Special forces in SS helmets at the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK). Shaveddinov. The hockey-playing grandfather.

[music]

Good evening, everyone. It's 8:10 p.m. in Moscow, and

live on air, I'm Alexei Navalny,

or, for anyone who feels like paying

a psy— well, a psychiatrist, sorry about that,

the person who wants to pay

for a psychiatrist. The Kremlin media have called me

that. I'm so excited because we actually managed

to go live after all, from a different

backup studio, even though it doesn't have

my wonderful, beautiful backdrop

that you're used to, we still managed

to put together a real, I hope full-fledged,

broadcast, not like last time during

the previous raid on our office, when I

was just saying something from the hallway for 10

minutes. It seemed fundamentally important to us

to make sure we could put out

a real, full program. Well, because

we're not asking you all the time for nothing

to support us, saying we won't give up, and we

we built this studio. We even have

a cup. In fact, a lot of people criticize

us because the cups are disposable. Our

cup is actually left over from last time. We

went on air, and it's really great that

this is happening now with our office.

The most common, most frequently asked

question right now is: I don't know. Judging

by the sounds coming from there,

I don't know,

they're smashing walls, wrecking furniture,

and definitely breaking dishes.

Let's just immediately watch a short

clip from Ivan Zhdanov, the director

of the Foundation, who was actually the main

culprit — or rather, the formal culprit —

behind today's raid, because all of this is within the framework

of the criminal case against him. He

says some very important things there, but you'll

also hear the background noise. He's standing probably

about 15 meters (roughly 50 feet) from the door, and you can

literally hear someone trashing the place.

Let's watch a short clip of Zhdanov. A nice

shot with

a big stack of various equipment, and

obviously this is not the equipment they'll be carrying out.

As for whether they'll be able

to delete anything from it, actually

I very much doubt that anyone can

simply open these computers. If

they had come in and we could have shown them

the contents of the computers, they wouldn't have

taken them away. I think there would have been no problem

at all: you show them, and they let

people go. But as it is, let me remind you, this is just robbery.

They can't do anything with this equipment,

but they are causing us damage.

You are a defendant in this case,

or rather, still a suspect

a suspect, but judging by the fact that I have

a summons already for the day after tomorrow,

apparently they want, before the end of the year,

to bring charges.

Well, I hope you can hear

those horrifying sounds in the background. I don't really

understand how there can be so much to smash and

destroy in our office. We don't even have that many

dishes, but still, whatever is happening there

is happening.

What is actually important to tell you

is that Alisher Usmanov,

the oligarch, one of the figures in our

film *He Is Not Dimon to You*, and specifically our

refusal to block or remove it from YouTube —

*He Is Not Dimon to You* —

was, at least that's what the paperwork says,

the reason for today's raid. He

also stuck us with another nasty surprise. Usually we

collect donations for this broadcast through

the Streamlabs service. It belongs to

Mail.ru, which means Usmanov, and they disconnected

us without any explanation. They just said,

"We're simply disconnecting you," and that was it. So today we

are testing a new service, and I

hope it works. Please go

there now — there should be a link below.

Click on it, and if everything works as it should,

if someone sends something, then in theory

something should float across the screen. We haven't fully

set it up yet, we're still testing it. These things won't

necessarily always float across the screen like this,

but let's try — maybe they will. And if they don't,

then we'll know we did something wrong.

And before I move on

to the substantive part: 30,000 people are

watching us live, and I still owe you

the announcement of the winners

from the previous program, where

— sorry — we were summing up the contest

that I announced in the last program. We

said that those who

guessed where, next time, the plane would fly

of Alisher Usmanov and Svetlana Medvedeva

would receive, respectively, a bandana or

a T-shirt from our merch store, as you

probably know from the video we

released today.

Medvedev, Usmanov, I don't know who else

— Kostin too, of course — somehow

had the aircraft geolocation data

blocked by some tricky method, but we still — well,

we know how to do this — we found that

data anyway. So I am now ready

to announce that two viewers correctly guessed

that the aircraft would fly to London, to

Farnborough Airport. Please show

the screenshot, if we have it, that

proves it. And the contest winners, as you can

see, are Mimo12217 and Mikhail

Veselkov. Unfortunately, we don't have your

email addresses. Please write to us — you

won and correctly guessed that it flew to

London, and you were the first ones

to send in that information, so

congratulations on your win.

Today we had quite a

funny thing happen — probably a kind of raid like this.

An attack on the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation), but every time it

really feels like a holiday.

Today felt like a special holiday of its own,

because we have a Christmas tree up, and hanging there

just this morning we finally hung, in the office,

a huge disco ball in the open space.

Some of us were in a staff meeting,

while at the same time we were finishing editing a video

that was supposed to come out today, and

it did come out today after all, despite the fact

that it was difficult, and then they started sawing

through the door, trying to break in, and it looked very

funny, especially with the disco ball. Let’s

show some exclusive footage of the start of the search, and

of them sawing through the door — this is what it looked like

through the eyes of the staff, with the disco ball right there

by the side.

[music]

At first they were trying to break the door down with some kind of

sledgehammers, then they started sawing, and it

was this kind of

beautiful spray of sparks from the door.

It looked a bit like a sparkler.

It really was the hit of today’s

internet. Let’s watch 11 seconds.

From the inside, it really looked

very cool, though we did have to get out

the fire extinguishers. But we didn’t know whether to start

putting it out, or whether that would be taken as

some kind of special act — like an attack on

the officers. It wasn’t clear who exactly was standing

behind the door — we didn’t know. We could just see

some guys standing there. Let’s

watch one second — the sawing looked cool,

the door, I mean.

[music]

One particular new feature

of these raids was that this time

the guys actually came wearing helmets. It was

very funny, because it was like

everything had been escalating: at first it was just

some FSB-type guys

who hid their faces just like this, well,

then they started wearing medical masks,

then they all started coming in balaclavas,

that is, black face coverings. This time

they actually came in helmets — I mean,

there were just these guys in helmets in the building.

Let’s watch how they ran into

the office. It

looked pretty funny in places,

and dramatic in others. Let’s watch.

They burst in directly, and again, at that moment

it was completely unclear who these people were.

Some people in helmets — who even wears helmets?

Like some fascists had come running in. Two seconds.

Seconds.

I was taken out.

[unclear]

37,000 people are watching you live.

I hope you saw

the heart-rending moment when one person

in a helmet lifted up another person in a helmet

so they could tape over the camera. It really

did.

Well, you can see it yourselves, especially that

big fat guy with his sleeves rolled up,

wearing a helmet — it just looked

like something out of those Soviet films about fascists

who come into a village. Not in helmets — they

have their sleeves rolled up like SS men, you know. But

the funniest part is that the head of our

Moscow штаб, Oleg Stepanov, immediately

made the association instantly, and if you

look at it, that helmet really is

This is specifically the Navalny LIVE office

that these guys are storming into. And next,

let’s look at a photo — it’s a complete

match. We laugh at Putin

because he really does seem, in his senility,

to talk to us endlessly

about the Great Patriotic War (the Soviet term for the Eastern Front of World War II), about fascism,

constantly talking about Poland. And it’s exactly

these little things that show that

right there in this whole constructed

project, where the head of the country — who

is actually supposed to be dealing with the country — while

22 percent of people are living below the

poverty line, spends all day thinking about

Poland and fascists, and everyone else starts

thinking about it too. And that shows up even in

these kinds of unconscious details. And now our

special forces from the Federal Bailiff Service

are now

walking around in helmets, and those helmets are a direct

copy of some SS-style helmets from the wartime

period.

The same thing happened today again

with the Navalny LIVE studio, otherwise

I’d be speaking to you from my usual background.

