Wagner and Lukashenko. Shnur in Khabarovsk. Spartak fans under repression

[music]

Hello, dear YouTube viewers and viewers in

Moscow, it is exactly 8:00 p.m., which means that

your favorite program is live on air,

Russia of the Future, and I am its host, Alexei

Navalny, or this week, the blogger for

poisoning lice, Ekaterina Vinokurova.

Ekaterina Vinokurova

A correspondent for our beloved, our jointly beloved

state

television channel, Russia Today (RT), she

was showing off obnoxiously on Twitter, and I

suggested that she disclose the size of the salary

the salary she receives from this

state television outlet. She said that

she would do it in exchange for my

I published my declaration in full this

week. Anyone

curious about how much I earn

and how my income is made up can go

and take a look. But Ekaterina Vinokurova

has now spent four days—four days have passed somehow—and

is pretending she did not notice, did not

pay attention; in short, she is refusing

to tell us what kind of

salaries are paid on state

television to people like her—

completely useless, needed by no one, and

most importantly, working on television

that is watched by approximately zero people, well,

or two, or maybe four—but in those moments

when we want to have a laugh and

also tune in and watch, then we are still

among the viewers. Otherwise, no one watches.

The unhurried course of preparing for my

program was changed literally in the last 10

minutes by deputy Yevgeny Stupin,

a deputy of the Moscow City Duma, an excellent

deputy elected

through Smart Voting, because he sent me

a reply that had in turn been sent to him by

the Investigative Committee regarding

the video that was published in many places,

and I was probably one of the first to publish

it on my Telegram channel.

Then we discussed it here with you a lot.

Do you remember?

A man turned on loud music,

a neighbor came to him and complained about him,

then Rosgvardiya officers (Russia’s National Guard) came,

and they simply started telling the guy directly,

“Right now we’ll plant drugs on you.”

Let’s watch 57 seconds from that incident,

which was discussed a great deal—millions

of views for that video—and all of us

of course, the whole country was outraged.

Just imagine: they simply come and

threaten to plant drugs,

so matter-of-factly, as if they do it every

day. “Seven seconds. Don’t want that?”

28,000 people are watching live,

and I think every one of you absolutely

agrees: well, guys, we saw

a crime. A person is being directly

intimidated, told, “We’ll plant drugs on you,”

“you’ll go to prison,” and deputy Stupin, well,

who wrote in—good for him, once again thanks

to everyone who voted for him—he wrote:

“Guys, look at the video, it’s all right there,

a Rosgvardiya officer says, ‘We’ll plant

drugs,’ and so on. Open

a criminal case.”

Stupin received a reply today. Let’s

look at it—they simply write,

the sheer level of brazenness: there are

no grounds; this appeal and this video

accordingly do not contain sufficient

data indicating signs of any

crime. Well of course—but what

signs of a crime? Just Rosgvardiya officers

while performing their duties

make a real threat to a person: right now

we’ll plant drugs on you. No

crime there, apparently. I don’t know—what then

would have had to happen? For them to pull out

a weapon and shoot this person? Or

to actually plant drugs? No

crime. But if you throw your

paper cup at a Rosgvardiya officer,

some large man with a big belly in

a bulletproof vest,

then the Investigative Committee—Bastrykin (head of Russia’s Investigative Committee)

might as well have a flashing light go off on his cap, and he runs

to open a criminal case.

But if they tell you, “Right now we’ll

plant drugs on you, and you’ll go away for several

years to prison, to a penal colony—want that?”—they

see nothing, notice nothing. Yet another

example of how, at locomotive speed,

this whole thing that

for some reason, out of habit, we call

the law enforcement system has long since

ceased to be that, and it simply spits in the face

not only of ordinary citizens, but of deputies too. And

even in the most high-profile cases—if this

guy

who had turned on the music had later written a post on

Facebook saying, “You know, can you imagine, guys,

Rosgvardiya officers came to me and

threatened to plant drugs on me,” then we

would say, well, maybe they threatened him, or maybe they

didn’t—how can you verify it? It would need

to be investigated. But here

it is all there, and they understand perfectly well that everyone will

see it, yet demonstratively say,

“You know, we do not consider that there are

any signs of a crime here at all.” In other words,

this is something everyone should be told about,

something everyone should be shown, simply because this

original video, as I already

said, was indeed seen in all

the major VKontakte communities by millions

of people. Everyone should be told how

the story developed: that even here

the Investigative Committee saw no

crime. Then where will it see one? Last week, following our

publications last week,

well, and since we are already on the subject, we found

We started talking about police lawlessness

last week. If

you remember, I showed you a video of a man

in sheer terror, running around his apartment

in his underwear because the door to his apartment

was being broken down and sawn through by police. Then they

stormed the apartment and tackled him

right in front of his child. It was a completely

or at least a very disturbing video, which I

will show you again now so you remember.

But this whole story took an interesting

turn, because

this man's relatives got in touch with us

and told us what is happening there.

And believe it or not, the situation has gotten much

worse. But first, a 35-second reminder.

So here it is: the apartment being stormed at two o'clock

in the morning, with a man who does not even understand

what is happening.

[music]

[music]

It is unpleasant to watch, of course, but it is worth

watching

because overall the situation turned out to be

even worse. It turned out that

despite what the local authorities

were saying — that this man had posted something

on social media and therefore it was necessary

to urgently search his apartment — no, that was not

the reason. He is now facing

charges — the man whose apartment was stormed — of

insulting a government official.

It turned out that in Kaliningrad, while standing near

a store called Euro Spar,

he allegedly said something to a police officer

— apparently something rude — and the officer

took it as an insult. In other words,

roughly speaking, I do not know whether he told

the officer to go to hell or not — he said

something to the officer, the officer felt insulted, and somehow

his superiors felt insulted along with him

to such an extent that this happened

in the evening, and they issued a special

order stating that there were urgent

circumstances requiring them, that very

night at 2 a.m., to storm

this man's apartment and break down

his door in the middle of the night in order to

look for some kind of evidence that he

had insulted a police officer the day before while standing near the store.

And if you think that

that was the end of the situation — no.

Against this unfortunate man

another criminal case has been opened

because he, obviously being in a

highly distressed state — which is understandable,

with children crying, practically an infant there —

said something to the investigator who

was conducting this absolutely illegal

search. In other words, all these people who

stormed his apartment, they are all

criminals from the point of view of the law. They

had no right to do it, and the investigator who

conducted, as I understand it, or conducted

this search

— I mean, that person themselves should simply

be jailed tomorrow, plain and simple. These are

obviously illegal actions.

And so the man said something

that was obviously unpleasant to the investigators. I myself

am always saying unpleasant things to them, and

they opened yet another criminal case against him

for threatening an investigator, namely

threats or violent acts

in connection with the administration of justice

or the conduct of a preliminary

investigation. In other words, the local

committees, the whole police gang, who

felt

— not exactly that trouble was brewing, but that they

had found themselves in a very bad situation

because the whole country saw how they

broke down a man's door for absolutely no reason

and terrified his family. And obviously, in order

to protect themselves and put more pressure on

this man, they opened

more cases against him because he was not

happy that in the middle of the night

they burst in and broke down his door. So there he is,

interfering with them breaking down his door, outraged by it,

he is obstructing them,

and supposedly threatening investigators

with violence. Of course, we are not

going to respond to anyone with violent

actions, but

all these people absolutely should simply

be sent straight to the defendants' bench

immediately. And they are all police officers, and

the whole gang — the prosecutor's office,

the investigators, those SOBR officers (Russian special rapid-response unit),

bursting in there — I mean,

just imagine again

the speed of the decision-making: you

tell someone off near a store — it happens,

that can happen to anyone —

and the officer is offended, and he can immediately make it so

that an order gets issued, SOBR or

OMON (Russian riot police) gets called, and in the middle of the night your door gets

broken down, and on top of that an investigator shows up right away. And

this is what is called one hand washing the other,

mutual cover-up. All law enforcement

agencies have turned into an organized

criminal group. And this criminal

group includes, of course, not only

police officers and investigators, but also, without question,

judges are among the main, one of the

key participants, and we are seeing this

fully in the case unfolding

right now — the case they have piled onto

Pskov and his associate named

Alexander Dorogov. This is a very important case.

I mean, do not treat it as though

Navalny, in the first half of the

program, is just talking about random guys

who have been thrown in jail, so it is not very

important. The case of Kotelevsky and Dorogov is

actually very important because

regular viewers of my program, you

You probably know Kotelyevsky, or at least remember him.

He’s this bald guy who lives in

the Moscow region. They have a whole

group of video bloggers who, for

the past several years, have been engaged in

fighting specifically against police

lawlessness, and in 90

percent of cases, that fight consists of

walking around with a camera and filming various

violations committed by police officers, and

so,

two of these YouTube bloggers, Kotelyevsky and

Dorogoy, were arrested and jailed; criminal charges were brought

against them, and now they are

being held in pretrial detention (SIZO, a Russian remand prison).

Their associate Andrei Filin spoke about this.

Let’s watch—just 9 seconds.

Hi. Today, July 29, were violently

detained by a group of twenty officers from

SOBR (a Russian special rapid-response unit),

our friends and colleagues Alexander Dolgov and

Yan Kotelyevsky. They were detained—you all

know why: for speaking their truth, for their

investigations. Over the last several

videos on Yan Kotelyevsky’s channel

have dealt with the funeral business in

the Moscow region.

Many of you have had to deal with funerals, and

many more will have to, and everyone knows

that it’s very expensive—but is that really the

case? In the Ramenskoye urban district,

whoever removes the body is the one who organizes

the funeral. For some reason, that’s how it’s done. The topic is

grim, and very profitable for those

who are involved in it. Among those involved, according to

statements by Dorogoy and

Kotelyevsky, are police officers—and who exactly

is protecting them remains to be found out.

But for now, the investigative authorities

are questioning Kotelyevsky and

Dorogoy. The guys are being held in a temporary detention facility

in the Moscow region, in Gorlovnya,

and as far as we know, the police have already

begun interrogations.

But that information was from a day

ago. By now, both of them have been arrested.

Kotelyevsky has done various investigations.

You heard that striking phrase: many of us

will have to deal with funerals. But

the thing is—why? This is a very important

case, because for several years now Kotelyevsky has been

genuinely battling

a kind of judicial-police mafia

from the Moscow region, and he has made life

very difficult for them. They have literally been dreaming

for years of putting him behind bars,

but never quite dared, because, well,

he’s a fairly public figure. His most famous

case was Kotelyevsky’s

—though in fact he’s had many cases.

He was constantly exposing police officers and judges

in the Moscow region, but the most famous case

was that one day he was filming

a police station with a camera, as they

were walking around—he was filming it.

And, and

he was detained because the police

were very unhappy that he was filming them.

The matter involved some plot of land

that police officers had allegedly seized illegally.

They detained him unlawfully, dragged him in, and

he was filming them and recording audio, and

they detained him and jailed him for 15 days.

The thing is, when Kotelyevsky was

locked up, he had some kind of phone—it wasn’t

a smartphone, just a phone with a really good battery—and he

didn’t turn it off. That phone ended up among the

physical evidence.

And it just kept continuously recording everything that

was happening. In particular, that phone

was brought, along with the evidence and case materials,

to the judge. Who was the judge again?

Let me tell you exactly now.

