Vyacheslav Nikonov
Nikonov, who sits in the lower house of the Russian Parliament and belongs to the same party, United Russia, as President Vladimir Putin, said he “wasn’t very interested in Navalny” and implied that Navalny wasn’t important enough to be targeted. Nikonov then contrasts how unimportant Navalny is by comparing the Russian opposition figure to Angela Davis, one of the leaders of the U.S. Communist party during the Cold War.
“Navalny, as you know, was saved by the Russian doctors,” Nikonov points out. The State Duma member implied Navalny may have been poisoned with the nerve agent after arriving in Germany. He blames “Russophobia” for the international reaction against Russia, stating “Russophobia is not something new… actually, in the case of Germany, it started like five centuries ago.”
When he was asked about the oppression of demonstrations by opposition supporters in Russia, Nikonov deflected and said “Russian police is much more civilized than German, French, or American [police].”
The Russian lawmaker also disputed a statement that the murders of opposition figures were being ignored and stated “most of the cases of political murders in Russia have been investigated.”
Evgeniy Marchenko
“[We’re] terribly sick of Navalny, if I’m being honest. We’re fed up with this Navalny. Screw him, I don’t even want to waste time on him. The more we think about them, the worse, we have to completely forget about him already. We have so many who can judge, let them judge him, lock him up. Why does everyone need him? People will only forget about him, again someone begins to stir up interest in him, protests, rallies – enough. The trial will happen, we have to forget about him completely, be silent [about him]. He’s locked up – and let him stay locked up”
Direct quote from Duma Deputy and United Russia member Evgeniy Marchenko
Kirill Cherkasov
According to Cherkasov, Duma deputy for the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, “Kirov residents go to protest actions largely because of economic problems and the inability to participate in making decisions that are important for the city and the country, and not for the sake of supporting Alexei Navalny.”
Konstantin Zatulin
Konstantin Zatulin, the First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on CIS Affairs and Relations with Compatriots, made the following statement to Baltnews on 28 January 2021 in response to pressure from the Estonian government on Russia in support of the opposition blogger Alexei Navalny:
“This is a traditional line of Estonian politicians directed at inflicting some kind of damage to Russia and the current Russian Federation government. This is overt interference in the internal affairs of Russia under the pretense of the fundamental value of protecting human rights, which serves as a slogan without any sort of diving into the essence of what’s occurring.”
Sergey Zheleznyak
According to Sergey Zheleznyak, a member of the Duma Committee on International Affairs, “the demands to release Aleksey Navalnyy, who has received a real term of imprisonment, and the proposals from Western politicians to levy new sanctions against Russia are illegal and are an attempt to pressure the Russian court system.”
Petr Tolstoy
“We’ve achieved a transfer of debates on the detaining of the “Berlin patient”[Navalny] in Russia from the category of urgent to the category of routine.”
In his words, this actually means that “based on the debates, no resolution will be passed, and the entire idea to again accuse Russia in violating human rights and oppressing the unlucky blogger and also to levy some kind of sanctions because of this, is falling apart.”
Yevgeny Revenko
Deputy Secretary of the General Council of United Russia and State Duma deputy from the Voronezh region Yevgeny Revenko called the participants in the rallies in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny “violators of majority freedom” and stated that “Article 31 of the Constitution should not be understood as a free pass to organize unsanctioned protests” at a meeting with students and youth activists in early February 2021.
Dmitriy Medvedev
“I, same as before, consider Navalny a political conartist that is trying to, striving to, creep into power to achieve his own personal goals, and nothing else.”
Statement made by Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia, Dmitriy Medvedev.
Sergey Nechayev
“Navalny, like all citizens of Russia, is obligated to adhere to the laws of his country. The fact that someone in the West doesn’t like that isn’t a problem of Russian law enforcement agencies.
We strongly call upon our German partners to refrain from hyped up politicization of this affair. Four detailed requests on legal aid of the Russian prosecutor general were sent to the federal judicial agencies of Germany. To our deep regret, the answer [we received] after almost five months carries a formal nature and does not contain any concrete materials and conclusions.
On this background, the demands of us to completely investigate the circumstances of the incident with Mr. Navalny look, at the very least, strange.”
Gennady Zyuganov
Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, claimed that Alexei Navalny is nothing more than “a messenger from Berlin” who is backed by the “organization of the Russian Maidan” (a reference to the protests in Kyiv against the Ukrainian government’s attempt to sever relations with the European Union in favor of relations with Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union.
Zyuganov also labeled Navalny as “another Gapon who will set fire to the internal situation” in a reference to Priest Georgy Gapon, who famously organized the demonstrations of the working class against Tsar Nicholas II that culminated in the mass shooting of demonstrators on “Bloody Sunday” and eventually led to the revolution in 1905 – 1907. Ironically, the Kremlin attempted to repeat the history of “Bloody Sunday” by using lethal force to combat peaceful opposition. Zyuganov attempts to blame both Gapon and Navalny for “setting fire to the internal situation” when it was actually the actions of the government in both cases that inflamed the public, not the protesters.
Vladimir Putin
During a news conference on December 17th, 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin made the following statement:
“Listen, we understand very well what this is, this is not an investigation but a trick aimed at attacking the top people. This is the legalization of data from the US special services.”
“This means that this Berlin clinic patient [Navalny] has the support of US intelligence services.” Therefore, he added, “the [Russian] special services certainly should track him.”
Putin continued to belittle Mr. Navalny by saying “what use is he to anyone?” He added, with a laugh, “that if Russian agents had wanted to poison Mr. Navalny they would probably have finished the job.”
Vladimir Chizhov
All this looks, on the one hand, comical, on the other hand, (this situation) raises a lot of questions about who benefited from it initially.