Let’s watch a few seconds of how

they ran in there. The makeup artist opened

the door for them — well, they rang, the door was opened, and

then people in helmets came running in. Let’s watch.

[music]

For now,

it was like this.

Open up.

[music]

You wait here for now.

[music]

Rostov.

[music]

42,000 people are watching us now, or at least

I can see little dots moving across the screen,

some little rockets flying around — that

means our systems are working.

For those who have just joined, let me

remind you that the service that

belongs to Mail.ru, and therefore to Usmanov,

has disabled donation collection for our YouTube streams,

and we’re now testing another

system, so don’t be alarmed by all these

little ducks — this is basically our first test of

how all this works on Navalny LIVE.

Everything was peaceful, but you know what the

funny detail was? All these

bailiffs, of course, are awful.

They were nervous because they were directly

simply understood that at that moment they

were acting, well, as Usmanov’s servants, and

of course I wanted to call them Usmanov’s servants,

but a person can’t

admit to himself: I call myself

an officer, I consider myself an honest man, but

in reality I’m just some pitiful slave

who is committing an obvious crime,

committing this crime in the interests

of the very person who robs him every day,

and is also protecting him. That’s just the reality:

oligarchic scum,

corrupt officials and crooks, from us normal

people, who are also fighting so that

this unfortunate representative of the

bailiff service gets paid more

salary. And that

makes some of them uncomfortable, and of course they stood there

almost relieved, happy that they were all in

masks, but sometimes it turned into this kind of

curious aggression. One of these

wonderful people in helmets even

got into it with Sobol there, and at some

point said, yeah, come on, like,

I’ll call you into the bathroom so we can settle it

man to man. Watch at 42

seconds — the bathroom is right here.

I can’t do it here, but maybe here

there’s a signal — I don’t understand why, if suddenly

right now... and he said, come over to the net—

come on, let’s go into the hall, let’s go into the hall.

It won’t work. I’ve seen this many times. You just

understand what you’re doing:

you’ve been given an illegal order, and it’s hard

for you to carry out this illegal order. Come on,

don’t pretend otherwise.

Well, what was that just now — how many times

did you say, let’s go around the corner? Of course, I mean,

it’s all a very funny, ridiculous absurdity,

but of course it was just one more raid, and we

understood it was coming, and we understood that

this whole thing would never stop, and

this had become the new life of the Anti-Corruption Foundation

(FBK) and our штабs (regional campaign offices): they would

regularly come in and take everything we

had so that we simply couldn’t

keep broadcasting this program, so that

you couldn’t carry out this investigation.

A simple point: I also wanted to draw

attention to the fact that this time it wasn’t even within the framework

of the FBK criminal case, where

there was that completely fabricated article about

money laundering — though there at least

you could, however far-fetched it was,

say, well, supposedly they laundered

a billion, as the Investigative Committee says,

and in order to find that laundered

billion, we need to seize their

computers or whatever. But why are they taking lights

and cameras? That can’t be explained at all.

But this time the criminal case, the way it

came about, was this: on March 2, 2017,

we released the film *He Is Not Dimon to You*,

after which, some time later, Usmanov — not

Medvedev, Usmanov — sued me and FBK.

My dear Basmanny-style court just

rubber-stamps any decisions for any

people with the right connections, and accordingly

it ruled against me and FBK and said that the film

*He Is Not Dimon to You* had to be removed, and

naturally we said: to hell with that,

we’re not deleting anything. It’s all the pure

truth, and you didn’t refute it — you didn’t even

try to refute it in court. But for a long

time this kept going on, I mean

this sort of thing happened: they would come

and say, delete it.

I’m not deleting a damn thing. FBK has nothing

to do with it anyway. This is my personal

channel; the video *He Is Not Dimon to You*, which

by the way has now been watched by up to 32

million people, is on my personal channel. FBK

has absolutely nothing to do with it.

So I said, back off — if you

have claims against me,

bring them against me. But they kept sending out these

pieces of paper. Even so, they told

the director, the official at FBK, that he

had to... and then: ah, I see, so now we’re opening

a criminal case because you’re not complying with

the court decision. And then, within the framework

of this criminal case over non-compliance with

a court ruling, they stormed

into all the offices. And right now it’s just

completely unclear how failure to comply with a decision

to remove a video from the internet could

justify

seizing lights and cameras, trashing the office, and

smashing dishes, which we heard on the video.

It’s not very clear. The funniest part is that

this is what happened: you see, the system there works

in a very stupid way — people in masks

run around somewhere, and therefore they’re right, and

any law simply stops working.

Our lawyers came, and they weren’t let in. That’s

absolutely lawless.

But they still won’t let them in — no matter what.

There they are, standing there, these

devils in fascist helmets, and there’s very little

you can do. They’re in gear, they don’t

identify themselves, they’re in masks, they’re in helmets, they’re

armed, and God forbid you touch them — they’ll immediately

run off to have you jailed. So what did he do? He simply

needed to get into the office to understand what was

happening. He put on

a black balaclava — show the photo, what he looked like — he

just took a couple of steps,

pulled this black hat over himself, and that was it.

A black hat in Russia opens any

doors, you understand. A guy walks up — I mean, walks up

in a black hat, so he must be one of ours.

No one asks him anything, they simply believe him or

don’t bother — he passed through the barriers and cordons,

went into the office, and after a while came back out.

That’s how the law works in Russia: there is law, and

then there are people in black hats, and they

can do whatever they want. 47,000.

There are people watching live right now, and I’m very

glad. I hope our broadcast doesn’t crash

because we’re going on air from a kind of

backup studio. I’ll say it again: I’m

49,000 people with us already — I’m incredibly

happy that we managed

to put this episode together, and make it a proper one

— not just a quick stream from the hallway. I’ll also

talk more about why, as I see it,

this happened.

Why this whole thing happened — well, it’s clear enough.

Guys, of course there’s a whole combination of reasons here.

After the Moscow City Duma elections (the Moscow city parliament), Putin said:

“They’re hitting my United Russia party, and not even

when I’m taking part in the elections. I don’t like that.”

None of us likes that. What the hell —

this has to stop happening.”

And after that, these cases were fabricated.

And now they’re coming at us from all sides in different ways.

Everything that’s happening — the criminal case,

the attempt to label the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation) as a foreign agent,

the pressure on our штабs (regional campaign offices), and so on

and so on.

The abduction of Ruslan Shaveddinov as well,

and today’s raid — all of this is, of course, one

kind of campaign, and one headquarters is behind it.

But still, we believe that

this time in particular there is a specific person who ordered it,

the beneficiary of this whole operation.

But before that, I wanted to say a few

words about Ruslan Shaveddinov,

our FBK employee,

because the situation with him has, of course,

shown, in one sense, some new

and entirely different methods

used by our authorities. On the other hand, as many people rightly

wrote on social media, especially

those interested in history, nothing

essentially new happened, because

the Russian

corrupt autocratic government

has always done this: “This student talks too much —

let’s shave his head and send him into

the army.” For the Russian authorities, sending someone off as a soldier

has always been considered in Russia

an effective measure against people who

say things they’re not supposed to say. Besides, and this is

actually a very disturbing thing, they

really do believe — and once again

they’ve demonstrated — that the army and

prison are one and the same.

To lock a person up — whether in prison

or send him into the army — it’s the same to them. That’s why,

by the way, it’s quite something to watch

how

all these Telegram channels write, “Ha-ha,

they took one of theirs — let him serve,”

“he’ll learn something there,”

“he’ll become a real man, learn about real life,”

and so on. So here’s a question: has our defense minister,

Shoigu, served in the army? Have his

deputies? Every other one of them hasn’t served.