It was Judge Golysheva, and the recording

simply captured Judge Golysheva

explaining to the police—there are several

hours of recording there—something like, ‘Your

witnesses are gone? That’s nonsense. You did everything

right. Rewrite it, boys. Let me

play you one clip—1 minute 19 seconds

from the longer recording that caused

a huge scandal. I mean, all of this

made it obvious that the judge should be removed—there was an obvious

criminal conspiracy there.

The unlawful arrest of Kotelyevsky—

I mean, it was really, truly

a genuine criminal offense: bringing someone to

administrative liability—in this case, arresting

a person known to be innocent. And this

was a unique case,

proven by an audio recording of conversations

between a judge and the head of the local

police department. Here’s a short excerpt—

19 seconds from that recording.

Careful, just watch—it's hard to listen to.

It’s all very, very bad there.

There are no outsiders—everyone involved has an interest.

Miss consultant, confidential, official

order.

It’s simply a judge and a police officer sitting there

discussing how to jail an innocent

person, and she says, ‘Well yes, there were no attesting witnesses,’

‘Yes, he’s shouting—of course he’s right.’

And I’m thinking: so why was he

forbidden to film? There’s no such rule anywhere.

‘Let’s make something up.’ And there they are, discussing

how to actually jail an innocent

person for 15 days. And that judge, of course,

should have been stripped of her status; she herself should have been

jailed. It was a huge, huge scandal. And how

did it all end? With nothing. She

is still a judge. But still, the scandal

did happen. Naturally, those police officers, that

judge, all of them—they basically painted a

target on his back, or on his fine

wonderful bald head—a target. And on him,

and everyone else from the channel and the movement there,

that remarkable group of people—I’ve long

I know them — they’re my comrades, very good people.

These guys are really just being

systematically targeted for imprisonment, and

right now their case strongly resembles

the case of that Police Ombudsman (a Russian police accountability activist), and I

understand that the essence of it is this:

that Kotelyevsky was standing there, and a car drove into him,

and then they said, “Oh yes, you

damaged our property because

the car got scratched,” or something like that.

That’s what supposedly happened, and then they accused them

of extorting money from a police officer

under the pretext that they wouldn’t

file a complaint against him. So basically, the whole case

is built on police testimony, exactly

the same way as in Vorontsov’s case, the Police Ombudsman case,

when one of the police officers said,

“He extorted money from me, extorted money from me,”

and that was enough for a criminal case, pretrial detention, and just

because we’ve entered this kind of period after the adoption of

the constitutional amendments in our

country where total lawlessness is happening

absolutely everywhere, yes. Unfortunately,

we’re not taking to the streets as often as

we need to. You have to come out, you have to show up, because at this

level of lawlessness, they saw that

the Ombudsman case went through, and they opened exactly the same kind of

case against these guys. And it’s

very important to follow how this

develops, because here you can directly see

a police-and-judicial mafia — bandits,

in the Moscow region, sitting there and jailing young men

who fought against them, and fought very

bravely. Go to the movement’s channel,

go to Kotelyevsky’s channel,

read everything, watch everything, and support

him in any way you can, because right now, of course,

public attention is needed. So many people are being jailed

right now that it seems like hardly anyone is even writing about it.

Well, sure, I saw that Mediazona (an independent Russian media outlet) wrote about them,

and someone else did too, although this is of course

an extremely high-profile case: they’re simply jailing

an activist who fought against

corrupt police officers and judges.

They’re putting him in prison for nothing. There are a lot

of questions about what’s happening with

our Smart Voting. My God, how

glad I am — I’m so glad you’re asking me questions

about Smart Voting. I’m practically ready

to tear up, because we

— well, I personally, all of us — spend an enormous

amount of time on this. We’re trying to convince everyone

how important it is to take part in Smart

Voting, to register. People are coming around

slowly, because everyone thinks

that with some silly thing like

registration, then showing up and voting,

nothing can happen. It can.

It can happen — this is an important precondition

for other events to take place.

So thank you to everyone who’s interested.

The campaign is underway. We have thirty-nine

regions — the updated figure now is 39

regions where Smart

Voting will be active. In total, campaigns at various

levels: there will be 66 city council elections in 33

cities, including major cities

with populations over one million. This is very important, and right now we’re

going through a difficult process:

signature collection is wrapping up for almost all

candidates, and for other candidates

the decisive moment has come, when

it’s being decided whether they’ll be allowed onto the ballot — many people

have been allowed through,

while others are being kept off the ballot. There, of course,

a completely lawless

situation is unfolding. I wanted to say a couple of words about Tambov.

Tambov — you know the saying, “The Tambov wolf is your comrade” (a Russian idiom meaning “you’re no friend of mine”) —

as a region, from the point of view of

dislike for United Russia, it’s actually very promising.

But enormous

falsifications keep happening there. The authorities there aren’t just

corrupt, not just bad people —

they’re outright bandits, and very

blatant ones at that. A group of people from

our штаб (campaign office), led by our chief of staff,

Diana Rudakova, is running in the Tambov city council elections,

and they’re not being allowed onto the ballot — and not being allowed on

in the finest traditions of — remember there was

that famous meme about Darya Timurovich?

The one who was supposedly born and born in

Novosibirsk.

When people submitted signatures there, the procedure

works like this: you submit signatures for a candidate,

then someone in the commission sits there,

some guy, and those signatures for the

candidate get entered into some list, and that

list is then checked against the database. If

the specialist wrote not exactly “Darya Timurovich”

but, say, “Dari Timurovich,” they go, “Oh, look,”

“there’s a mismatch — it says ‘Dori Timurovich,’”

“and here it even says ‘Dori Timurovna,’”

“so the signature is invalid,” and

that’s it. I mean, it’s a complete sham.

But what’s happening right now in

Tambov

is exactly this: all three of our people

are currently being kept off the ballot.

Let’s watch for a minute — Diana

Rudakova, the head of our team, will explain

what’s happening. Three out of our four

candidates — me, Egor Slivin, and

Anna Nefedova — submitted signatures to the

election commission last week.

We collected the signatures very carefully, with

a double safety margin, and they went through

several of our internal checks.

We submitted the clearest, most legible ones to the

commission.

But the verification of signatures by the district

commissions was carried out with the most serious

violations. One stage of the verification through the

GAS Vybory system (Russia’s state election database) took place entirely in our

absence, and commission representatives

deliberately distorted the surnames of the signatories

so that the names would not match the voter database,

and all subsequent stages of the verification

were based on data distorted by the commission.

the data, and then it was up to

a handwriting expert who simply

arbitrarily threw out genuine signatures

of voters. We war—

[music]

You were probably wondering what happened — I

cut out. I really did

go offline. Vladimir Putin struck back

with a counterblow. You understand, this is a powerful, extremely powerful

technology. What just happened is that our

electricity was cut off. Just some

guys cut the power in order

to, for a few seconds,

stop my program. And 57,000

people were watching live before

the electricity went out. I hope

they’ll come back, but it’s just, well, like

I was just talking about this — how in

Tambov they won’t let our candidates run

and are engaged in petty fraud

and you can simply watch this petty

cheating with your own eyes. Well, I don’t know

there, we’ve turned it back on now. We probably need

to leave someone by the electrical panel around the clock

some kind of armed guard there, because

some people will come again and

switch it off, and I’ll disappear from the broadcast again

So, getting back to Tambov, we

have once again found ourselves in a situation where

voters — ordinary people, as in Moscow

and it was the same in Novosibirsk — have to

prove that they’re not camels, meaning

they literally have to come in and

say: I’m here, I exist, I am this person, this is

my signature, it’s genuine. And to them

the graphologist and the commission member will say

well no, wait a second, do you have

a graphologist’s certificate? No. But I

do have one, so I know better

whether this is your signature or not. Here are

18 seconds

one of those people who is now

going around this commission proving

that he is who he says he is

I am Vyacheslav Andreevich Yershov. My signature

in support of candidate Diana Borisovna

Rudakova was recognized as invalid. I am

outraged. I demand that the signature sheet be recognized as

valid, because these are my

constitutional rights as a voter, and

I demand that Diana Borisovna be allowed

to take part in the election.

And there you have the situation: there is a person, there is

his signature, and the commission says the signature is fake

and the person goes around proving it. Rudakova

goes around proving that the Tambov mafia

simply does not want to let these people into

the election, because they will win these

elections, then they’ll sit in the assembly and

keep them under control. We will now

nevertheless push for registration of

many candidates in many cities

Some have already been registered, and they really

need any help you can give — with registration,

campaigning, voting, financial

support, or simply sharing links, and so

on. Because, as we know, in

practice, in regional elections there is

low turnout, and a person can become

a deputy with a tiny, tiny

number of votes

That is exactly why our Smart Voting

strategy is so important. We still haven’t finished

collecting signatures everywhere yet, so for those who

for example live in Belgorod, I want to draw your

attention: there are still three days left there

for our great candidate

Maxim Klimov, who is running for the local

legislative assembly, to collect 3 percent

of all voters’ signatures. But that’s hard, really

it is

In the summer, collecting 3 percent of all signatures

for him

to take part in these elections — three days

are left. Please go to his website

and if you live in Belgorod, help him

however you can. First of all, I forgot to say that

right here, I can see right now that

a little duck named Sergei is floating by. You

can click below and send these

ducks

We are still continuing to raise money for

paying the fines of those people who

took part in the Moscow City Duma elections

and were not allowed to run, like Rudakova

They called everyone into the streets, and they were then

hit with enormous multi-million-ruble fines

and of course we want to compensate

those fines on the principle that we all

protested together, so let’s all chip in

100 rubles each (about $1). This is very important. By the way,

speaking of chipping in 100 rubles each

I wanted once again to

thank all of you very much for taking part in our

fundraising campaign. The whole story with

them taking away FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation) from us was that we

were very afraid of losing those

7,000 of our regular donors, and I

talked about it here on the show, we released a video

and now we have 15,000 regular do-

donors. So we really thoroughly

rubbed the noses of all those guys in

the Kremlin, Prigozhin, and everyone else

who did this. It’s really cool, we

are very proud and very grateful to you. It’s also

a huge responsibility. An awful lot of

people signed up specifically for monthly

donations

During the presidential campaign we had, I think, more than 100,000

people

send donations, but they

mostly sent them as one-time contributions. But this kind of

large-scale support from 15,000 people

every month — of course, we’ve never had that before

There’s also a link in the description — a lot of

fundraising links there. Go there

click

join in if you can

If you want to support us, Vitaly,

asks me: tell us, do you know anything

about the logging around

Lake Baikal?

I know they’re building major rail lines there, and I

know that, naturally, under the cover of

that rail construction, they’re cutting down

a huge amount of forest, including

areas that don’t actually need to be cleared, simply

so that, while the work is going on, they can cut it down and, as usual,

send it off to China. I don’t know

all the fine details there;

I only know what’s been reported in the media. So let me

look into the issue.

Damn, if you keep using these kinds of

usernames like this one — “sorceress” and it rhymes with

swear words — I can’t read them out loud.

Anyway, a girl with a very obscene

username asks me: what do you

think about the situation with Chaika’s wife (likely referring to the family of Yury Chaika, former Russian Prosecutor General)?

Taking away her passport, threatening to take the children

just to keep her from leaving — I think I’ll talk about that.

It really is a divorce story of the year. I

do have it in the plan; we’ll cover it in the show, but

first I wanted to tell you about this.

