‘Stop calling them the opposition’: Russian Foreign Ministry says Navalny team are ‘agents of NATO,’ not legitimate politicians

“We should stop calling them the opposition. The opposition is something else,” Maria Zakharova said on Thursday to Russia’s Channel One. “They are agents of influence, and I will prove it to you now.”

Zakharova recalled how key Navalny ally Leonid Volkov revealed last week that they would no longer hold demonstrations in the winter and planned to wait until spring and summer. Then, on Tuesday morning, the Lithuania-based Volkov announced a change of heart, proposing a different form of protest.

“What happened between February 4 and 9? It’s trivial, simple and, unfortunate,” she said. “Volkov and [Vladimir] Ashurkov [another close Navalny ally who lives in the UK] had an online meeting yesterday with the Polish Permanent Representation to the EU, which was also attended by other EU member states, as well as the United States and Britain.”

“One small nuance. This format – the EU countries, plus the US, plus Britain – it’s a not the EU, it’s NATO.”

In Zakharova’s opinion, these countries told Volkov not to wait until spring, and protests must continue immediately.

“No matter how you cover it up, no matter how you call it, this is a meeting with agents of influence to destabilize the situation in a sovereign state,” she concluded.

German pundits on the DW network discuss the Navalny case: all finding Moscow guilty, of course, of great crimes against human rights, general perfidy, aggression, etc. Their vassalage to Washington's wanton disinformation is near total.

Earlier in the day, speaking to Vesti FM, she called the two Navalny allies traitors.

On Telegram, Volkov revealed that he and Ashurkov spoke to the European Union about a package of personal sanctions he wants the bloc to impose on a select few Russians. The Navalny ally made sure to note that he does not advocate “sanctions against Russia,” but “sanctions against the purse strings and propagandists.”

“These are sanctions – in the name of Russia, in its interests,” he wrote.

Last week, Volkov announced there would be no more protests in support of the activist until later this year. Large rallies were held around the country on January 23 and January 31, but falling attendances amid mass arrests and a heavy police crackdown have caused his team to reassess. According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, the decision of Navalny’s allies to focus on foreign pressure to seek his release from jail is a “complete demonstration” that he deserves to be labeled as a foreign agent.

End of RT.com dispatch. 

ADDENDUM I
Annotated by Patrice Greanville

Navalny as new dissident hero—
America's "prestige" soft power machinery provides the necessary endorsement

Besides the leading "legacy" press (NYTimes, Washington Post, LA Times, NPR, etc.) CBS's 60 Minutes, and PBS itself, have jumped into the propaanda fray with glowing profiles of Alexei Navalny. 

Oct 14, 2020. Note the 60 Minutes interview was first taped in 2017. The empire has been puffing up Navalny for quite a while. 

ADDENDUM II
The heavy hand of imperialist meddling: the adulterated social media beat

BELOW: The underhanded censorship cum propaganda carried out by Western social media is now evident everywhere.  Google (YouTube) leads the pack. This is what happens when you do this exact search on YouTube: "Navalny NATO agent". The engine returns only videos favorable to Navalny, not a single one clearly critical, nor pointing to his well documented relationship with western intel/soft power agencies. 

NAVALNY'S TIES TO REGIME CHANGE AGENCIES LARGELY SCRUBBED
Below, another example. The search command here is "Navalny NED agent", wich he certainly is. This fact, until recently, has been amply documented. Navalny has longstanding ties with the US regime change apparatus. His connections range from a Yale University "fellowship" bestowed on foreigners brought to the empire for training in destabilization in their homelands (officially described by the Western media as "struggles against corruption and/or human rights, democracy," etc., etc. the usual self-serving American interventionist boilerplate) and general "Americanization". The Hong Kong anti-Beijing "protest" leaders were also accorded similar treatment. Navalny, like his counterparts in Hong Kong, Venezuela, etc. is a NED operative, the CIA's/ State Department key regime change organization. (Most of this sordid background has been mysteriously "disappeared", scrubbed from the sites and pages where the relationship was once clearly explained, obviously the work of Navalny's handlers. Only genuine left media still talk about this shady arrangement. In the publication Liberation, a socialist outlet, the latest Western hero is described correctly: "Furthermore, Navalny co-founded the Democratic Alternative movement using funds from the U.S. State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The NED is a slush fund used by the U.S. government to fund political organizations and “civil society” groups that will further U.S. imperialist interests..." See Anti-corruption protests in Russia led by right winger Alexei Navalny, March 2017.)  His sentence (along with his brother and other relatives) for financial fraud is also ignored by the Western press. Probably they realise quite  well  that  a con-man and a rigtwing racist is not exactly a very credible anti-corruption champion in liberal eyes.

MANUFACTURED TRUTH THROUGH FALSE DIVERSITY
BELOW:  The same search command brings up more videos from a wide variety of sources, all proclaiming Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, an absurdity according to impartial experts on the matter.  False diversity of media content through "numerosity" (large numbers of media repeating the same false story) is an old US method to manufacture verisimilitude for a total falsehood. Practically all Western false flag psyops use this approach.  As Zakharova indicates, Alexei Navalny is a Western intel / NATO asset, whose usefulness derives from his ability to provide demonisation copy against Putin and the Russian government primarily for the benefit of Western audiences (prepng them for war) in the course of an ongoing color revolution against Russia, in itself probably a Nuremberg-type capital crime.