Did Medvedev serve in the army? No. Did Putin serve in the army?

No. Why didn’t Putin serve in the army?

He studied there in Leningrad

at the law institute — he should have been drafted.

None of these people ever served,

and look at their children: all our most

hardline militarists, the most swaggering

guys, the ones rubbing their hands together the most right now,

saying, “Good, they took him away,”

“you shipped him off to Novaya Zemlya (a remote Arctic archipelago used by the Russian military)”},{

— not one of their children serves, because they would never hand their own

children over to prison.

Because to them, the army and prison are one and

the same. And here, taking this opportunity,

I want to address the military, including

those whom I know have at least some kind of weak

internet connection there on Novaya

Zemlya.

Aren’t you yourselves upset, offended, or at least

uncomfortable that you’ve been equated with

some remote SIZO (pre-trial detention center)? In our country, the army is

just a place where they send either

people the authorities don’t like,

people who have somehow offended them, or else

poor young people, children from single-parent

families, those who can’t buy their way out. I’ve

always said it, and I’ll say it again: this

situation with Shaveddinov shows one hundred

percent that the army is a tax on

the poor.

The army is simply a tax on the poor, a tax on

those who can’t buy their way out. I’m being told

that unfortunately our payment system

couldn’t handle it. It’s bad that it couldn’t cope,

and it’s good that it couldn’t cope,

which apparently means a large number of

donations are coming in. For now, at least, you can

use

Super Chats. Continuing about Shaveddinov:

what happened to Shaveddinov? The guy

disappeared. He’s gone all day; by evening he’s still

not there. It’s unclear what’s happening. But for us,

this isn’t entirely unusual — he was constantly being detained,

at one point the police kept picking him up, so we

start looking for him, sending people to

his home. We arrive at his apartment, and we can

show you

what it looked like.

Go ahead, take a guess. People arrive

at the home of an FBK employee and see

something like this. Tell me,

I mean, you come to someone’s place and see

a door like that — what would you think, that the Hulk

barged in here or what? I mean, this isn’t even

a lock cut open like at the FBK office.

This was smashed with sledgehammers and a battering ram,

like Romans in the movies, running up and striking it,

— or with helmets, headfirst. In other words, they didn’t just

open the door; they absolutely

smashed it to hell. Ruslan isn’t in the

apartment, nobody knows where he is, and he didn’t

write anything, which is strange, because obviously

if they’re breaking down your door with a battering ram or something like that, you

might still have time to write something like, “Get in touch with my

lawyer.” But there’s nothing. Nobody is answering.

What is going on?

We start trying to find out what happened through the police and the Investigative Committee.

I mean, it was clear that

masked men had rushed in, acting as if the law did not apply to them,

taken someone away, and our guy was gone.

No one understood at all where he was.

After some time,

Telegram channels started publishing

videos claiming that Ruslan was somewhere in some

snowy place, and the funniest part was that

he was getting onto a bus marked “VIP.” Let’s

watch this little video.

There are 3,000 people watching us live right now.

People are messaging me saying that the payment system is working again,

so there’s a link in the description

where you can send lovely little ducks

that will float across the bottom of the screen, and

each duck will bring us a bit of money

that we’ll use to buy a new door. You

go on about what happened. So then it became

clear that a huge number of police officers

had put him separately into a minibus, but we

understood he was being taken north, and

at first it seemed like

Arkhangelsk. After a while, those same

Telegram channels started writing—they

themselves, by the way, did not know where he had been taken.

They started writing about the Far East and about

other places, and then a witness called,

by which point he had been missing for two days.

His mother, of course, was going out of her mind,

and everyone else was tense too, because who knows what

they might do to a person under

our conditions. The commander of the unit called him,

because he simply could not do otherwise,

handed him a phone, a call came through, and left it

next to Ruslan. He said that he was on Novaya

Zemlya.

That sounded shocking, of course. Can you imagine?

Novaya Zemlya is a completely closed-off

territory. That is where the nuclear test site is located.

When you most often hear in

the news

that test launches were carried out there, that a missile with a dummy

nuclear warhead, or with a real

nuclear warhead—those are the missiles

they were firing. In most

cases, they go to Novaya Zemlya, and there

they fall somewhere there. It is a nuclear test site.

It is a coastal territory, and to

get there, you need to spend several months

trying to obtain permission from the FSB (Russia’s Federal Security Service), because it

oversees the border service.

Civilian transport does fly there,

but very rarely, and they will not let you on

if you do not have permission.

To fly to Novaya Zemlya—but in Ruslan’s case,

he got there within a day. That

suggests that he was transported on several

planes. And so, accordingly,

when he told us he was on Novaya Zemlya, in a very

sad voice, Ruslan told us

they had brought him there. But the question is: when they dragged him out

of the apartment in that jacket—well, they must have

given him some warm clothes there—because they brought him

to Novaya Zemlya, where at that moment it was

minus 23°C (about -9°F); usually at that time of year it is around -40°C (-40°F).

So of course, when the authorities

started hunting for Ruslan and started

all this business about how they were

now going to take him into the army, despite the fact

that there was not the slightest legal basis

for conscripting him. He had gone to court once,

and pro-Kremlin Telegram channels

write that he lost. No—he

lost once on one specific ground, but

there is currently another court case underway on a different

ground, so he has not lost

any final case. First of all. And second,

under the law, this is not allowed. By the way,

this is very important for all young male viewers

to understand: there is no such

concept or legal mechanism, no such

right under which they can grab you and

forcibly take you to a military unit. That is not

possible. Neither the police nor the military can do

that. For that, there is

criminal liability for evading

service. If a person is not evading service,

then no criminal case can be opened against him.

But he was not evading anything—he attended court hearings,

he was at the office, he received

summonses, so he was not evading

anything. What they did was absolutely illegal—they really

kidnapped him and, on several planes,

took him to Novaya Zemlya in a single night. So

at first it was kind of hard to understand

why Novaya Zemlya, right? But then after

some time, after talking to him,

it became clear: there is no communication, and getting

there is impossible. It really is, basically,

a quasi-prison, and

Ruslan says, yes, I am here; the other

soldiers have phones. In the army, soldiers

are forbidden to have smartphones, that is,

phones with internet access.

He does not even have an ordinary phone. He was

immediately told that he would never have

any phone at all.

There is a special day—Saturday—

when soldiers are allowed to use

communications, at least to call their relatives.

He was immediately told: not on Saturdays, not ever.

No one will be able to reach you,

no one will get through, no one will write to you. He has

a special person assigned to him who

follows him around and watches what he does,

literally walking after him even

to the toilet. So it is a prison. More than that,

the full resemblance lies in the fact that

he called us

because he asked us to send over

his medical documents. These bastards

will not even let him call his mother.

Literally 10 minutes before

this program,

his mother called me, and she was beside herself,

just crying and sobbing, saying, well, what kind of

situation is this—he can call from prison, but

before the police took him away, but

here, I mean, he was just taken away, kidnapped from

you — no belongings, nothing at all, you understand. His mother

is naturally worried about how he is there,

where he is there. He has absolutely nothing with him,

nothing. He has one pair of shoes there, one

set of clothes, no underwear, well, no basic household

items.

And as for buying anything there — well, maybe they will

provide him with something, but there is no such thing there

as just stepping outside and going to a store. Go

look it up on Google Maps and see for yourselves.

It is literally just

tundra, probably — there is not a single tree.

There is some little settlement there where a few

hundred people live, and they are all military. The nearest

stores — there are two settlements there.

In one of those settlements there is

a store that we looked up,

called “At Seryoga’s,” and that is basically all you can see there.