It turned out that the first part of the program

is entirely devoted to political repression. So

here’s a question for you: what do you think is currently the

biggest and yet completely

non-high-profile, almost unknown

mass political case with a large number of

defendants? Well, if you

think about it, you might say the Moscow Case, although

that one has already more or less ended. There was

the Bolotnaya Case (the prosecution following the 2012 Bolotnaya Square protests), and there are other cases underway,

including cases against Crimean Tatars, and so on.

But no — the biggest repressive case right now is obviously

the case against — you’ll be surprised —

Spartak fans, and more broadly

against the football fan movement. I

briefly talked about this in the last or the one before last program.

There was a question about it here.

But Ilya Yashin released a really good

video on his channel, and it once again

drew attention to the fact that we need to talk about this.

After all, we know that Spartak fans —

who just a few years ago

were seen by the authorities as unquestionably

their own supporters — were, you know,

guys with right-wing leanings who

were perceived as a counterweight to certain

liberals. But then it became clear fairly quickly

that Spartak fans — and

the football fan movement in general —

cannot be politically mobilized

for any one political force, whether the authorities

or the opposition.

Because it includes completely different kinds of people, and

the football fan movement instantly

splits apart as soon as people start

discussing the political agenda.

And the authorities don’t like the football fan movement at all.

First, they want there to be

a kind of political monolith — a monolith

that is pro-Putin or otherwise politically uniform.

Second, they generally want

to take everything under control, and they view any

actions or movements as

hostile acts, and they’ve simply

started putting people in prison.

Spartak fans held what was basically just

a completely harmless event: a bus carrying the players

was driving by,

and they blocked the road in front of the bus —

a small secondary road —

for a moment.

They waved flares and shouted, “We love

Spartak!” It was all great, all fine, and

then they dispersed. In other words, it was the kind of action

everyone does to support their favorite

team. It’s nice for the people sitting in the

bus to hear that.

Even so,

a criminal case was opened. There were hundreds

of searches, and dozens of people became defendants

in the criminal case. In terms of scale, it really is

an absolutely outrageous case — bigger

than, for example, the Moscow Case — and yet

almost no one knows about it. Let’s

watch a clip from Yashin’s video, about 37

seconds long.

An important political case that, unfortunately,

no one is talking about: on June 15,

Spartak players were heading to Tula

for a match against the local Arsenal, and the

red-and-white supporters gave the team a colorful

send-off. They unfurled a banner,

put on a flare show, and for a couple of minutes

held up the movement of the bus and

the police escort vehicles.

I want to stress right away that this happened

not on a busy highway, but

in the area adjacent to the stadium, where

there are hardly ever any ordinary cars.

It’s mainly club

transport that moves through there.

But agree, it seems that nothing terrible

happened. Yet against Spartak fans

a criminal case was unexpectedly opened.

Three supporters were detained immediately,

and the next day they were released under

travel restrictions, but that was only

the beginning. Over the next several weeks,

the police identified 70

Spartak supporters who may have

taken part in this action.

Searches were carried out in their apartments, and there began

interrogations, face-to-face confrontations, and other

investigative actions. All of these guys

are being charged under Article 213 of the Criminal

Code — hooliganism. The maximum sentence

under it is 8 years. The supporters

put on a fairly ordinary performance;

previously, no one was imprisoned for something like this.

Even though the laws were the same, there are no victims,

no one was harmed, and it’s not just that Spartak has no

complaints — on the contrary, the club

officially thanked the supporters for

for the vivid show of support and for the motivation

of the players, Spartak captain Georgy Dzhikiya

even said he was ready to pay out of his own pocket

to cover any fine for the fans if

the police had any complaints against them. 59,000

people watching live in real time

the viewer count recovered after

that — our electricity was cut off

thank you very much for watching, I mean

Yashin is saying the right thing here

there are no victims, nothing at all, and in general

what is the problem? The problem is disobedience

to our police state. Before it starts

locking everyone up around them — basically, their

machine works like this: they need

new cases

new employees are hired, they expand

the anti-

extremism centers

they need new cases. If some people

are running around, singing something, waving flares

and didn’t warn their handler from the

center, then

somewhere along the line they start locking people up, and

there are no victims, no one at all, but

nevertheless people are actually being imprisoned — these are

quite simply real repression, like

everyone stays silent. I know that football

supporters, real Spartak fans, don’t

kind of troll me a bit because

at one of my meetings with

voters in 2013, I was asked which

team I support. Well, it’s a Moscow

team, I live in Moscow, so I support Spartak

well, anyway, that’s that

I said I support Spartak, but at the same time

later, in an interview with Dud (Yury Dud, Russian journalist)

he asked me who the head

coach was and which footballers were there, and I know absolutely

nothing about it. If you asked me now

who the head coach is, or who plays, or

what division they’re in, I would have

no idea at all. And honestly

speaking, I’m not very interested, but

of course, like any other

person, it concerns me when, for absolutely no reason,

they open a massive criminal

case in which, essentially, hundreds of people are being processed

and jailed, and I’m simply baffled every

time by the position of the rest of

the football movement, which

stays silent and watches: these ones got devoured

and the next ones will be devoured too. Of course, in every

country there are police units

that, well, kind of keep an eye on fans

because it’s quite a lively

social group that can do various things

including, of course,

there are some related stories, yes

especially in the past, involving crimes

committed by fairly organized

groups. And in general they also have

certain traditions, like arranging fights somewhere

or something else, but overall that doesn’t

concern ordinary people — they fight among

themselves. But even so, one can

more or less agree that this requires

some kind of police oversight. But damn,

locking these people up for nothing is the most

genuine police lawlessness; it is

the most real political repression

these people are, unquestionably — if

they start imprisoning them — they will be

prisoners of conscience, and they will be

political prisoners, despite the fact that they are

fans, and maybe they hold

right-wing views or left-wing views — that no longer

matters in the slightest. Therefore

I simply want to draw attention to this

case

so that people follow it, because, well

basically no one is — I mean, practically no one

is writing about it, just a small number of

outlets: Mediazona writes about it, Sports.ru writes about it, but

overall, the scale of this case is nowhere near

matched by the scale of its coverage, because

well, people seem to think, like, why should we feel sorry at night for

fans — Spartak fans, or, I don’t know,

Zenit fans — because they supposedly

once, back in 2012,

were against the protesters. First of all

these are completely different people now, and second

it doesn’t matter what views they

hold — the system devours anyone

today they’re devouring Spartak supporters, and

forgive the banality, but

tomorrow they’ll devour you in exactly the same way

so solidarity is everything to us. So

Dmitry Zair-Beg asks: Alexei,

hello, what can you say about the New Greatness case

I saw your post about the torture of

Ruslan Kostylenkov — how would you

comment on the prison terms requested by the prosecution?

A completely fabricated case, fabricated

entirely

from the first word to the last

invented by FSB officers

Even officially, that whole so-called

terrorist group

had nine people, of whom four

were undercover agents — that’s according to the case materials

the group, that is, consisted of

some unfortunate

young people who were recruited through a

Telegram chat, and undercover agents from the FSB and

the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs), who wrote all these documents, and

now, simply in order to get

a few more stars on their shoulder boards, are trying

to put these unfortunate kids in prison, actually asking

for terms of 6 to 7 years. And on top of that

they torture them — torture them in absolutely monstrous ways

read Kostylenkov’s letter in

Meduza — there was rape, really, I mean

it describes utterly nightmarish things

that are happening. 2,000 people are watching us

live right now. So, there are a lot of

questions here about fabricated criminal cases

the utter horror of our situation, of our

The point is that if I

cover in my program all

the politically fabricated criminal

cases, I won’t be talking about anything else

at all. Every episode would end up being

a gigantic Thursday broadcast, and it

would be devoted exclusively

to political prisoners, because

there are simply more and more of them

and more and more, and

there are now so many of them that people have

stopped paying attention to the individual cases

but I’m trying to highlight this however I can

but

of course, all of this is very sad and depressing

So, Ivan Grigoriev, Alexei, in

an interview with Pivovarov, Sobchak said that you

lied about her coming to your home

the story, the proposal disappeared, paid for, bla

bla bla bla bla bla. Ivan Grigoriev, come on

seriously, in 2020, to believe Ksenia

Sobchak

or any word she says? It’s just that by now we

simply have a great deal of

empirical experience showing that she simply

lies all the time, in every word. How can you tell

that Ksenia Sobchak is lying? She opens her mouth

that’s all. And in that sense, there’s really nothing else

left to discuss

The fact that 2,000 people will watch live

about coronavirus—there was a time when coronavirus

when I was sitting at home

and doing broadcasts from home, it was always

the last topic of the show, when there were already a lot of

viewers—the biggest audiences watched that

those were the biggest hits, everyone was very

interested. Now we’re all already sick of

the topic of coronavirus, yes, we no longer

want to discuss it, we’re tired of it, and in general

it’s not interesting. But nevertheless, a new, to put it mildly,

very interesting process is underway

because in the regions it’s either the first wave

or the second wave, but there it’s simply

a catastrophic situation. All those

videos we saw of ambulances

of ambulance vehicles that

were standing in huge lines—they’re gone only in

Moscow now, because in Moscow

an enormous amount of money was invested

and now all of this has shifted to the regions, while

the number of people dying is enormous

Our situation is better than in the United

States of America

where the biggest catastrophe is happening

in that sense, but overall things are very, very

bad. And it’s interesting that this

week Putin spoke about coronavirus

Let’s take a look: it’s already mid-to-late

late July 2020, and Putin is already forced

to say that the situation with coronavirus

continues, continues to be

very difficult

[music]

If I knew how to roll my eyes that theatrically

that well, I would be rolling them

very hard right now, because, well,

seriously, what a primitive little tactic

they used. I mean, in a way

it’s actually surprising they didn’t

do it earlier. There had already been searches

there had already been internet shutdowns, but

just, like, turning off the lights—that hadn’t happened yet

So, Vladimir Vladimirovich, you are

an amazingly sophisticated

politician. Wonderful—I’ve forgotten what I was

talking about. I really forgot what I was saying here

but Sergei Andreev asked a good question

Hello, whom will Smart Voting recommend

if in one

region two opposition candidates are blocked from

running? Excellent question, dear

Sergei Andreev. If these are

gubernatorial elections—who in

gubernatorial elections—I assume

you’re asking this question in connection with

the gubernatorial elections, and even

specifically in Arkhangelsk, where they registered

a candidate from the SR party (A Just Russia),

which is great, and his surname is Mandrykov. He’s

a real candidate, and as I understand it, he

supports our position very well. It seems

he will be able to take part in the election, and there

is also a second candidate from A Just

Russia, also apparently not a spoiler

a woman, unfortunately I don’t remember her name. In

gubernatorial elections, everything is much simpler

you don’t even need Smart Voting there

because you are voting for a runoff

that means you vote for any

candidate

except the Putin-backed one, except the United Russia candidate, because

the goal is for the other candidates

together

to get more than 50 percent. That

means there will be a second round, and in the second

round, the candidate who received the most

votes in the first round should be the one to win

because everyone will need to rally again and

vote for him. As for the first round

of the elections—that is, all the other ones, the

really important elections for regional legislatures

city councils, municipal councils, and so

on—well, that’s exactly what Smart

Voting is for. Because if there’s one

opposition candidate, everything is clear, but if there are two, three, or four, and

if it’s not clear at all which of them

is actually the opposition candidate—and in 99 percent of cases

that’s exactly how it is—you come to the polling station and

look and see nine names there, and you

have no idea who these people are. Well,

let’s be honest: for a city

assembly or even a regional

legislative assembly, you don’t know

any of these people, not a single one, except in

very, very rare cases. And we

will take on all of that heavy lifting

all that tedious work in 33, or however many I said,

34 regions across 66 election campaigns

We’ll look at each person and examine

their previous results, and so on.