Obviously, against the backdrop of the pandemic and other news, Navalny’s fate began to recede. Probably the person felt offended, and he decided to maintain [to himself] interest. It is also interesting that at first one of our special services was accused of poisoning, and now the vector has moved to another.
Statements made by the Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation of the European Union, Vladimir Chizhov.
Vyacheslav Volodin
Stop, the team has decided. The speaker of the State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, answers: did not Navalny poison the CIA in order to speed up the preparation of the Maidan in Russia? – that is, we have nothing to hide, we are literally demonstrating no, this is not us.
“Was it not an attempt on the part of foreign states to harm the health of a Russian citizen in order to create tension within Russia, and also formulate new accusations against our country?”
Maria Zakharova
“Today it all, of course, takes some grotesque forms.”
“Prior to the export of the blogger to Germany, no traces of chemical warfare agents were found in it, as stated by Russian doctors. If NATO members present the fact of their identification as unconditionally established, then it could well have happened outside of Russia: on the way to Germany or already in the Charite clinic.”
Statements made from Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova
Oleg Morozov
“Why did they use combat poison if they only wanted to intimidate? If we follow this absurd logic, then it was possible to intimidate by causing ordinary stomach indigestion.”
“If the MI-6, the CIA, or any of the three German intelligence services seriously put forward the version of “double poisoning by Novichok in order to slightly intimidate,” then this seriously undermines the credibility of these special services”
Statements made by Oleg Morozov to the VZGLYAD newspaper. Oleg is a member of the international affairs committee of the Federation Council.
Federal Security Service Public Relations
In statements made by the FSB, they proclaim “Opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s allegations about the involvement of Federal Security Service (FSB) officers in his poisoning in August is an act of provocation.”
Russian new agency, Interfax, reported on these statements made by the FSB’s public relations office.
Dmitry Peskov
The Presidential press secretary told reporters “He is a citizen of the Russian Federation. First, it’s necessary to wait for the final results that will help doctors determine the cause of this situation, why he lost consciousness. After that, if he was actually poisoned, if certain statements are made, and if law enforcement agencies adopt other decisions, an investigation will be opened.”
The Kremlin official told reporters he knows nothing about the presence of officials from various defense and security agencies in the Omsk hospital where Navalny is located.
Dmitry Kiselyov
TV presenter and Russian state media propagandist, Dmitry Kiselyov spent the night in a room at the Xander Hotel in Tomsk, where Alexei Navalny stayed shortly before he felt sick. The production, filmed on September 23, was aired by Vesti Nedeli on Rossiya 1.
“It is believed, at least so we are told that it was from this room that they took three bottles of water, one of which was thickly smeared with Novichok chemical warfare agent,” Kiselyov said while in a hotel room. According to the presenter, if this substance were really used in the room, it would only be possible to get into the room “in a deaf chemical protection suit with an autonomous life support system” – while Kiselyov was reporting in a dressing room.
“If room 239 really had such a strong poison, I would not be sitting in front of you right now.”
Kiselyov is the head of the state-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya and is host of the Russian state-owned Rossiya 1 TV “Vesti” (news) program.
Margarita Simonyan
In a now deleted tweet, Margarita Simonyan promptly suggested Navalny was not poisoned, but that he was simply treated – either for Alzheimer’s disease, or for glaucoma.
“Everyone was waiting for what the famous Charite would say, as if it could say anything other than” Simonyan says.
Sergey Lavrov
“We are already accustomed to the fact that the United States and other Western countries simply announce in the media about the next accusations against Russia, be it hackers, be it some kind of sensation about the double or even triple poisoning of Navalny. It turned out the for the first time his wife was poisoned.
All this news is funny to read, but the manner in which this news is presented says only one thing: that our Western partners do not have any ethical standards and the lack of any skills for normal diplomatic work and a reluctance to comply with international legal norms when speaking is about fact-finding.
And the logic is this: so, they say, we announced, for example, new facts that were discovered by the German special services about the poisoning of Navalny, and Moscow has been silent for two days. If she is silent then she is guilty. The flaw in this approach, in my opinion, is obvious to any sane person.”
it is not surprising that all aparatchiks lie, just watch some of old Eisenstein’s movies and all becomes clear. Ad immemoriam all rulers in Russia were ruthless, this runs in their blood. I always heard that in every Russian there is a drop of Mongolian blood and these were blood thirsty folks.
I wonder how it is proposed here by the selection and commenting of citations, that all the establishment of Russia should have knowledge about the case and was willingly lying to the public. I see no clear evidence for that, which would have required strict coordination between the bodies.
This could be a sophisticated cover-up plot, or it could just be general contempt for Nawalny, who obviously tried to challenge and finally oust the Putin powerhouse. Doing so without expecting at least political reactions like those cited was naive, I would suggest.
There are many indices suggesting it was a plot as others have been before. To be in vocal opposition to a leadership structure like Putin’s can be a dangerous enterprise. That’s not the ideal of democracy which is upheld by many in the West. But it’s far away from the dictatorship of many former leaders in Russia.
Changing attitudes in power systems is a long run, and requires serious work and wisdom about the choice of topics, time and place. A. Nawalnyi seems to have not the best wits or counsel to choose his weapons and battle grounds.
I’m afraid that I’m not convinced by this incoherent attempted assassination allegation. If the Russian authorities wanted him dead, then Navalny would be dead. None of the other Presidential candidates were disposed of in the last Russian elections of 2018. Navalny’s candidature was denied due to alleged past criminal convictions.
And why would Russia use an unreliable nerve agent that would consequently point the accusing finger of Western Europe and the USA at Russia? It doesn’t make sense. That Navalny is a sore loser makes more sense.