There is nothing there at all. But imagine what

his parents are feeling: their son was kidnapped, taken

away somewhere where it is -40°C (-40°F), he has nothing, and he is

not allowed to call.

Some strange video was published where, in

a few seconds of footage, he is being driven

somewhere, to some kind of bed. Let’s

take a look here. Well, as you can see,

he is a rather unhappy-looking person. He was transported somewhere for a whole day,

and his fate has not been determined.

It is unclear what status he may be in there; he has not

taken the military oath.

What he will be doing there is unclear. Well,

those scoundrels who came up with this

— yes, they surely, absolutely

planned it, because you cannot just

take a person away and, within a day —

in less than a day —

deliver him to Novaya Zemlya (a remote Russian Arctic archipelago). I do not know, maybe

they chartered planes or something, like on demand,

ordered something like that.

They sat there and deliberately came up with this plan:

we grab him, and then — bang — he is on

Novaya Zemlya, and a polar bear walks in. I

asked this

Ruslan — I mean, of course he was not in a

state to joke, but he said that

yes, I had said there were polar bears there. I mean,

Novaya Zemlya — the first association is, of course,

polar bears, naturally.

Whether he has seen any polar bears or not, we do not

know yet.

But they will definitely come, and of course

he will see them. And this shows that they really did

plan this whole operation.

Really, we were making dark jokes about it, but what

disgusting behavior. They did not think about his

family, his loved ones, about how,

again, you simply cannot treat people like this.

From one army unit to another — whether you want to or not —

you are supposed to leave with some kind of duffel bag

with clothes, you take the oath, even

if you do not want to — there is a procedure. You cannot

just say it outright: our army is

a prison. But they have said it outright: our

army is a prison, as this example has shown.

They have simply shown once again that our army

is a prison. And by the way, we have

a photo of what this military unit looks like

from satellite imagery. Let’s take a look. Or maybe —

no, there is no such photo, sorry

about that.

By the way, it also became clear why he

could not call us. This too was

apparently a separate special operation.

Think about it: any person with a mobile

phone — if people start breaking in, you would have time

to send something from your mobile phone,

to write a message. They cut the power in his

apartment, and at the same time, a few

minutes before that, his SIM card was

disabled — that is, Yota,

which

is his mobile operator, simply

shut off his SIM card so that during the period

when they were breaking down his door, when they

had cut the power and he could not

use a landline phone,

he would not be able to send anyone an SMS or

call from his mobile phone.

Which, by the way, is an excellent example

of how this whole обслуживающий apparatus (the service class around the state)

— and mobile companies in particular — are ready

to grovel before this state, while

of course presenting themselves as such

cool, trendy, modern companies.

But as soon as they were asked to do

something illegal, they instantly did

something illegal. Just now, screenshots were sent to Insider from

Yota’s internal database,

where it basically says, so as not to

give themselves away,

they put a note on his phone number saying:

for any actions, call PR.

Call PR for any

actions. In other words, they understand

that what they are doing is completely illegal.

If something suddenly comes out, let the PR person know immediately

so that they can carry out

crisis management, so that under no circumstances

the blame does not stick to Yota,

despite the fact that they are engaged in such

monstrous vile acts. Let me now

take a few questions live

on the stream. There is

a question from Ryan: have you appealed to

the ECHR over Ruslan’s kidnapping? In my

view, we cannot appeal there yet.

To apply to the ECHR, you need

to exhaust all remedies within

the country — specifically, you need to go through the courts

in the court of first instance, then on appeal,

and after all the courts in Russia

have refused you, then you get

the opportunity to complain to the ECHR. But we have

certainly already started this work. The Committee

of Soldiers’ Mothers joined in today,

and they too are demanding that he be sent back.

a proper medical evaluation, because

Ruslan has completely valid

documents that, on medical grounds,

rule out the possibility of

him serving in the army, and we started

this procedure. So, Timofey Platonov

asks how people can help Ruslan, and

whether you’ve now seen that with the Lubyanka (the FSB headquarters in Moscow), things are not so

simple. Timofey, of course we understood perfectly well that

it wasn’t all going to be straightforward, but

we absolutely understood that.

Every staff member fully realizes

that they are in some kind of

risk zone. It’s just that the situation with him really

infuriates us for various reasons,

for various reasons. First of all,

because, well, first of all, this is a new

level of lawlessness: to simply take

a person, kidnap him, and carry him off to

the ends of the earth. Secondly, on a personal level,

it really gets to me. I spent my whole life in a military

town; I come from a military family, and it infuriates me

that they have effectively officially called the army

a prison. They basically said: well, we can’t

put you in jail, so you’ll be in the army instead.

As if the army were a prison. That is extremely

irritating. So yes, we understood perfectly well

that things there would not be simple. As for how to help

Ruslan: if you happen to be there, or

if you’re watching this and you’re on Novaya Zemlya (a remote Russian Arctic archipelago), or if you

have someone you know on Novaya Zemlya who can help

him, just go there somehow, on foot if necessary,

try to find him, give him

a chance to use a phone, or

at least explain to him verbally what

is happening here, and send back

some word from him. It sounds absolutely insane,

as if someone were an elephant on the moon or something,

as if we’ve gone back to the times of the Gulag (the Soviet forced-labor camp system),

but for now, that is exactly the kind of help we need.

We’re doing all this work. Why

are Putin and this whole regime in such

a panic? Because honestly, there’s no other way to describe it

except as panic, because on the one hand

they puff out their cheeks,

trying to put on a brave face in a bad situation, but

this week, one very

small but, it seemed to me,

remarkable thing happened. I noticed it

and it struck me as super

symbolic, and I want to share it with you.

Putin was speaking at a meeting

of the Russian government, and there he simply

misspoke, which happens all the time.

I mean, I’ve already misspoken 27 times on this broadcast.

In general, on my broadcasts I constantly

misspeak and say things that, well,

either lose their meaning or even reverse

what I meant. There are tons of clips people make

just for fun,

including all sorts of Kremlin guys entertaining themselves,

where I’m saying some nonsense because I’ve

simply misspoken, misnamed cities,

and so on. And Putin misspoke too.

He said that we need to fight

the real incomes of the population. Let’s

watch those 30 seconds.

In the final quarter of the outgoing year, even

starting from the third, we can see certain

rates of growth in household incomes and

in unreal wages. We need to make sure

that this trend is preserved and strengthened.

But we all know that one of the

main tasks in this area is

fighting the rise in the level, the level

of citizens’ incomes

especially among those categories who

receive the least. This is task number

one.

Well, he misspoke, so he misspoke, for God’s sake.

It’s really not that big a deal, and maybe

no one would have paid attention. But people

did notice, had a laugh, and then the Kremlin

just sprang into action. And this happens extremely

rarely: they actually changed

the transcript. They redid that section,

cut out the words he actually said,

and inserted words he never said.

Why?

And why did I pay attention to it, and why did it

seem symbolic to me? Because this time

people started joking in a very specific way:

that this wasn’t a slip of the tongue,

but that he had actually told the truth, because

that is exactly how it is. And I will never get tired of repeating it:

the Kremlin

is in a frenzy and will keep sending

its people in helmets—like SS men—

to ban everyone and jail everyone over likes, and so

on, because they cannot achieve

higher income levels, they have wrecked

the economy, and the government controls

nothing. All the people who make up

Putin’s inner circle do nothing but steal

and spend their time, well, sort of

sorting out little issues, because it’s hard to steal

a billion, and once you steal it, you have to

share it with some people,

squeeze something out of others, with others

make deals. In other words, it’s complicated—it’s a

full-time job, as they say. And they do

that constantly and do nothing

else. Everything is falling apart, the country is getting poorer,

and that is why people, with a kind of

fierce but humorous determination,

started spreading this video everywhere,

because, look, this is exactly

what they are doing in

reality.