And then we’ll figure out who has the best

chance of winning, and who is

almost certain to come in second, and we

will give you that person’s name so that

through smart voting you can vote

for them. Because if you don’t have

the surname, you won’t know yourself whom

to vote for. Or you may think that you

are more of a left-wing kind of guy,

so you’ll vote for the Communist, while someone

who’s a liberal will vote for Yabloko (a Russian liberal party), and

the United Russia candidate will win, because that is exactly how it

works. So we’ll see who is stronger and

suggest that, setting ideological

differences aside, everyone vote together for

candidate number two so that they win, just as

happened in Moscow, and it will work

if you register for

the voting. So, about Putin—I was saying

about that, and

I wanted to show you an 18-second video where

Putin says that the situation is very

difficult with the coronavirus in the country.

The situation remains difficult, and as

they say, it could swing in any

direction. That, by the way, is exactly why

we have gathered here, and therefore there are no

grounds for complacency, for

relaxing, or for forgetting

doctors’ recommendations. Remarkable

words—truly remarkable things to hear at the

end of July. How can that be, Vladimir

Vladimirovich?

The situation could swing in

any direction; we must not become

complacent—it is very alarming.

Well yes, it is very alarming. But who was that

person sitting in this same bunker

some 65-year-old man with a large number of

plastic surgeries, who quite

recently was saying that everything here had

been sorted out, everything had stabilized,

so much so that

I order preparations to begin

for a parade. Let’s take a look at who that

man was. Thirty-three seconds: given that

the situation both in the country as a whole and in

most regions

the armed forces themselves remains

stable, and in many places

is stabilizing after passing the peak

of infectious disease,

it is possible to make the following decision:

I order the start of preparations for the military

parade in honor of the 75th anniversary

of victory in the Great Patriotic War (the Soviet term for the Eastern Front of World War II). So,

you see, two months ago everything was so

stable and great that a parade had to be held.

And back then everyone was saying—and

I was saying it too—what are you

doing? You’re going to infect a huge number of people.

Let me remind you: the parade took place in

a huge number of cities in the regions. I

said that in the regions you would simply create

first with the parade and then

with the voting a second or

an additional first wave of the epidemic there. Everyone

said, what nonsense.

The situation is stabilizing—and now

it turns out it has become alarming, and now

it is alarming. So why then

did they announce the vote?

And I remember how Vladimir Putin spoke about

how, in principle, everything was fine and it was possible

to finally return to considering

the most important issue of our time:

his constitutional amendments. Eighteen seconds.

But we proceed from the assumption that as

the situation with this pandemic improves, we will of course

return to normal life, including

having to think about further

work on the constitutional amendments. So,

we were returning, returning to normal

life, and then it turned out that in some places the situation is

serious.

Already this week it could swing in

any direction, and so on and so forth. Well,

Putin’s concept, as you and I

discussed a month ago, two months ago,

was fairly clear: they would say that

the epidemic was over, everything had

stabilized.

What’s more, I was already predicting back then—

a great prophet, though it wasn’t

hard—that they would start lying about a miracle

vaccine and say that Russian doctors were the first

to invent a vaccine, and we can see that this is

happening right now. But still,

this talk about a vaccine,

about human trials—all doctors are reacting

with sheer horror to the talk that

human trials are already underway and that they are already

planning—this is putting it mildly—to

roll out this vaccine. And everyone, naturally,

jokes that a country that is incapable of

producing insulin properly is now

trying to claim that it has invented

and will produce a vaccine against the corona-

virus. So, obviously, all of this is

a lie.

But the plan looked smooth: in Moscow

everything had more or less passed; there were no

endless lines of coffins for anyone to see in

the regions.

And to hell with it—let them die there; we’ll

say it’s all over, we’ll hold

the parade, we’ll hold the vote, and then

we’ll also say that we were the first to invent

the vaccine, and it will become the story of how

Vladimir Putin defeated the coronavirus. Well,

in other words, it looked smooth on paper, but

the ravines somehow appeared along the way.

And now those lines of coffins, after all,

sadly, do exist in the regions—an enormous number

of deaths. And in fact, there

it’s somehow not even very noticeable that any kind of

a turning point, stabilization, or something else

there’s nothing even close to that

there was a funny incident connected with this corona

virus, and with this mask

mandate—you know that in many

regions it is still in effect

in many regions the authorities are busy

doing some strange things: first they

ignored masks, and now

they’re forcing everyone in the metro—ordinary people

are being fined over these masks, while Sobyanin (the Mayor of Moscow) actually

just a month ago—he first introduced

a mask mandate in all establishments, and

then publicly, on camera, met with

restaurateurs and wasn’t wearing a mask, and

what’s more, like a day before that he said

that restaurants were reopening with masks, that everyone in

restaurants would be required to remain

in masks—and then he held a meeting, sitting there without

a mask. Let’s recall it, let’s watch these 30

seconds

I hope we’ve gotten rid for a long time of those

restrictions that were in place

and we didn’t make these decisions lightly; all

the decisions were considered very carefully

we monitor every stage, and this past

Monday—last Monday—we once again

checked

whether we were making a mistake; we looked at all the trends

the data, case detection rates, and

hospitalizations, the numbers, the overall picture

everything is declining, which is why we’re fairly

confident. Good. Well, naturally, when

this segment was shown, people watched it

and said: so, you just introduced

a mask mandate and now you’re sitting there without a mask, and

they filed complaints against him. Not even just

to troll him, but out of genuine

outrage—how can it be? You scare everyone and

fine them, while you yourself sit there demonstratively, on

camera, without a mask. And then a month passed, and

the first replies started coming in, and this is what

the wonderful Moscow government even

responds

Well, the official reply says

that evidence of committing an

administrative offense has not

been provided. So here’s the video, here

you are—you’re just hypocritical crooks. Here

is the video: Sobyanin has no mask on. No, this

video was shown on Moscow’s official

television. Does this video

prove that he was supposed to be wearing

a mask and wasn’t? Apparently not. No evidence

has been established—they write this down on paper, literally

paper will put up with anything. They really do

write this on paper and send it out, so

it can be framed and discussed on the

program

*Russia of the Future*. It’s just, simply, pure

window dressing, the real thing, and this

is, of course, also a great example of how

this escalation of brazenness is happening. Basically,

a year ago, two years ago, sure, they lied

deceived, cheated—they always did—but

not quite this openly, this directly. Still,

they at least tried somehow; they wouldn’t have

answered a question like this. You see, we

write to them: why was Sobyanin without a mask?

Fine him. They could have said something like

we lost the request, it never reached us—but they

don’t even say that anymore. They say

you haven’t proven that he was

without a mask. Just wait, there’s more to come. At the end of the

program we’ll discuss Belarus, where

things are much worse—that’s exactly where we’re

heading. I’m asked quite often,

why such an idiotic decision gets made, or

why such an idiotic decision—where

the root of this idiocy lies

Well, in many ways idiocy in Russia

is self-reproducing, and it is simply

determined by the laws and the established

order. But all the same, there still has to

be somewhere a kind of generator

of stupidity, a generator of harmful decisions and all

this foolishness

that someone came up with, and then it

grows to gigantic proportions

costs huge amounts of money, and so on. And

this week we saw

a perfect example of such a thing. More than that,

the generator of stupidity itself came out and

explained how it had all been done. More than that,

they proudly declared

that what they had done was supposedly

not stupidity, but some great, grand

achievement. So, you saw that

there was a hugely pompous, expensive

it wasn’t enough—just a parade, damn it, just

a parade wasn’t enough for Putin; he needed

he apparently wants to hold them endlessly

to please the Supreme

Commander-in-Chief, so he also held

a naval parade, and of course

but the main madness—aside from

the fact that during an epidemic, and in general

it’s unclear why you would hold this

naval parade, which is very expensive, by the way—

the crowning touch of the insanity was

the situation with the remains of the unfortunate

Admiral Fyodor Ushakov. Fyodor Ushakov

a great Russian admiral, had wished to be

buried somewhere there, in his

homeland in Mordovia (a republic in Russia), and he was buried there

his will was carried out, and he lay peacefully

in his grave all those years

but Putin needed a parade, and they literally

dug Ushakov up out of the ground and started

hauling him around the country, for heaven’s sake—I mean

they literally organized a kind of tour

they called it, supposedly, transporting the relics

of Admiral Ushakov, but I mean, really

they dug up a corpse and started with this corpse—and

they solemnly carried him from one

city to another, along rivers and seas

and supposedly used it to bless everything

the footage is monstrous, but I’ll show it

A bit of news.

At 21 seconds there’s a photo report, but besides that,

I wasn’t even going to dwell on this here,

about the Chinese and how they kiss these skulls.

They rummage around in these relics—it’s some kind of

nightmare. At 21, there’s a segment about how they’re transporting

Ushakov—the relics of Admiral Fyodor Ushakov.

A reliquary has been brought to Kronstadt and is now

located in the Naval Cathedral building. It was

brought from the Sanaksar Monastery (a men's monastery in Mordovia),

in Mordovia, for Navy Day.

During his lifetime,

he was among the founders of the Black Sea Fleet

and took part in the Russo-Turkish War.

Ushakov won 43 battles and did not

lose a single ship. The man was

a military man, an outstanding and honored figure in our

history. But he was a military man—he didn’t

talk to animals in the forest, he didn’t

heal people, and the Virgin Mary didn’t appear to him

or anything like that, as far as I know.

He was a military man. Before he died, he said,

“Bury me normally, please, just put me in the ground,

and I’ll lie there quietly.”

But they dug him up and started hauling him around

the country. Why? You’d be surprised. And while

they were showing this on television too, with

great pride, Putin was saying that he was sitting there,

flying on a plane, reading a book,

and an idea came into his head.

They should hold a naval parade, like

they used to do back in the old days.

He picked up the phone and called some guy—

the Defense Ministry chief,

the head of the navy, the commander—

and they started preparing it. I mean, just

do you understand? A crazy old man is sitting there, and into

his head pops some thought: “Wouldn’t it be nice

if, you know, it were all vivid and grand? Me, there in

Kronstadt, standing there, with people in uniform

next to me,”

“and then ships sail by and everyone salutes

me. Beautiful picture. So let’s

go ahead and organize something like that for me. And also,

dig up Ushakov and start carting him around

the whole country.” That is exactly how Putin,

more or less, explains how he came up with the parade.

Incidentally,

while on the plane,

for secondary reasons,

I happened to come across

it.

The man likes reading

historical literature, so he cooked up a parade.

