whether it’s coronavirus

or not, do the best available test, and after that

isolate them and prevent another 10

people around them from getting infected. That’s the only way

to fight an epidemic. Here, as Stupin just said, we have the opposite mess.

As Stupin just said, it’s the exact opposite nonsense.

Reporting — everyone needs reporting.

Certificates, paperwork, statistical reports — that’s why

the calls keep coming. Constant manipulation of

statistics and record-keeping, different agencies,

different bosses calling different people and

asking them to report on the situation, and then

reporting on the situation again — and the whole system

is busy endlessly

reporting on the situation, while nobody does a damn thing

about treatment or

prevention. Since we’ve started talking

about our Moscow and our wonderful

mayor of Moscow, Sergey Sobyanin, the

probably most repeated phrase this

week was the one about how the budget won’t

burst. I even wrote it on my mug,

because, well, you know,

that’s what Sergey Semyonovich blurted out. We

know that the federal authorities, generally speaking — and

I’ll talk about this a bit later too —

have chosen a strategy of

not spending any money, not

giving people money directly under any

circumstances — maybe forgiving some taxes or doing

something else, but

but probably only doctors received those

measly 10 billion rubles (about $108 million USD) in

support — two times less than the annual budget of RT,

yes — and as I already said, that is

the only direct payment. Everything

else requires you to meet

fairly complicated conditions to get it, and

Sobyanin, explaining why they don’t want

to help people, said: ‘Well, we can’t

help everyone. Even if we helped everyone,

the budget would burst.’ And

of course, the outrage was absolutely justified,

and only the laziest person didn’t say he deserved a punch in the face,

over that one,

because at the same time

a truly enormous scandal is unfolding

over the fact that Moscow City Hall, under cover of all this,

has simply poured some gigantic

amounts of money into its favorite paving tiles.

Their favorite curb again: they announced

the purchase of curb stone worth 19

billion rubles. Just compare that again:

10 billion rubles for all the doctors

across all of Russia who are fighting

coronavirus, and 19 billion rubles for

these paving tiles. And as usual, the devil

is in the details: they will be relaying the tiles

in places where they do not need to be relaid.

Not long ago, a piece was published about this.

The outlet Baza, a sort of semi-pro-Kremlin

media outlet, even did a special

investigation on the subject.

There, the first 12 billion that

was allocated needs to be separated out: 12 billion

was allocated for beautification, and 19

billion they allocated for

the purchase of curbs. And about those first 12

billion, Baza even simply

went around the places where they are going to

relay the tiles and found that

the tiles are already there. Look: just in

February and March, in the months when

the active fight against

coronavirus began, the capital awarded

more than

12 billion rubles in beautification tenders. These are the same tiles

they are relaying. Well, here, you can

see the boundary: here are the tiles that

were relaid, and the tiles that were there before. In my

view, the tiles that were already there look

much better. We walked from Tsaritsyno Square

literally about 100 to 150 meters

and came out right here. What is here?

Here, basically, there are concrete tiles

that are also supposed to be replaced under the

terms of the tender. The tiles seem

perfectly fine; it is not even clear what else needs checking.

Well, they are not loose.

They are set solidly in place, look perfectly fine.

What is the problem? Here is a section with

asphalt and curbs that also, under the

terms of the tender, are supposed to be replaced

with new asphalt and new curbs.

So what is wrong with them? The curbs do not

look worn at all; they look excellent. They were replaced

probably a year or two ago, judging by

their appearance. They are granite; they can stand for

centuries. The asphalt is also very good, and in

the end it will turn out that they are once again burying

money in the asphalt, literally. But

they did not spend it on coronavirus or on the elderly. And

this is a Kremlin-linked outlet; they do

decent investigations, but we all

understand that it belongs

to the Kremlin-linked Life News holding.

Even they are outraged. But here we should

not use the word “bury” — in reality

they will steal it, because all of this is being stolen

in plain sight. And within this

big, big scandal that

everyone in Moscow is outraged about,

what can we say about the regions? People write to me:

“Korolyok, please remind Putin

that people need cash, and utility bills

really ought to be canceled for a couple of months.” In other words,

people genuinely cannot pay for

utilities because they have no work, they

have no money. Moscow will spend 31 billion

rubles on this damn beautification program.

At the same time, I recorded a video on Instagram

and said that roughly

about 40 percent would be stolen there. Now I understand

that 80 percent will be stolen, judging by

what an amazing scandal has unfolded

around the specific situation involving Ilya

Yashin and the relaying of tiles at Chistye

Prudy. It is genuinely very interesting,

and it needs to be watched closely. Even Sobyanin

was forced to respond to it

on his website. So, what happened?

A video was posted online

showing how at Chistye Prudy

people were relaying the tiles. Let’s look.

You can see it all — a huge area, simply

right by the Chistye Prudy metro station, and importantly,

they are relaying it there. And if you

live in Moscow or spend time in these places,