Putin said they are lowering people’s incomes,

and they are lowering people’s incomes.

That’s what they are doing.

Their ratings are falling—what possible

response can they have except trying to crush those who

are outraged, those who show themselves, those who

refuse to stay silent? And that is what is happening to us. But we

will not give up under any circumstances. So,

let me take a couple of questions. Erin Wake.

Someone asks me, thank you very much for

the report on domestic violence.

Will it be possible to fix the situation

only in the Beautiful Russia of the Future?

Regarding effectively legalized domestic

violence.

Everything that is happening right now can

be fixed only in the Beautiful Russia

of the Future. In this current state,

nothing can be fixed, absolutely nothing.

I mean, the system there is no longer

designed for that. That's what people write to me.

They write to me.

And now I'm getting messages—new

news is coming in that the searches at FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation) and the studio

have ended. It's just that I have this kind of screen here

with prompts, and words gradually appear there.

It says something like this there.

In all caps: SEARCHES. I think, where else is being searched?

But it's just the news that the searches

are over. But anyway, this system is not

something that can be improved anymore.

It's fundamentally built that way, well,

simply.

The entire law enforcement system

needs statistics, and it gets those statistics

however it can: it jails people for

likes, and even Putin himself

has said, basically, enough already,

stop imprisoning people for likes.

But they keep doing it, and imprison even more people,

because this system cannot be stopped,

it simply doesn't work any other way.

Right now, at the head of the country, we have

the result of negative selection—that is,

the rule of the worst. The worse a person is, the higher

they are in this hierarchy, and we

cannot expect anything good from this

system. So, as for the investigation because of which,

as we believe, the special forces came today specifically

—yes, absolutely.

As part of some broader campaign, there was

an order that raids needed to be carried out regularly.

But why did they come

today in particular? We definitely

believe that one of the main people behind it

was VTB Bank chief Andrei Kostin.

He is, in fact, a very resourceful

person. If it seems to you, well, how

could Kostin, a banker, order something like that?

No—banker Kostin heads

such a corrupt institution, a very

loss-making one, and it works in such a way that

our tax money goes into this bank, VTB.

VTB pays under-the-table salaries to various

corrupt FSB officers and police officers.

As we have seen, it buys planes for

Medvedev's wife, for the Patriarch (head of the Russian Orthodox Church), as

the investigation showed—they also use

these planes.

And accordingly, Kostin there for his

mistress as well—this plane. That is, these

people, who keep on their payroll

a huge number of

idle generals, in that sense,

can send special forces somewhere without

any problem. They can do that.

And this time we did something we usually do not

do. We do everything based on documents,

and we never call—we do not contact

the subjects of our investigations so that

they do not know in advance what we are going to

do. This time we had to—if you

watched the video that we did, after all,

release today—we needed to

establish the identity of one of the guys.

For that, we simply couldn't do otherwise, so we

called Kostin's office, and then

called that guy himself. I

wrote to him on WhatsApp and called him; he

hung up immediately too. But they knew

perfectly well that we had figured out who he was.

They knew perfectly well that we

had exposed the VTB scheme, because after the release

of our film about it, Asker-zade (likely Nailya Asker-zade, a Russian TV presenter)

publicly lied, claiming that all these

planes had nothing to do with her. Why

did they do that? This is very important.

They are afraid of sanctions, and they are afraid of the law,

including laws that regulate foreign

corruption. But if the largest state bank

is effectively providing a plane

for Medvedev's wife, that is bribery, and for

that bribery VTB in particular can

be punished—not only in Russia. In Russia,

of course, no one will punish them, but in London,

where they are listed, where their shares are traded on

the London Stock Exchange, and so on

and so on—they are afraid and worried

that this scheme will be exposed.

And we exposed it, and we found out that they

stole the planes. When I say stole

the planes, many people think, well, sort of—

what does that even mean? Each plane costs $60

million. This is a gigantic,

gigantic corruption scheme. It's wild—

these guys have a plane, you understand? If

they steal planes, can you imagine what

is going on in the bank generally? They

stole these planes, and they are run by the same

people as before. More than that, this is

Kostin's closest aide, this is

the head of his office—that is,

the person who does everything for him,

the person who communicates with him most often,

the person who sits closest to him.

This is very important. Let's watch

a fragment of our investigation where

Georgy Alburov, in fact,

triumphantly gets through, and we understand

that VTB will not be able to, so to speak,

weasel its way out of the corruption

scheme involving the planes. But then we simply

went ahead and called Kostin's office.

[music]

Hello... your passport, please... how

can I reach Alexandrych's reception desk by phone?

And Vorontsova, a non-profit organization.

the foundation for supporting the development of civil

aviation. We came to the meeting, and we want

to send a gift.

We have an anniversary, and New Year is coming soon. You

wanted to know where it would be best to send it so that

it definitely arrives, and definitely with greeting cards.

about ten people, Kostin Andreevich's hall

before

[music]

a lot, you see. I mean, all of us

identified this person, we proved

everything, and I think that when they realized that

it was us, I called him, well, I called

and said, hello, this is Navalny. Talk to

me—he immediately hung up in a panic.

They understood everything, and of course they really did not

want to see this video that we are

publishing, because, essentially,

in it I plainly explained to everyone

give me a few more seconds to explain what

actually happened with all of this.

The entire VTB corruption scheme has already become

effectively, legally proven: VTB

Leasing acquired several private jets.

They were needed to serve the interests

of various crooks who are not entitled

to have planes.

But they so badly want to fly, and the planes

belonged to VTB.

They were serviced by the aviation company

Business Aero. And who is this Vorontsov,

Alexander Yuryevich?

Who is this super-close and super-

reliable person who owns the air carrier

to whom it is not scary to entrust such

secrets as, for example, the passenger lists

for every flight? First, we found his

photograph. Look, here is the man.

It is captioned: Alexander Vorontsov.

And he is standing next to Kostin at the forum

Russia Calling! It was he who handled

the flight arrangements on VTB's side and on the

other side

for the direct organizations, as

the founder of Business Aero.

According to data from the European Organization

for the Safety of Air Navigation (Eurocontrol),

all the planes we are interested in are operated

by the same operator, Skyline Aviation,

an absolutely unknown company.

It is registered in San Marino, apparently specifically

for servicing

the aircraft stolen from VTB. We take an extract

from San Marino and find out that the company is run

by a certain Russian man named

Oleg Burov. And, would you believe it, this very Burov

is also the director of Business Aero,

which belongs to the chief of staff

of Kostin. The VTB planes

were managed by Kostin's chief of staff.

The planes were stolen, and they continue to be

managed by Kostin's chief of staff.

They steal, they hide things abroad,

and they just lie to our faces endlessly. I mean,

of course, many of you, when we

were making this video—and we were already

finishing it at the last moment, when

we had already all been thrown out, we no longer had

the equipment, and had to figure out how to rework it—

and

bits of this video were left there in the office,

and we simply

finished it and uploaded it. You may think,

as you watch that legal section,

"Good Lord, some companies from who-knows-where,

papers are flashing by, it's not clear what any of it

means." But believe me, it means

a lot.

This is genuinely a huge amount

of investigative work that

exposes VTB Bank, and on the basis of which

in the beautiful Russia of the future

they could all, without question, simply

be jailed immediately for corruption and embezzlement.