Good thing he doesn’t like reading

science fiction, otherwise he’d have

said, “Let’s build a hyperboloid

of Engineer Putin the size of a 100-story

building,” or something else. I mean, let’s hope he doesn’t

start reading literature on

agriculture, because then he’d say, “Let’s

go ahead,” he’d say,

“let’s reverse the Siberian rivers so that

they flow into Central Asia, like some people once

wanted to do”—the same kind of lunatics who

ran the Soviet Union. It really was

a gathering of senile fools, and one petty tyrant

says, “Well, I was doing some reading and decided

to hold a parade,” and the others

stand there nodding: “Yes, yes, yes, of course,”

“as soon as we got the call, we immediately

thought, wow, we had exactly the same idea,”

“brilliant, absolutely, let’s do it right away.”

As for, say, buying apartments for military personnel,

or fighting the coronavirus,

or not holding a parade because of the corona-

virus—because that really needed immediate attention—but instead they held

a parade and some other highly ceremonial event, and

“let’s dig up Ushakov and carry him around

the whole country.” And they did it.

They spent billions on it and once again

infected a whole lot of people. And now we sit here

discussing why we have no money, why

we need to treat even more

people, and why our situation is

so difficult. Because there is a generator

of senility and idiocy, and he has

a specific name: Vladimir Putin. He

comes up with stupid, foolish things because

after 20 years in power, he’s lost his mind, like

any person who spends 20 years

in power. Of course he’s gone off the rails—I think his

mind is completely gone. Anyone would. If I sat

in power with that kind of power for 20 years,

I’d probably end up the same way. I like reading

different literature too,

and I’d probably come up with some nonsense as well, and everyone

would say, “What a brilliant idea he’s had.”

Like, say I love—I don’t know—

doing a show on YouTube. So let’s make it so

that everyone is forced to have

YouTube on, and at 8 p.m. on Thursdays

everyone has to switch to that YouTube, and those who don’t

—well, never mind—

we’ll fine them for disrespecting

the authorities.” And everyone would say, “What a wonderful

idea. Alexei Anatolyevich is a genius—how did

that never occur to us?” That is exactly what is happening.

Exactly the same thing: a person is going mad,

and the crooks and thieves around him

use his senility to achieve

their own ends, to steal. And if that theft

needs to be covered up with the corpse of Admiral Ushakov,

whom they dig up from the grave, they’ll

do it with pleasure. And sometimes, even

in an authoritarian country where everything

is supposedly under complete control, there happen

things that absolutely

no one can foresee or predict,

where it’s not even that a conflict happens or

something breaks down, but rather that something

gets exposed—when it’s no longer just people who are against

the authorities, like me,

or like you, but when at least some parts of that

same power structure start talking about the lawlessness

that’s going on and, well, show us

the underside of how all this is really put together.

And of course, I want to tell you about the split.

There was a question here about

Marina Chaika, and to be honest, we

when we saw it, we were honestly a bit stunned

because this whole family here is

the children

of Artyom Chaika, the elder son of the prosecutor general

Chaika — in other words, Chaika's grandchildren

sitting there. Yes, when we released

the *Chaika* investigation, which you can watch

on YouTube — after *He Is Not Dimon to You*

it was our second-most-viewed

investigation. All these children grew up right before

our eyes. We searched for photographs, we

dug through social media, we — well, we followed

them. But here — show that family photo again

of the family — there's a boy, Sergei, sitting there, and we

the last photo of him that we

had found showed him as a tiny child

on a private jet, and there he is sitting there, and we, we

suddenly see that they're on YouTube. I don't

want to somehow... well, they

really seemed to be in a very difficult

situation, and then suddenly they themselves voluntarily

show themselves — these children

and, as it turned out, the unhappy wife too, and they

talk about how, well, they want to

make it public: the wife wants a divorce

from Artyom Chaika, who is not just some thug

but also the son of the former prosecutor general, and now

the presidential envoy to the North Caucasus Federal

District, and still a man who

controls the whole system. He isn't just

refusing to give her a divorce — he won't even give her passport back

A person has simply been driven to such despair

Just imagine: this person is the wife of

yes, Artyom Chaika — Marina Chaika, right,

Marina, Lord, I forgot

I keep forgetting the names of our, you could say,

characters. Just imagine the level of

despair Marina Chaika has reached, and how afraid she is

that the authorities can do absolutely anything

take away the children, kill her, send her off

to a psychiatric hospital — simply because she

asked for a divorce from the prosecutor general's son

Let's watch a clip from her appeal

1 minute 57 seconds. The whole thing is only 4 minutes; you

can find it on YouTube. But here's the essence of

what she says in this short

video

My name is Marina Chaika. These are my children

Maria, Sergei, Dalia, and also Ossei Oles

.

I am the wife of Artyom Chaika, the elder son

of the former prosecutor general. This video appeal

may seem somewhat strange

but I am making it out of desperation. I am simply

a woman who wants to divorce

her husband, Artyom Chaika. We lived together for

21 years, and now we are in the process of

what should have been a calm separation, but instead I am under

threat. I am not seeking any division of property; I do not

want anything from my husband. I only want them to return

to me

at least my passport, because for almost

two months now — and you did not mishear that

because of this I have been forced to file

a lawsuit, and I also want to get my

documents from the notary

Irina Yuryevna Glavnaya, who also

refuses me, saying that without

a passport she has no right to hand them over to me

even though she is obliged to do so. And at this

moment, thanks to my husband, I effectively

have no rights, because without

documents — and because he

wields unlimited power

to pressure all state bodies, as I understand it

I now simply understand that my

family is under threat — and these are not empty words

especially the children, because I had

conversations that made it clear that

the judges would protect the man. I ask

the press and everyone to support me

and pay attention to this case, only because

I have no rights left other than the right to

public protection — nothing else remains for me

You have just seen the prosecutor general's grandchildren

and, in fact, Yuri

Chaika is still a very senior official

He is a presidential envoy; one of the most powerful

officials in the country. And in fact

that is exactly why they still continue

to have the ability to do

absolutely anything. Of course, unquestionably, I

despite all my negative feelings toward

the Chaika family

both sons, the prosecutor general himself, and

that whole prosecutorial gang in general

I feel

great — one cannot help but feel great

sympathy for this family, for these children

who are guilty of nothing, and for the wife, because

they have now experienced firsthand

that lawlessness, that

absolute arbitrariness that was suffered by

everyone else who ever dealt with the Chaikas

They took away businesses in exactly the same way

People died in mysterious circumstances, as you may remember

including the owner of the Far Eastern Shipping Company

and so on. Any person

who crossed this family

ended up having something very bad happen to them. And now

now this is happening to them — and, damn, again

just imagine the level of despair. Obviously

she was told: I will take away

your children, and in general I will do whatever I want

to you, and

and he will do whatever he wants, and she understands

that he really can do anything, and

his father will get involved too, and you will have

neither the police nor the local committee

nor the notary on your side — everyone, absolutely everyone,

will be against you. And suddenly, from being the grand

wife of the prosecutor general's elder son

you find yourself in a position even lower

than that of an FSB officer, because

an FSB officer is at least a person to whom

no rules apply

laws

And if you're a wife who wants a divorce

from the son of the prosecutor general, then you're basically

a target — they won't even issue you a passport

at all. Of course, she says she isn't

dividing any property, but Marina Chaika

certainly ought to say a big

thank-you to the Anti-Corruption Foundation because

thanks to the fact that we released this

film, Artyom Chaika ultimately transferred his

numerous assets

to nominees, after all, and to his wife as well, and in the

event of a divorce, she of course

should receive a very, very large

share of the property — she would become a very wealthy

woman. So this Chaika clan is probably

shaking every last bit of money out of her, and they'll do anything for

documents, anything at all, because some things

we talked about in this film, and some things

we didn't talk about in that film

simply because we didn't know. I think

that's what this is connected to

— this desire, so intense,

to crush his own wife, that he ran off

to record those videos on YouTube

The property situation there is extremely, extremely tangled

— you remember that Chaika's children

were the first ones who, in Rosreestr (Russia's property registry),

changed their names — that famous business with

the mustaches and everything else.

I mean, in that sense, it's like, let's

Marina Chaika can say: let's

divide the property. But what property? In

Rosreestr, it says that Artyom Chaika

has nothing. Here there's some kind of letter code

and who can look it up? It'll be some

letter code

and it's secret. And she'll be saying: but this is

my apartment, my children live here, and

they say: it's secret, you can't. And if you

show off, you won't have a passport, and then

something, somehow, something there altogether

it looks like there's something wrong with you, and now

we'll sort out your parental rights — snap, and that's it

— and the judge looks you in the face and says: deprived

of parental rights. That can happen easily,

just that easily. So

I sympathize with Marina Chaika's family and her children

who of course are not to blame for the fact that

around them, their relatives are

crooks, bandits, and murderers. And this is

an excellent example of how the system

is built and devours absolutely anyone

and no matter how powerful you are, as soon as

you come out against this

mafia, tomorrow suddenly you'll be stripped of

all rights altogether. It can affect anyone

So don't ask me here about

Deripaska

or something about him taking away the recipes

of Babushka Agafya. Unfortunately, I don't know anything about

that, so I won't say anything. And Static

Caulfield asks me whether there's anywhere

real statistics on coronavirus in Russia

— no, there are no real statistics, there aren't

but there are a huge number of studies

done by doctors and mathematicians

that show, based on various

indirect data and mortality indicators,

they show a lot. After all, there are

indeed data

on mortality showing that

mortality has risen very sharply. It's just

all being recorded as non-hospital

pneumonia or something else, but

without a doubt all of this

is being concealed very carefully

Somewhere — I don't remember which journalists

— I think it was in Yekaterinburg — they

ran an experiment

They simply stood watch outside a COVID

hospital by its morgue, and then

compared the officially reported

statistics on how many had died with the number

of bodies taken out of the COVID hospital

No one else is treated in that hospital, and

it's clear that all the bodies

were connected to coronavirus, and there

the official statement was supposedly that

two people had died, but they observed

six bodies or something like that. So in that

sense, the falsification of statistics is happening

on a truly staggering, outstanding scale, and

even so, nevertheless, even by the official

falsified statistics, Putin is forced

to come out and tell the whole country that

the situation is very serious. So despite

the fact that we've stopped discussing corona

the situation really is very

serious. Shnur (Sergey Shnurov), my new neighbor, by the way,

we're sitting here in the office and

across from us is the TV company

RTVI, whose head

has become Sergey Shnurov, and this week he

did some amazing, strange,

incomprehensible thing

He went to Khabarovsk with great fanfare;

it was specifically Governor

Degtyarev who announced his arrival, and everyone was waiting

to see whether Shnurov would finally do something

bad or something good. But judging by his

recent behavior, his participation in absolutely

that kind of Kremlin party stooge act

and on the RTR channel, all of it looks

strange. Everyone expected some kind of

grand nasty move from him and thought he was going

there as some sort of Kremlin emissary

to shut the protests down. And the protests

really are happening — today is the 20th day

of these protests, the 20th day, and today is Thursday

Just look at what Khabarovsk looks like

today, on the 20th day of protests, on

Thursday, with a sea of people

You can see the city — there are thousands of people

walking through the streets

By now, no one is even asking anymore

A happy city, happy people who

have finally simply decided that we no longer

I will never ask for any

permits for rallies again — I’ve been saying this for a long time.

You keep saying we simply need to stop

asking for them. Yes, there will be some detentions.

1 222 32

But in the end, we will achieve it, and

there will be no need for those idiotic

approvals anymore, no need to apply for them, and we

will exercise it directly, the way it is

written in the Constitution — a notification-based

procedure. In Khabarovsk, people are simply marching

for the twentieth day already.

