Navalny Case Is Naked Admission of Spooks and Media Collaboration

Navalny was airlifted to Germany on August 22 at the request of his family for treatment at a hospital in Berlin. It is understood permission for his transfer was given by President Vladimir Putin. Last week, during Putin’s nationwide annual press conference he remarked that if state agents had wanted to kill Navalny that would have been easily achieved.

On the face of it what we are expected to believe is that Russian security services botched an assassination attempt in a farcical way and that the Russian authorities subsequently allowed their victim to escape to Germany where he was later diagnosed to have been poisoned with the incriminating Novichok military-grade poison.

Putin also remarked that Navalny’s claims are merely “laundering of US intelligence” for which the dissident figure is an asset.

Since Navalny’s mysterious seeming incapacitation, he has been shrouded in secrecy while based in Germany. While the German government has refused to cooperate with Russian authorities to provide evidence supporting their poison claims, at the same time Berlin and other European capitals have moved to impose sanctions against Moscow. The whole affair is a repudiation of diplomatic norms and due process. A minor dissident figure – some would say “gadfly” – has been elevated to the status of an international statesman whose words have more credibility than the Russian president.

The timing of Navalny’s alleged assassination came as the Nord Stream-2 natural gas project between the European Union and Russia entered into a final phase for completion. Predictably, there have been vociferous calls from within Germany and the EU for that project to be cancelled, in accordance with Washington’s long-held demands.

Then for some weeks the Navalny saga seemed to slip from public attention, only for it to be reinvigorated by a joint media campaign involving CNN, Der Spiegel and the British blogger group Bellingcat. Navalny himself has joined in the campaign giving CNN interviews from his secret German location which purport to bolster claims of a Putin-directed assassination plot. This came just in time for the confirmation of Joe Biden as US president-elect and a new White House administration taking office.

Bellingcat is credulously described as a “cyber-sleuth, open-source investigative website”. Far from being a campaigning independent media project, it is closely linked to British MI6 and the American CIA. Posing as a citizen-journalistic endeavor, Bellingcat gives Western military intelligence valuable cover for their propaganda. It has previously peddled fabricated reports on alleged Russian responsibility for downing the Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine in 2014, as well as alleged Russian complicity in chemical weapons atrocities in Syria.

Maybe the orchestrators of the Navalny false-flag operation thought they would be smart by creating a “dream team collective” to spin the latest twists. The thinking seems to have been to turn up the volume by packing the storytellers together, thereby giving the saga some badly needed credibility. So, Navalny personally teams up with Bellingcat, CNN and Der Spiegel to shoot the breeze about Novichok being slipped into his underpants. CNN follows up with “exclusive” interviews of Navalny over his FSB “sting” and Bellingcat chimes in with “confirmation”.

What the orchestrators don’t realize due to their propaganda bubble-existence is that they are just making it all the more apparent to anyone observing: that Navalny and his intelligence handlers are in bed with Western corporate media… and they’re not wearing underpants.

Finian Cunningham is a former editor and writer for major news media organizations. He has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages

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