But even right now, this provides grounds

or at least many claims against VTB Bank

to be brought both in Russia and outside

Russia. This is actually very

important. They are telling me that at the very beginning

—sorry—I forgot to say: please write

your questions on Twitter with the hashtag #RussiaOfTheFuture

and I will

answer them. There are 8,000 people watching live.

Please forgive me

for stumbling over my words, because after all

this is an emergency broadcast. We are going on air from

a backup studio. Huge thanks to our entire

team, who still somehow managed

to organize this backup

studio.

Right now, in the description below, at the link,

there is a new donation system, because

the previous one was shut down for us by Mail.ru,

which belongs to Alisher Usmanov, so

we are fighting as best we can, and you

are supporting us, and we are not going to

give up just like that. Write your questions on Twitter with

the hashtag #RussiaOfTheFuture. I said in

the previous segment that Putin

is extremely worried, United Russia (Russia's ruling political party) is extremely

worried. We can see this in various

ways, from different signals, actually.

Let's watch this video again.

If you can play the clip where the little man in

paint

starts making accusations against one of the

employees of the Anti-Corruption Foundation

and simply says to him, "Let's go around the corner right now

and fight." When I watched this

video, I was amazed

that they were filming him, and there he is in that helmet,

looking ridiculous, like some ridiculous fascist from

a parody film, saying, "Let's go

settle this." This is really what you see before

you: United Russia (Russia's ruling political party) and Putin.

This is simply how they operate. So let's

now watch this funny

little moment, and then you will see how it

implement on the main Russia Day (a Russian national holiday)

first, the guy who says, "let's go"

let's step out; there's a restroom here

I can [help] you here, here; I passed along your signal

I understand, if that's the question, why

just now he was looking for [you], that you'd come over; I...

I'll film a Muscovite.

come on, little car

he called out, "let's go to the hall"

Vasenka, if I weren't like this, just once...

do you understand that you will be carrying out an illegal...

an order—an illegal one. Is it really that hard for you...

to carry it out? Let's assume you won't...

you won't.

well, what did you just... how much...

that is, these are small, spiteful

aggressive people in helmets who are not...

sort of vested with authority...

of course, there's also a pistol here

there is one

but in essence, all their power rests on

some kind of ephemeral thing, on the idea that

we recognize it as authority, and that's why they

behave so aggressively and

so brazenly, because they

understand that if suddenly everyone who

is standing there stops being afraid of us, who in fact

can't really do anything, then they

will disappear instantly. And right now in

the Moscow City Duma, which I keep

talking about because it is essentially

right now the only regional

parliament where there is a real opposition

which we helped shape, including

through Smart Voting, we are seeing

absolutely incredible examples of how

hysterically they behave, how cowardly

how they instantly, by the way,

will lose as soon as

the opposition is able to create normal

parties and there are real elections—how they

will be thrown out immediately. That's what is now

happening in the Moscow City Duma. United Russia

still, with the help of falsification, has

managed to preserve its majority. They can

pass any law. They passed the budget, and

they pass various statements there in support of Sobyanin

—well, you'd think: just sit there

like bosses, smoke cigars, pass

your laws, enjoy life. But the opposition

keeps showing off there, keeps saying something

—so what is it saying? Fine,

Navalny cuts these clips up and

shows them on his YouTube channel, sure

a lot of people watch the program; in particular,

8,000 people watch it live

my last live stream was watched by 1.4

million people, but still, what of it?

it's not the whole country. Let them cut things up there

and amuse themselves with how some

opposition figure insults us—who cares.

No, they can't handle it like that. This week

in the Moscow City Duma, a real

scandal broke out because United Russia

decided to do the following in order

to make sure no one says anything cheeky

or calls them

political prostitutes, as has happened—they

introduced a new rule under which

deputies can be stripped of the floor for 3

sessions, and their sessions are held about once

a week

so basically, if you say something that United Russia

doesn't like, you're immediately banned there for

several weeks and you can't

say anything. What's more, before this they didn't allow

the opposition members to say much of anything, and

they could only announce some of

their statements in the "Miscellaneous" section

the agenda would go on and on and on

for several hours, and only in

the "Miscellaneous" section were they allowed to the podium

to say something. Now even in the

"Miscellaneous" section

you can't just get up and say

"speech by such-and-such deputy"

you have to write out again what you want

to speak about

and if you say something other than what

you wrote down, you'll be deprived of the right next time

to ask a question. And if what you wrote

contains something they don't like, they

won't let you approach the podium at all. And there

the scandal escalated to the point that

simply

all the opposition deputies, all of them

the Communists in full

as well as the Yabloko faction leader

and the A Just Russia faction leader, simply walked out of the chamber

let's watch that moment. Deputies of the

Communist Party faction of the

Russian Federation, Yabloko, and

A Just Russia...

so right now this is not just lawlessness, I

believe that what is happening now is sheer rudeness toward

us, the opposition deputies, and

I ask those who are ready to leave the chamber with me

—it is impossible to remain in this mess

thank you. Given the current situation that

has developed here, in order not to aggravate

the situation, I propose that members of the CPRF faction

leave this chamber for today

thank you

excellent—this is how a parliament should act

and again I watched this video and said

we were absolutely right in what we did within the framework of

Smart Voting. Yes, of course, right now

it's impossible to outvote them because

they have a majority, unfortunately

which was formed, among other things, because of

people who called for a boycott of

that last election. We were just a little short of

winning a majority in

the Moscow City Duma, and then we would have dictated terms to United Russia

but at the very least

they made a political gesture

this week—they walked out in protest, and there

is a real confrontation there, but in...

In the end, you understand, the opposition—

the opposition can't really do anything.

But at the very least, through its words and actions,

if you like,

through political gestures, it has to show

whose side it's on. Because if it doesn't,

then the whole—

the Moscow City Duma, like the State Duma now,

will turn into the same astonishing spectacle

that we saw at the last session. I

watched those 11 seconds and thought:

that's the essence of it right there. She came there, and speaking there was

the chairwoman—well, she came there—

the head of the Moscow City Court, Yegorova, whom I've talked about many times on this program.

She is one of

the most sinister women,

one of the most sinister figures in modern

Russian history. This is the person who

fine-tuned the system of falsifying criminal

cases and imprisoning innocent people. All those

Bolotnaya case and Moscow case

and many, many others—Yegorova ran all of that

like a machine. She turned judges into

powerless ants who

hand down absolutely any,

absolutely lawless ruling. And then she came to watch it.

She sits there, and the United Russia members

just take turns—well, in the video now you

can see a couple of them—walking up to her,

kissing

her hand. Let's take a look.

There sits this witch who throws people in jail, and

one came up and kissed her hand, then another—Stepan Orlov,

the one we also did an investigation on—

ran up, grabbed her hand, kissed it. Everyone

has to come up and, basically, kiss the ring,

kiss the hand of this power, because it imprisons

those who ask United Russia, and Stepan Orlov in particular,

questions like: where did this or that come from?

How did this petty crook get one apartment,

then a second apartment? Go to the main

channel and watch how this

deputy—who, by the way, used to be

an aide to Irina Khakamada and a great

democrat—then somehow went from one

living space to two, and now in terms of

real estate, he owns properties worth

many millions of dollars, and he kisses

the hand of this power, because that's how it

all ties together. He has to serve

the Moscow City Court, and the Moscow City Court serves him,

because it jails those who ask too

many questions. And once again I welcome

all the deputies in the Moscow City Duma who

have come out and are standing up to

United Russia. And by the way, one of the

amusing consequences

there was this decision they didn't pass—but they did not

pass a decision allowing them to strip a deputy

of the right to speak, and some other decisions too. But they

did pass a decision under which it is now possible

to vote remotely by proxy. You've seen

it many times in the State Duma: an empty

hall, and some weirdos running around pressing

buttons. In the City Duma, that used to be

not allowed, or at least technically much

harder. I mean, things like that happened there,

but, for example, you couldn't do it at

committee meetings. And deputy Yengalycheva too,

from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, wrote that they brought this in

specifically so that they could

stop showing up altogether while still passing any

decisions they wanted. And I saw comments

saying, oh come on, that won't happen. Well,

look at the meeting hall of my

ecology committee—what it looked like

today. No one there except three people, all three

from the Communists.