The Kremlin doesn’t know what to do about it

at all, because, well, dispersing them

is frightening, but if they don’t disperse them, it is supposed to

die down on its own — except it isn’t dying down, and it’s unclear what

to do. And the protesters themselves, broadly speaking, don’t

really understand where this is going

to develop next, but for now they are full of

determination, and they’re doing a great job. As for

Degtyarev, they sent him there, and

the Kremlin’s idea, as I understand it,

was that they believed that, well,

the people of Khabarovsk had elected the LDPR

(Liberal Democratic Party of Russia), so, like, what difference does it make?

They’d get another LDPR guy, and he would

say all sorts of funny, silly things, and

they would swallow it. But they didn’t swallow it; they

didn’t like Degtyarev at all.

And

and it’s great that they didn’t. Besides,

what angered them even more was that

Degtyarev is originally from Samara; basically,

he’s a Moscow politician who ran twice

in the Moscow mayoral elections.

And as I understand it — well, I don’t want

to unfairly take shots at

Sergey Shnurov, but the idea was precisely that

Shnurov would go there, do a big

interview, and show the people of Khabarovsk

and tell them what Degtyarev is really like —

that he’s, well, a normal person, that he has

a human face. And the refrain there

kept being the same thought: basically,

wait, don’t rush, just

let’s all calm down, let’s not

take part in mass protests,

let’s all go home, and then some kind of

trial will happen, and maybe there will be elections, and

maybe

Degtyarev

will take part in them, or maybe he won’t — but overall

he seems like a normal enough person whom

people could put up with. But I’d say the interview

had more or less the opposite effect.

Not that Shnurov was especially

playing along, but Degtyarev’s own answers

were such that you just watch and

realize it. What absolutely stunned me — and

stunned many others too — was this answer

about… let’s look at a few clips from the interview.

I showed all of these in my video

on the main channel, regarding

this question: if Putin wants one thing, if

the people of Khabarovsk want something, if

the governor wants something — who is more right here? Tell

me. Look, you have three opinions:

Putin’s opinion, Zhirinovsky’s opinion, and

the opinion of the people of Khabarovsk. Which of these

is the main, prevailing one for you?

Putin’s opinion, Zhirinovsky’s opinion, and

the opinion of the people of Khabarovsk — the views of all three of these

parties do not differ on

a single issue. Not on any issue at all — take any one

you like, pick one at random, and I’ll

tell you they are absolutely identical.

But specifically on the agenda of Khabarovsk Krai (region),

between...

It was both amusing and, really, hard to say

anything. Whatever purpose

Sergey Shnurov came there with, he could only

either pretend, or perhaps he genuinely

felt only this kind of

bewilderment — like, “What are you even talking about?”

Putin’s opinion and the opinion of the people of Khabarovsk are not

the same — people who have been marching through the city for 20 days already and

shouting “Putin to trial!” Those are not identical opinions.

I mean, it’s just that this person is saying

some nonsense, while at the same time saying,

“People, just endure a little longer.”

Stay here a bit longer, and basically, well,

no matter how hard you try in your interview — which, in fact,

didn’t really contain those

tough questions; there was a lot there

that we expect from a good

interviewer — it still doesn’t come together

into any kind of

normal, or even remotely

human image. Everyone understands that

they sent a complete fool here.

A monstrous one. Today we released

an investigation — an important one, actually — about the fact that

this idea of

Degtyarev as just some simpleton

from Putin’s camp is completely wrong. He is actually a very

cynical man whose business,

whose work — as with the party overall —

in the LDPR mainly consists of

political prostitution. That is, they

pretend to be the opposition, while the LDPR

is a big party, and it varies, and in some

regions — after all, Furgal was LDPR too — but nevertheless

he behaved absolutely normally in

Khabarovsk.

Some people are now leaving

the LDPR because they do not like Zhirinovsky’s

position — that he betrayed Furgal. There are different kinds of people there.

But Zhirinovsky and the Moscow

clique around him are engaged in

systematic political prostitution

and make money by pretending to be

the opposition. Degtyarev is, of course, one of the

champions of this, and we released an investigation.

Watch it on the main channel — about how

back in 2013 he took part in the

mayoral election and then, just a month later, became

70 million rubles richer (about $1 million at the time). Here’s a short excerpt

from our investigation: 2013, the election.

the Mayor of Moscow

and in the end receives his two and a

half percent, and exactly one month later

our not-so-wealthy Degtyarev suddenly has money in his pockets

appearing in

the cash. His father, a simple gynecologist from

Samara, on October 9, 2013, bought a plot of land

of 16 sotkas (about 1,600 square meters / 0.16 hectares), two kilometers from the MKAD (Moscow Ring Road), and

began building actively. According to the documents,

the house is a modest 266 square meters. We fly up to

the house registered in Degtyarev's father's name

and see a rather nice, well-kept property.

On the left is a greenhouse, in the middle the main house,

and by the fence a trampoline for Degtyarev's children — he

has four of them. The building where the

inflatable pool stands is actually part of

the main house.

We fly a bit farther and see satellite

dishes and four chimneys. No doubt, this is exactly

where

the political magic of the LDPR (Liberal Democratic Party of Russia) happens.

This is a banya (traditional Russian bathhouse). On the other side of the building

there is a parking area, very convenient for

driving in with the family Mercedes. The entire

plot covers an area of

1,600 square meters, but the most

interesting thing here is something else: according to the paperwork,

the size of this enormous building with

the parking area, bathhouse, and God knows what else is only

266 square

meters. But we can all see that the real

area is somewhere around 1,000.

We estimate it at no less than 70 million

rubles, and the market value of a house like this

in this residential settlement is about 100

million rubles.

Mikhail Vladimirovich earned the money, built the place,

and then the money ran out.

But he wants, wants more real estate.

So what is to be done? Well, there are new

elections ahead. By a special order

from the Moscow Department of City Property,

the city sells him, at a practically symbolic price,

an apartment — an excellent apartment, almost

100 square meters in Akademicheskaya. One like that

costs 25 million rubles. This apartment

modest Degtyarev immediately registers

in his mother's name.

This is done as urgently as possible

so that the acquisition

and disappearance of the property would not

show up in the declaration. Nearly 80,000

people are watching us live, and here

Art Client Shortcake writes to me: "Svetov

was right to say that the people of Khabarovsk need to

hate Putin more

than the governor sent in from outside." Right,

absolutely. But we released the video in order

to

tell people more clearly about the outsider governor,

so that people

would hate the one who sent him to them —

the governor is, of course, part of the Kremlin's plan here. Overall,

the idea is to shift the confrontation from

Khabarovsk residents versus Putin

to Khabarovsk residents versus Degtyarev. He wants

to divert the blow, and that is exactly why,

as I understand it, there also came

Shnurov — in order to, well, somehow

make the story more about

Degtyarev.

Dio Stark Thor Quad asks me:

"All right, a question, Alexei: what do you think about

Shnur's film about Khabarovsk? It all seemed on point,

but it still left some kind of bad

aftertaste." I think that Sergei Shnurov

himself, despite having volunteered

at first to play some kind of, well, not very

pleasant role, simply realized that

he couldn't do it. Did you see how

he was walking the streets there? I

watched the livestream for a while

that our people were doing: Shnurov is walking down

the street, with something like 1,000 people around him, and

something like half of those thousand people

are saying, "Explain this: did you come here

to cover for Degtyarev? What, did you come here

on the Kremlin's orders?" And he was just constantly

making excuses. When our correspondent

Nizovtsev interviewed him there for the channel, he

was simply constantly forced

to justify himself for things he hadn't even done yet. And in

that sense,

to be fair, as for Shnur,

honestly, you can't really accuse him of

or say that he was working for

the Kremlin there. Maybe he had been given some instructions,

and the whole thing looked suspicious,

the channel looked suspicious, and everything looked very dubious, and

there are lots of questions about why on earth Shnurov even

needed any of this. But he probably just came,

saw that if he now did something like that,

if he did it now — no. And if he simply

went against the truth, lied somewhere, or

helped the Kremlin,

and played along with the authorities against the people of Khabarovsk,

no one would forgive him for that. He is, of course,

a very popular artist, everyone knows him,

everyone loves his songs — in Khabarovsk,

in Moscow, everywhere else — we all love

singing along.

Especially when we're not in the most

sober state. All of that is great, but you

simply can no longer allow yourself to

do that, so to speak, because there would simply be

an avalanche of negativity. Shnurov sensed that very well,

you have to give him credit for that.

He didn't do anything bad, but what he did was rather

fairly

toothless — an interview with a couple of those

more or less acceptable questions. Degtyarev did everything himself;

he has long been saying all sorts of foolish things.

But as for his political evolution,

Shnurov will of course be interesting to watch.

The authorities have clearly recruited him,

but he clearly believes that he

will be able to outsmart the whole system of power,

that he'll slip through the raindrops, so to speak.

So, the opposition wants one thing, while the authorities want another.

And then he somehow just goes bang, bang, bang,

bang, bang, and does everything his own way, and on top of that,

something no one else has managed to do. I'm afraid

that it won't work out.

And as for Sergei Shnurov, well, the hope is

at least for now, we still have

hope that he will behave like

a decent person. I'll be running into him very soon—

our office centers

are directly across from each other, and all the employees at RT

eat at the same place, a kind of

food court where our FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation) staff have already

seen him many times having lunch.

I'll run into him somewhere, and I promise to ask him

this question, and then I'll tell you how my conversation with

him went. As for Khabarovsk,

of course, the authorities' strategy has already

kicked in. We can see that it's shifting a little

toward targeted repression. They are still afraid

to disperse people en masse, understanding that

it's impossible to do. But, well, people have been marching for 20 days,

and who the hell knows—what if these

people of Khabarovsk are so stubborn that even after

40 days they'll still be out there marching? There is great

hope being placed on the cold weather,

that September will start there now,

the school year will begin, and that will drive people away

from the protests. But what if not? What if tomorrow they

just go and enter the administration building

and refuse to leave, or do something else like that?

That's very frightening, so now there has already

begun this kind of effort. And the symbol of all this,

of course, has become the absolutely

disgusting situation involving

a disabled man who became, just this past

Saturday—and many of you saw it

in the video—let me show 13 seconds of a

man walking on crutches. Yes, he simply became

one of the symbols of the protest—a man on

crutches.

He joined the rally and started walking.

[music]

A lot of people saw it, and everyone said,

just imagine how fed up the authorities must be with all this

if even a man without a leg came out and is marching against

the authorities, for Furgal, for the demand

for his political rights, for

the governor to be tried here, for

real evidence of his guilt to be shown,

for the election results to be respected, and so on.

So just appreciate the sheer taste

of this vile—if I may put it that way—

word.

Filth—let's use that word for these authorities.

This man was shown in many places, and he

became one of the symbols. So they came to

his home with the police and started drawing up

a report against him. And now, attention—guess

what for? For walking without a mask. Here is

1 minute 22 seconds in which this protest participant

explains what happened to him.

Good afternoon. On July 25, I was at the rally in support of

the governor of Khabarovsk Krai, Sergei

Ivanovich Furgal. The situation was basically this: after

two days, I got a call and was invited in.

I said, all right, I understand. For

what? No, I didn't go there right away.