The United Russia members just—well, you can

clearly see it in the picture—they just, damn it,

don't come to work, and yet there is still a quorum,

all the decisions get passed, because

for some reason they're also voting remotely. They passed

an amendment to the rules under which one

United Russia member can come in and say:

don't look at these empty chairs; in fact,

the deputies whom people voted for are sitting here

and they are making

decisions at the ecology committee

to slap, roughly speaking,

a waste-processing plant or an incinerator

in your area. So yes, everything is absolutely

according to procedure, absolutely by the rules. That's

what United Russia looks like. And why I started with this

is that it's exactly the behavior of that very

little thug from the saying about the dog in the alley,

who says, let's go around the corner, have a drink, and then fight.

That's exactly what's happening. All 9,000

people are watching us live.

A lot of people keep asking me for some reason

about integration with Belarus. I can see

several questions on that topic, but

listen, my position here

hasn't changed. Of course, Putin

doesn't really want any integration with

Belarus; he couldn't care less about all this integration.

What he wants is a new state in which

without violating the constitution, he can become

president once again for another 12 years.

He just needs a new political entity.

Before, I was president of Russia for 20

years, with a break for Dimon (Dmitry Medvedev's nickname), and my term in

Russia has ended. Now we have some kind of

new country,

Russia-Belarus or something like that,

and now I'll head that too for six years, and then

another six years after that. That's the whole point of this

integration. There is not the slightest other

meaning to it. 59,000 people are already watching us.

59,000 people. I was delayed a little

for technical reasons, so

I'll stay on the air a bit longer.

Many thanks, by the way, that you

are watching the program so actively.

Usually, as New Year's approaches, the holidays

draw everyone in and people become less interested

in politics. This year we've seen that this is

completely not the case.

There was enormous interest in politics; the rallies were

massive, and now, right before New Year’s, because

a lot of things are simply going to start

changing very rapidly. You know how it is:

everything here is falling apart. But at first

it was falling apart slowly, slowly, slowly, and

then—bang—all at once, and we simply

look around and there’s nothing left. And right now this

is happening in one of the most important areas for

the state: healthcare. I’ve talked here

a lot about the Doctors’ Alliance trade union

and so on, but over the past

week there was a real battle,

though not a rap battle. Actually,

it was a video battle between two

officials: one, former Health Minister

Golikova; the other,

the current one, Skvortsova, who simply

started explaining things.

One says our healthcare system

is exemplary, while the other, at the very same time,

is saying that our healthcare system

is terrible, in ruins. Let’s start with Golikova’s

first remarks.

Putin’s current aide, the former

head of the Accounts Chamber, and before that

the deputy prime minister overseeing healthcare,

said that all this “optimization”

turns out to have gone badly. A few years ago

people in the regions were already loudly protesting

about this so-called optimization.

Of course,

in many regions the optimization was

carried out unsuccessfully, to put it plainly. But who

carried it out? You were the ones who did it.

Next to Golikova sits Sobyanin, who every

hour seems to be shutting down hospitals, while doctors are furious.

The people who carried out this optimization sit there

saying, “Yes, yes, it turned out badly.” It’s as if

they were some kind of opposition

that has just come to power, and before them there were

other people—for five years, for ten years, for nineteen

damn years there were other people. No—they’ve been sitting there

for 20 years, and now they say it went badly.

Skvortsova responded by saying that, actually, in

Russia we don’t just have good medicine;

it is exemplary. It’s one of the world’s models.

The next time you show up at a

clinic, remember Skvortsova’s

words.

If any of you have received treatment in

Germany, Israel, America, or other

countries,

then when you come back here, you’ll look very differently

at how medical care is organized

in Russia. Right now, just for general

understanding: our model is one of the

benchmark models in the world. And every day

we collect these, Lord help us, text messages for programs

that I talk about in every broadcast—

for the treatment of little Anya and Petya, who need

operations in Israel and Germany.

And at the very same moment, the health minister comes out

and says: if you

have been to Germany or Israel, then you

of course know that we have exemplary

medicine.

It’s so exemplary that, for some reason,

we are constantly sending people to non-exemplary countries—

our children, because here

we can’t treat them. But the battle, so to speak,

continued, and after

Skvortsova spoke about “exemplary” medicine,

Golikova responded again.

And this time she said that the optimization

had been carried out—not just unsuccessfully, as she had said earlier,

not merely badly,

but that it had in fact been carried out terribly.

The optimization was carried out terribly. I’ve said this before

and I’ll repeat it now: in many

regions of the country,

the so-called optimization

of healthcare was carried out

terribly—I will use that word—and

the quality and accessibility of

healthcare services

deteriorated sharply.

So, the former health minister

says that the optimization was carried out

terribly. She is one of the very people I’m

talking about. To use her own term, she is now

Putin’s aide. And we are the ones living

inside this terrible optimization,

that is, inside this very healthcare system

where everything is terrible. And clearly they

have enormous amounts of money; none of them

gets treated in Russia. But if for

us everything is terrible, and they are forced to

admit it—even on Solovyov’s show (a Russian state TV political talk show), where

they stand there like this,

nodding their heads, thinking, “My God,

thank goodness I have somewhere on Lake

Como some clinic or other

where my children and I will be able to

get treatment—not in this horrible

optimized system.” Well then maybe

someone should be dismissed, or they should admit

their mistakes, or say that this terrible

optimization in many regions was carried out

by these terrible

regional parliaments where United Russia held the majority,

or by the terrible State Duma,

which passed such laws, and by those

bad United Russia governors

appointed by Putin and supported by United

Russia. Basically, if something

is terrible,

then it’s probably not enough for us simply

to state the fact that everything is terrible. We

can see for ourselves that everything is terrible. Let’s remove

the people who are doing terrible things and

try to find people who will do

things well, or at least normally. But that is not

happening. But notice this already:

it’s impossible to deny it anymore, because everything was

bad, bad, bad, and then, excuse me, it all

just went completely to hell and fell apart. That’s what is happening

in healthcare right now, and that’s why

Doctors are on strike. For 20 years, they were never left idle.

Because they were told, "We’ll fix"

"your ambulance service."

"We’ll fix your ambulance service," and then

a year passed, five years passed, and nothing. Nothing at all.

Nobody fixed it, and it became clear to everyone that

it was never going to be fixed.

For now, let the authorities know this: 59,000 people are with us.

We’re live on air, and we’re ready to show

photos of what’s left of the office and the studio after the raid.

Navalny Live viewers haven’t seen this yet, but they will.

They’ll be looking at this for months. Let’s see what happened

to us there. Show it. There, you see?

This time, they were taking ceiling panels down.

I mean, judging by the sounds

I heard, I was expecting

broken glass. There’s no broken glass, but

they were tearing apart the ceiling, looking for—I don’t know—

some heroin or cocaine.

Venezuelan, maybe. Business as usual.

Right. There used to be a server here, and some other stuff too.

They ripped everything out.

And they took it all away. They only left us the rack.

Let’s see what else we’ve got there.

Okay, right, this is

this is actually the very place where I

usually sit. The ordinary chair is still here.

What a blessing that at least the chair and

the table were left. As you can see, this is the

studio where I record the main videos.