When they arrived, they started saying that a

report would be drawn up against me, a report for

the fact that I had supposedly been there without a mask. And I

said that I would not sign anything.

They told me, fine, then you will

need witnesses to the procedure.

I said, no problem, just don't call

a witness

your own employee. One employee

immediately started citing the article about refusing

to give testimony.

I said, excuse me, gentlemen, but why are

your employees

also currently without

masks? Why don't you say anything about that? They

said that

that had nothing to do with it—I was the one who was supposed to wear a mask.

So that's the kind of situation that was happening.

And then I said that I would not sign anything.

Again, I repeat, I

specifically told them: you do not have the right

to detain me. I will stand up and leave.

And I did just that—I got up and headed for the exit.

I was told that I would be

summoned to court. Just take in

all of this and appreciate this

great man, who has one leg,

saying, 'I'll stand up and leave,' and then he stood up and left. But for them

it's very important to detain someone. There are no

obvious leaders there, none at all.

The clear leader of all this is sitting in

prison—Furgal—so they latch onto

simply visible people. This man,

a disabled man with one leg, was shown everywhere, and

they started drawing up a report against him. And then there is

also the owner of

the 'Furgalmobile'—he was simply driving around

in a minibus with 'Furgal' written on it

and playing music—and they jailed him for 8 days.

Scumbags, simply put. They're already dragging in random

people. And here we have

a question from a viewer:

'Alexei, Putin's silence

on Furgal—is that a sign of confusion?

What will the Kremlin do

if Khabarovsk doesn't give in?' Another question:

'Pasha Bulakhov: if people protested for more than a year,

will Khabarovsk be able to

hold out?'

No one knows. We can see that in Khabarovsk

the mood is determined. Yes, judging by

what is happening there, the mood is very

determined. And Putin's silence is

connected precisely to that. On the one hand, it's the usual

strategy: we do not yield to

pressure. On the other hand, they do love

this kind of aikido approach

—they like to seem to relax,

to throw people off, deceive them, and then jail them.

someone's—well, I mean, the uniqueness is that

Khabarovsk's uniqueness right now is that they were not

successfully deceived—that's it, that's how I'd put it.

They couldn't be played for fools. And at

the Moscow protests and in many other places,

through a clever combination of tactics, people were simply

well, excuse the expression, but they were strung along.

You could add “like suckers,” or not,

but in Khabarovsk, that did not

happen. There, everything was stated very clearly right away:

“Don't feed us all this garbage.”

“We don't need Degtyaryov,”

“we don't need Trutnev,”

“Bring him back, that's all—or else we'll keep

coming out.” It's very important that this worked, and unlike

unlike all

the other protests, if you look at how things are developing

in Komsomolsk-on-Amur,

the mayor and the head of the city assembly came out.

Let's take a look: the man in the black

T-shirt is the mayor of Komsomolsk-on-Amur,

Alexander Zhornik, and the man in the suit is Vladimir

Ginzburg. They came out to the rally participants—

officials, the city mayor and

thanked them for taking part.

Can you imagine? When else has that happened in

Russia—that people come out to what is formally, from a

technical point of view,

an unauthorized event, and the mayor

comes out and says, “Well done, all of you”? That

is the Kremlin's worst fear. That's why Putin

is silent—because he doesn't know what to do.

Let's watch this clip for a few seconds.

It helps.

And I'll say more about each of them, because you really can

roughly... the point came through clearly.

If

You know, usually this kind of talk is the sort of thing

I would say when I come to some

region and people come out, I tell them: “You're doing great,”

“the fact that you came out here—each of you deserves

a monument. All of Russia hears you.”

But here, the city mayor and the speaker

of the city assembly come out and say:

“You deserve monuments. Thank you for

coming out.”

“All of Russia hears you.” This is a super-

unique situation that

of course requires

enormous—truly enormous—patience,

and enormous emotional commitment, especially from

the residents of Khabarovsk themselves.

I understand that, of course, everyone wants—

they want it, and we want it too—for this

to spread to other cities. So far, that

isn't happening, although in the Russian Far East

there are actually quite a lot of

rallies, simply because the situation there

is so unique: they are defending

Furgal, whom people know in many

other cities. People sympathize, and we

can see that people across all of Russia sympathize.

Polls show that most people

are on the protesters' side, but that level of

personal emotional involvement needed

to actually go out into the streets isn't there. But the people of Khabarovsk

are holding on, and of course any support—even a like

online—will help them a lot, and it is very

important to them. That is exactly why it is also very

important that Gosha Kutsenko

—yes, he was once Putin's authorized representative

and Sobyanin's representative—went on

Instagram and recorded a video in support of

Khabarovsk. Good for him. “For 44 seconds, I'd like

to address the residents of Khabarovsk and

the Russian Far East.

Despite the fact that on the central

TV channels you have been unheard for two

weeks now, when I go to bed I know that at that

very time you are going out into the streets. And I don't know

who will turn out to be right and who will be to blame, but right now

the truth is on your side. A huge

united crowd has come to the theater

of justice. Open the doors—we want

to be present for all of

this honest, open, candid

dramatic performance.

I am with you in this audience,”

you know, speaking as an actor. Well done, really.

Clearly.

And by the way, no one paid him for that, no one

forced him to do it, and obviously no one even

asked him to record it. Nevertheless,

he felt it and

recorded it. And that is very important, and it is a very

big fear for the Kremlin, because actors,

creative people in general,

are, of course, usually very loyal to the authorities, with

rare exceptions,

or they try to keep quiet. Alexander

Gudkov, who is perhaps now one of the most

well-known entertainers and, in general,

artists in Russia, also said on TV Rain (an independent Russian channel)

quite directly that when he looks at

Khabarovsk, he understands that it is the best thing

happening in Russia right now. Fifty-nine seconds

of Gudkov fearlessly saying things

knowing that hundreds of thousands,

millions of people will hear him. In that respect,

my heart just—well, it makes me want

to kiss every one of these people, because

what is happening here is a deeply collective,

proper way of thinking, to me, and it is

the kind of thing that makes life worth living right now.

Khabarovsk is the main place right now, well,

for me, because what is happening

in Khabarovsk shows that we are all living people.

We are not dead, we have not gone numb, we have not

grown rigid—we are alive, we are Russians, and that

is right. And this unrest is the right

response.

The residents of the city are standing up for their rights.

I would add my voice to theirs, that we all

—well, that's not quite the right word, of course—but

in any case, what is happening in Khabarovsk is, for

me, basically equivalent to Russia itself.

Those are very important words, after all. But

to sum up about Khabarovsk:

It’s clear how the situation will develop:

either people will get tired and there will be fewer of them,

and then some leaders will be jailed,

or

if we don’t, you know, just

fantasize that tomorrow huge protests will simply take place in every

city,

like the demonstrations in Khabarovsk,

that would, of course, be a better course of events.

But people ask me:

what about Yekaterinburg, what about everywhere else,

many cities in Siberia and the Far East,

and of course we support all of that.

But overall, it seems to me the strategy should

be to support Khabarovsk

with all our strength. Khabarovsk

has to keep coming out, and it will keep coming out. And right now

polls show that 45 percent

of respondents—well, about 45 percent of people surveyed—

support the protesters in

Khabarovsk, and around 60 percent are following events closely.

Only 16 percent do not support them,

and some percentage

say they don’t know yet

or haven’t decided. When support is no longer

45 percent but 65 or 75 percent,

then Khabarovsk will win. And in that sense,

the influence of each of us

is of crucial importance. Here’s another question:

why isn’t anything being shown on federal

television? Well,

because they don’t want

to show it, because the people who watch it

start supporting Khabarovsk. Our

role is very important, and it is

to help break through

the information blockade so that

the whole country continues to support them. And

when a certain threshold of support

is exceeded, Putin—as a somewhat

unhinged but nevertheless fairly cunning and

rationally minded person—will probably

try, once again, to trick and

deceive these people, but at least by meeting

some of their demands. Their demands

are very clear, and I don’t think they should

be either broadened or narrowed. That means:

Furgal in Khabarovsk, an open trial,

evidence—if there is no evidence,

then let him go. But if not, if he

remains in custody, then direct

gubernatorial elections right now, not

the appointment of Degtyaryov, but elections right

now. These demands can be met, and

if they are met, if Khabarovsk

is supported... Naturally, most of the questions I get are about Belarus.

Most of the questions are about Belarus,

about Belarus—the one I drew on

the mug—and of course right now the thoughts

of a huge number of people are with Belarus.

We don’t understand what is happening there; very few people

understand what is going on, and Lukashenko

probably understands it least of all.

He understands least of all what is happening there.

But this is very important, because

Khabarovsk is a kind of

unique situation, a highly unique one, whereas

Lukashenko is Putin’s political father and teacher,

the man who built a regime that

Putin simply copied in full.

Lukashenko is just two or three years ahead, and

now, depending on how

these elections end,

a great deal depends on that, including what kind of

scenario Putin and his government will try

to stage in Russia. So,

the news coming out of Belarus

simply stunned all of us—we were

left open-mouthed when we saw reports

about some Wagner people being detained and

so on. Let me, again,

add a small disclaimer: I am not some kind of

top expert on Belarus,

probably not really any kind of expert at all.

Yes, not a super-expert, not really an expert,

but I have spoken with some

people, so if there are people who

understand the situation well, forgive

any inaccuracies. The way I see this

situation is as follows:

in the past, elections in Belarus always

followed roughly the same

scenario.

By the way, on Tuesday

early voting starts there, and

early voting there is always around

30 percent—that is the main

mechanism for falsification. They simply

stuff the ballot boxes on a massive scale, unlike

in Russia, where there are at least some

observers, and in some commissions

there are regions where there is less fraud

and regions where there is more. In Belarus, it is simply total,

100 percent falsification everywhere, and there

they simply draw the result. And before, all

of this happened roughly like this: they

would write in 85 percent, and then some

figures would say, well, yes, of course

it was inflated, but he got 60 percent anyway, so

fine, whatever. And we had something similar,

actually, in the last

presidential election: Putin completely

fabricated the results, and then out came

Sobchak, who was apparently brought in for exactly that, saying:

well, sure, they drew in some extra votes there,

but overall he still got more than 50 percent, and

people just shrugged and said, well, maybe he did.

And now a unique

situation has emerged in which I personally don’t really believe

that Lukashenko’s approval rating is 3 percent. That just

doesn’t happen—that an authoritarian leader

has been in power for 30 years and has an approval rating of

3 percent. But no one knows what his real rating is,

including because Lukashenko

himself banned opinion polls.

And now it is obvious that the majority of the population

will not believe 85 percent—

they clearly won’t even believe 50 percent.

It’s hard to predict.

And what result will be announced in the

election? Lukashenko will get eighty

five percent, and Tikhanovskaya

— and the rest, they’ll probably just make up around 7 percent, I think.

I assume they’ll put them in third place as usual,

not even second. But now,

no one will believe it at all — not 85

percent, not even 50 percent for Lukashenko —

no one will believe it, and that has completely changed

the situation. And as I understand it, my

analytical assumption is this:

the entire leadership

of the Republic of Belarus was sitting there, officially, and thinking:

how do we, well, sort of

let some candidate through

who would be weaker, so everyone would believe that

he — or rather, she — got 85 percent, and

someone among them came up with the idea

that seemed brilliant to them: let’s

allow Tikhanovskaya, but we’ll lock up Tikhanov

— he’s already in jail,

we’ll jail Babaryka too, and we’ll definitely start locking everyone up.