There used to be standard lighting equipment here,

sound equipment,

and now there’s nothing. They’re telling me that, in fact,

they even took the power strips from the studio.

That’s one thing. I mean the extension strips you plug into

the wall socket—those are gone too. There’s nothing left.

But we, like a phoenix,

keep rising again and again.

And Putin stamps his feet and screams, "Take everything out!

Paralyze all their activity! What the hell

are they even doing there?" But even so,

we will keep doing it. This

our mighty old man,

is apparently sitting there right now, waiting for

a fresh report to be brought to him on how

successfully the latest operation against

God knows what went. And I have no doubt that the report he gets says

it was all a huge success, brilliantly executed,

another wonderful operation—because

it’s obvious that he is, of course,

living in some completely parallel reality.

He is clearly senile, without question.

That’s not really an exaggeration or an insult.

By every sign, we can see

that Putin is in a state of senility, and his

inner circle is afraid to tell him that he’s

senile, so instead they indulge him

and encourage it. And we watched that this

week with Poland: like a maniac, he just

kept going on and on about Poland, Poland, Poland.

He held a summit of CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) leaders.

There was Nazarbayev,

Lukashenko, and some other people from Central Asia,

possibly Azerbaijan too, and he really

lectured them about Poland for an hour and a half.

We saw it on video. I remember, they didn’t even want

to show it properly—they weren’t prepared, but I

still thought:

here he is, supposedly giving a report about Poland,

and it’s awkward to interrupt him. Lukashenko

needs money, Azerbaijan has

its own agenda, Armenia too,

Kazakhstan—Nazarbayev was just sitting there

like he’d seen it all before, sitting through an hour and a half

about Poland. So yes,

the guy is obviously senile.

And this week there was a colossal,

super-mega traffic jam that simply

showed that senility. How are

a traffic jam and senility connected?

I mean a car traffic jam.

An absolutely record-breaking one.

Something incredible happened in Moscow. Why?

Because grandpa wanted to go skating.

We’ve got this great athlete of ours now,

this great hockey player who scores, what, 100

goals every time, and everyone has long since

been laughing at it. I made a video about it, and

after every new match there are tons

of funny clips showing defenders skating around him,

dodging him. This here

is footage from the previous super-mega

hockey game where he scored 11 goals.

It amused everyone. Just 11 seconds—

let’s take a look.

[music]

The goalie lifts his leg so that

Putin can score that puck. And look,

you’re normal people, so let’s

imagine ourselves in the shoes of some

Kremlin PR people. The old man has annoyed everyone.

In 20 years, everything has gone to hell,

nobody’s wages are rising, but

part of the population still believes the fairy tale that

"if not Putin, then who?"

And at least they’re pleased that

Putin seems energetic, unlike Yeltsin (former Russian president),

who was drunk all the time. And he likes

playing hockey, and he has this

quirk: he thinks he has to score

20 goals, and he enjoys it. So it would seem

logical to say, "Vladimir Vladimirovich,

people don’t really believe

it’s realistic when you score

16 goals. So for variety,

let your team lose once. Or maybe you

just won’t score that many goals. Or maybe

you go one-on-one with

Ovechkin,

and Ovechkin beats you.

Then everyone would say, "Wow, that’s actually cool,

that’s great, something different for once."

But the degree of senility now is such that

nobody can say that. And don’t laugh—when you

think I’m exaggerating,

please look here at what it looks like

when it reaches the next stage of senility:

the golden goalpost. Let’s watch.

[applause]

This is the president of Turkmenistan. Does this

video

amuse you, or does it inspire respect? Well,

or will it make you think,

my God, and your impression of

the president of Turkmenistan, and of everyone loudly

surrounding him, has become much worse?

Well, of course. You laugh at this. You

think, my God, idiots. But he does this

because all these people come to him

and say: listen, I won't reproduce the

first name and patronymic,

well, in our case they say, Vladimir

Vladimirovich, listen, Vladimir Vladimirovich,

you can't imagine, the entire internet exploded

with delight when it saw how you scored a goal.

How you skated up

and slammed one in, and then another, and

another, and everyone scattered, and you kept going, and

there was even a video of you putting your helmet on

the wrong way round, but as long as everything turned out fine.

Everyone wrote: what a cool guy.

YouTube is flooded with comments saying, thank you,

Vladimir Vladimirovich, you're the coolest

dude, in great shape,

and definitely not some senile man who loves

scoring all these goals. They convinced him

that this is awesome, and they keep

convincing him every day. And meanwhile, he doesn't

use the internet, as we know. They bring him

the whole internet, printed out. Here,

I have a printout budget right now, so they

bring him printouts, and it says that about

you, the number one topic on the internet

this week was that you are great.

You were criticized 27,000 times more often,

criticized for being too

handsome for your age, because

it's impossible to be that handsome. And also,

another 16,000 messages came in saying that

thanks to our exemplary medicine and to you

personally, everything worked out, and this is no

exaggeration.

You remember, I played here

that representative of the Academy of Sciences who

said that thanks to Putin, scientific

breakthroughs happen; thanks to Putin,

Russian electrons move along their

orbits much more vigorously and spin around

their axis in the opposite direction compared

with Western electrons.

A human being is the kind of creature that if

all sorts of people around him endlessly

feed him nonsense and string him along, he'll believe it.

And Putin genuinely thinks this is

freaking awesome, so he went and decided,

what's new,

everything was great when I played

in my Night Hockey League, and now

I'll play in the Kremlin. And on the Kremlin

rink they staged their hockey game, and there

it was all perfectly natural: everyone came,

the roads were blocked off, and people were

stuck in traffic for four hours. Vladimir

Vladimirovich scored eight

goals this time. They write that he has scored something like 435,

though that's modest compared with the 11 in

the previous

previous game. But really, let's just

make this clear: for 27 seconds you

will simply see how this guy just

skates along, and that's it, while everyone else

just kind of skates around chaotically,

trying not to notice him, while he just

keeps going and businesslike scores his goals,

and everything is fine.

He thinks it's cool, it's great, while

all the rest of this gathering of thieves, lackeys, and

cowards, unfortunately, including our honored

hockey players, act as the same

contemptible lackeys around him.

They simply skate around him and

create for grandpa

well, just a backdrop. Twenty-seven seconds.

[applause]

If the old man wants to be entertained, they entertain him.

The whole country gets shut down; Red Square is blocked off

so he can play hockey. If you want to play at little war,

or something about Poland, well,

go ahead, here you are, you have

your own special forces in fascist-style

helmets storming your enemies. And all of us in Russia want something

real in Russia,

something alive. We're sick of this filth already. This is

my final program this year.

We'll meet again next year. I

just want to wish everyone that in

the coming year we achieve it, so that in

Russia something real, something alive, happens,

so that we don't have to watch endlessly this

minced-up mess, the constant lies of various people

all the time, this deception, these kidnappings,

their removal, and when hypocritical crooks

say something like, well, everything was done

according to the law. I mean, it's just an endless

sort of Botox mask that has simply

become the face of our country. Let's

make sure that something

alive happens in our country. It all depends

entirely on us. We have 61,000 people watching us

live. I want to end the program

with a video from today's

search, before it began, where, in effect,

the whole Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) team is wishing you a Happy New Year.

Let's watch.

They broke down the doors. Finally, I'm inside

the office during the search. At the time I couldn't

get in there. Come on, we're being watched right now by

1,700 people. Wish them a Happy New Year.

[applause]

[music]

[applause]

That's what a cheerful team we have.

Thank you so much, dear friends. I

am very happy that you were with me, and I

was with you all this year. We will

definitely see each other next year.

Happy New Year