In Belarus, that happens

all the time — we’ll start jailing everyone, well, maybe let

someone through for appearances, and she’ll get very little support. Sure, let’s do it.

Tikhanovskaya — they probably also thought

the public would say: these are basically military-type people,

collective-farm types (from the Soviet-style farm system), like,

let’s put a woman on the ballot — who on earth is going to vote

for a woman? No one is going to vote

for her. Of course she’ll get 5 percent.

She can’t possibly get more than that. No one

votes that way, ha ha ha — how could anyone

vote for a woman?

And besides, her husband is in jail.

The woman is just horrified, she doesn’t know what

to do, she never wanted to get involved in

public politics, she has no team,

she isn’t prepared for any of this. I mean,

it’s like, you know, being thrown off a boat

into the sea and being told not just to learn

how to swim — they threw you from a boat into the sea

and said: you know, Tikhanovskaya, you’re

competing in the world swimming championship.

Swim. And while she’s swimming, these

wonderful women around her,

and that photograph has already become

iconic. Suddenly, it worked. And whatever

picture they may have painted in their heads,

this crude, collective-farm-style

deranged власти — and let me remind you that to this day

the KGB is still officially called the KGB in the Republic

of Belarus —

this worldview in which a woman cannot be

an independent political actor,

it backfired. And now what’s happening there is

absolutely astonishing rallies

in every city, drawing

tens of thousands of people. And I’m sitting here thinking:

right now there’s a rally in Minsk

with an enormous number of

people, and here in Russia, any rally

we immediately compare with another one,

like: was it bigger than the one on

Bolotnaya (the major Moscow protest site), or smaller than Bolotnaya?

Or when Navalny travels and speaks, was that

bigger than the rallies in

2013, or smaller than in

2013 or 2018?

In Belarus, nothing like this has ever happened before.

There’s nothing to compare it to. It’s absolutely

unprecedented.

And the authorities, who had assumed

they would let this poor Tikhanovskaya through,

that she would stand there crying, not understanding what

to do, saying some foolish things,

and that no one would support her — instead,

people suddenly rallied around her. The men

were jailed or driven out of the country,

and the women united and became symbols, and

thousands of people come to them. For the authorities, this

was an absolute shock.

So what do people do when they’ve been in power for 30

years and are suddenly faced with the shock and

the threat that no one will believe them in the election

when they say they got 80 percent? These

people — in Russia, in Venezuela, in

Uzbekistan, in Azerbaijan, everywhere, in any

authoritarian country of the former Soviet

Union and elsewhere — they all come up with the same

thing. They can’t think of anything else.

They start talking about

an external threat.

And on the one hand, everyone is shocked listening to

these stories from Lukashenko about how

Russia is supposedly a threat

and mercenaries have arrived to stage a revolution.

At first I also thought,

what kind of nonsense is this? It’s just

complete nonsense. But we have this

wonderful colleague, Vlad Lenus,

he’s from Belarus, and on his Twitter there’s

a very long thread where he simply

explains it all. He’s a political scientist by

training, explaining what’s happening. And

he said something like: Alexei, the fact that you’re

surprised just shows that you don’t

understand a damn thing. Most importantly, you don’t

know the history of our elections, because

Lukashenko has always done this: before every

election, some crazy story appears about

how

— well, about how, supposedly,

some people are threatening something or

planning acts of sabotage. In 2006,

they detained representatives of

and announced that money and weapons had been seized from them.

Let’s watch the video — 45 seconds. This is 2006.

It says there that the elections are becoming an attempted seizure of power.

And the proof of this is supposedly the following:

Recently, they have repeatedly come across

actual materials from the opposition and

from individual presidential candidates to their

supporters, urging them on March 19 to take to the streets

to defend a supposedly stolen victory. What is underway

is not preparation for a peaceful protest, as

the organizers claim.

the so-called revolution, okay

a planned violent operation involving bombings

explosive devices, arson, and active

provocation of the apparatus into using

chaos

you won’t seize power that way in the 14th century

years ago, and almost literally the same thing

they talk about chaos, war,

the horrors that will happen, and how all this

ended back then for the participants in this affair

they were brought to trial there, and they

were given several months of arrest

but as for terrorism and weapons, none of that

was there; it turned out that all of it

was completely made up, and in that sense

any intelligence service in an authoritarian state, really

any intelligence service, you see—when

I don’t know, the FSB, the KGB of Belarus, or even the CIA

of the United States tells you something, you need to understand

that 90 percent of it is, basically,

a lie, because any intelligence service in any

country is simply engaged in lying

endlessly—that’s basically the whole point of all

intelligence services: they just lie constantly

and a politician who is in power at least

thinks about the consequences, but if today you

lie and then get caught

well, intelligence guys just lie

all the time—so what if you got caught, you got caught

caught doing what? I was just doing my job

it was a disinformation operation, that’s what they—they

just make things up; in 2006 they

lied, then 2010 comes around and you

see reports coming out saying that

already from Ukraine then, not Russia, from

Ukraine they supposedly brought in a whole busload of weapons

let’s watch 33 seconds

this cargo was detained at the Belarusian

Ukrainian border; it was being transported by a group of

foreign nationals, all of whom worked

as instructors in radical organizations

in Belarus. During interrogations it emerged that the purpose

of their trip was to take part in unrest in

Minsk

only a few days remain until Day X

the candidates are becoming increasingly

outspoken toward President

Lukashenko; direct threats are being heard. Well, you see

there was this solemn report, and it

was shown on every channel

they showed the weapons—but how did it all end?

when there was an actual case there, people were beaten

people were accused, cases were fabricated against them

but there were no weapons

and no terrorism in the verdict

none of that appeared in the case; it was all an absolute

total fabrication from beginning to end

a fake report—they planted the

weapons themselves, filmed it themselves, and they did this

every time, and they keep doing it every time. Lukashenko

tells fairy tales; now Russian

leader Putin talks about European

and American plots; somewhere out there, people in

Uzbekistan or Tajikistan have

exactly the same kind of ruler telling

I don’t know, stories about Chinese, American,

or Russian threats—they invent and tell

all sorts of nonsense, inventing various

terrorists. Why? Among other things, to

make fewer people go to

rallies. Tsikhanouskaya was holding these

rallies, and all the Belarusian authorities, Lukashenko and all,

the whole regime was in absolute shock, and they

this morning gathered all the candidates and

told them, in all seriousness, these

stories about some Russian

mercenaries, and said that there would also be some other

groups arriving to carry out terrorist attacks

so, whether you hold rallies or

don’t hold them, be careful. All of this

is being done for one reason: to

intimidate people and make it harder to hold

rallies. If earlier Tsikhanouskaya

could hold them normally, this time

there are metal detectors, metal barriers, everything is

fenced off. Nevertheless, at the rally—you can

see now—this is the first time when her

rallies are surrounded by nothing but

barriers. Even so, right now in

Minsk there is a rally of 30,000 people. For

Minsk, even 13,000 people is an absolutely

fantastic number; there has never been anything like it

before. And at this rally there is a woman—the wife

of a political prisoner—who became a presidential candidate

simply because they jailed her

husband—not because she was pushing to become president, but because

Lukashenko and his regime laughed

at her and thought that she wouldn’t be able to do it, and that

those who gathered around her

wouldn’t be able to either, and that Belarusians wouldn’t be able

to properly assess what was happening. They also

thought people would look and think: well, she’s frightened and

confused, just a woman—let’s vote for

the tried-and-tested Alexander Grigoryevich (Alexander Lukashenko’s first name and patronymic)

instead. But people, as it turned out, said

no—and nobody believes any of this. That’s where

this whole Wagner-guy story came from. Let’s

watch this segment that was shown

on television—it really

looks very comical. One minute, eight seconds

the detention of the fighters by law enforcement

agencies of Belarus, acting on received

information about the arrival on our territory

of more than 200 militants to destabilize

the situation during the election

campaign

each of them had only a small piece of hand luggage

with them, and between them they had three large

heavy suitcases, the loading of which into the

vehicle was carried out by

several people. Of course, the funniest

piece of evidence was that they did not drink alcohol

that is, of course, when

a bunch of Wagner guys arrive and don’t

drink alcohol, that really is

suspicious—that’s the most suspicious thing

the fact that they weren’t drinking

alcohol. And it’s obvious that there was simply

This is all very carefully staged.

It’s not just something some journalists

made up and immediately put out in a report.

The president holds a meeting with the Security Council,

where Lukashenko says outright, directly,

and at that Security Council meeting they say

that these were people from that

private military company, Wagner. Twenty-four

seconds.

Tonight, at approximately half past midnight,

in a town outside Minsk,

32 people were detained,

citizens of the Russian Federation,

members of a private military organization,

company.

Wagner. It has been established that all those detained

have been identified with absolute certainty as

members of the Wagner company. You see, I mean,

later they report the same thing there as well,

just like in 2006, just like in

2010, and these really are

Wagner fighters, because they showed them and many

people recognized them. So here, essentially,

there are two possible scenarios.

No one can say for sure, no one really understands what

this is. Either these were ordinary Wagner

fighters who were constantly traveling, and I—I

don’t believe that Belarus was

some kind of permanent hub for

sending mercenaries somewhere.

Because you can’t send lots of people through another

country; obviously,

they were being flown directly there,

but small groups,

I have no doubt, were sent through

Belarus, maybe through

Almaty, through Kazakhstan—that’s entirely

possible. Some small groups

of up to 30 people could be routed that way.

So either this was a joint

operation, where it had been agreed that they

would travel, and Lukashenko simply decided

to act treacherously and then

have them arrested on camera and accuse them. But

to be honest, I’m much more inclined to believe

that this was simply a joint

performance by Putin and Lukashenko, and that

Putin just, you know, like someone handing over actresses

or girls to a brothel, handed over all these

Wagner guys simply as theatrical

props. Why? Because, well, look:

look at the U.S. embassy—

they hung up a rainbow flag, and Russia’s Foreign Ministry

has been screeching about it for three weeks, you understand?

They issue statements, Maria

Zakharova says something or other—for three weeks

they’ve been talking about it. Someone in

some English newspaper wrote something

about World War II,

and the whole ministry is busy with it.

Putin writes a response article, everyone

is outraged—and here?

But even if we assume, yes, that Russia doesn’t

acknowledge that these are

Wagner people, still, in Belarus

30 Russian citizens are detained. They

admit they are Russian citizens

and accuse them of organizing a

coup—and everyone is silent.

Well, the Russian embassy said something like

they were some people who were

traveling in transit. But when some nonsense

happens and someone accuses

the Russian authorities, Maria Zakharova

usually immediately downs a bottle of vodka,

tears her shirt open,

runs off, and starts spouting her usual nonsense,

issues statements, writes Facebook posts.

Here, nothing at all. Peskov said only:

‘We’re looking into it,’ and the Foreign Ministry is silent.

The deputies are silent, Senator Pushkov isn’t mocking anyone

on Twitter.

In other words, all these loudmouths,

all these TV talk show regulars,

Vladimir Solovyov included, are silent. And

that is, in my view, the best

proof that this is simply

a stitch-up. And more than that, Lukashenko simply

comes out and says directly that this is