Navalny will remain the West’s darling, but not Russia’s

By Johanna Ross | February 4, 2021
In case you missed it, Russian blogger/politician/investigative journalist Alexei Navalny was sentenced on Tuesday in a Moscow court to 2 years 8 months in prison for breaking the terms of a suspended sentence.
The western media is, of course, outraged. The leaders of the US, UK and France have all joined in unison to demand his release. Michael McFaul continues with his Navalny/Mandela comparisons on Twitter until we finally accept it. He’s clearly following the old adage of ‘if you say something often enough, it becomes the truth’.
What seemed like overnight, Alexei Navalny has gone from being an obscure opposition activist to the saviour of Russia and the human race itself (or as the western media would have us believe). Opposition journalists, of whom several are not even based in Russia, but prefer to egg-on their activist colleagues from the safety of the US and Europe, have been tweeting their profanities and scolding the Russian authorities for not immediately releasing their media darling.
While the western world has become caught up in the drama of this ‘one man against the world story’, few are able to scratch beneath the surface, to see past the golden gates of ‘Putin’s palace’ and the condemned man kissing his wife goodbye in the airport as he meets his fate. Navalny is an expert in PR, something which his opponents are only just catching up with.
Alexei Navalny has quite deliberately set about becoming a political martyr. His very existence depends on the mythology surrounding his plight. His existence, his financial support (which I shall touch on later) depends on him being a ‘victim’ of the Russian state. He has to continue his anti-Putin programme to sustain himself and his family. For what other job/career does he have? No other would pay as well.
How many of those protestors who responded to his ‘call to arms’ in January and ventured out into the bitter cold to demonstrate, could actually name any of his policies? Could they even say what he stood for? Navalny himself isn’t sure. He has flipped and flopped between right-wing nationalism and left-wing policies for the last two decades. The only consistent policy is he wants to bring down Putin and replace him (if you can call that a policy).
As renowned academic Anatol Lieven has noted, we have to put aside the emotion in this case and deal primarily with the facts. Navalny has played with our emotions as much as possible; emphasising the romantic attachment to his wife with footage of him signing love hearts on the glass box in the courtroom; and performing the role of the underdog in the case to the letter. But over the last few months, the world, including the Kremlin, has been dancing to his tune, not the other way around.
In Germany Navalny was treated like a diplomat, escorted around by the security services, visited by Chancellor Merkel. He decided when he would arrive back to Russia, and knew he would be arrested. The release of his ‘Putin’s Palace’ video, which he clearly worked on in collaboration with German intelligence while he stayed there, was perfectly timed to be published just after his arrest, and it was hoped this would trigger mass protests, which in turn would pressurise the authorities to let him go. Protests certainly took place, but much to his supporters’ dismay, the authorities had no plans to override the law and release him.
And it’s worth here touching on that infamous palace video – which we now know, thanks to a video produced by ‘Mash’ – to be a complete misrepresentation of the truth. There are no golden gates. There is no baroque furniture. The ‘palace’ at the moment is a concrete shell, and there is no direct evidence linking it to the Russian President – instead it has been claimed by businessman Arkady Rotenberg as an aparthotel complex. That in itself is offensive, that Navalny would have the Russian people believe that there is a luxurious ‘dvorets’ on their doorstep, photoshopping the whole building to dupe people into buying his ‘golden toilet brush’ story. It shows extreme contempt for the general public he is addressing.
Indeed, Navalny would have us believe that he is acting on behalf of the Russian people. From his prison cell, he is demanding people go out on the streets in the middle of the Russian winter, during a pandemic, to take part in unsanctioned demonstrations, for which they are likely to be arrested, and as is often the case during such mass protests, injured. Is this thinking about the Russian people? Of course not. Navalny is thinking about Navalny.
Returning to the subject of who finances him, there have been suspicions for some time as to the extent to which he is being subsidised by western governments. Then, earlier this week, an explosive FSB video was released detailing a conversation between Navalny’s ally Vladimir Ashurkov and a British embassy official back in 2012. Unbelievably candid, Ashurkov asks the diplomat for ‘millions of dollars a year’ to help Navalny with his campaign, reminding him that foreign businesses have ‘billions at stake’. Literally asking a foreign power to meddle in the affairs of a sovereign state with a view to toppling the current government. If that doesn’t constitute treason, I don’t know what does.
For his part, we know that Ashurkov, who remains the Executive Director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, has links to UK intelligence operations. Granted political asylum in the UK in 2015 after being wanted on embezzlement charges in Russia, Ashurkov was named in the documents of the Integrity Initiative – the UK’s covert anti-Russia propaganda campaign funded by the Foreign Office – leaked back in 2019. All this simply confirms the Kremlin’s assertions that Navalny is being aided and abetted by countries that have declared Russia their sworn enemy.
The western involvement in and support for Navalny’s campaign vastly reduces his chances of being taken seriously in Russia. For the vast majority of Russians he is the anti-hero, not Russia’s saviour as he is being portrayed in the West. Therefore while he may remain the West’s darling, he won’t be Russia’s.
Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Foreign Office maintains deafening silence on Chagos Islands despite UN ruling
Press TV – February 2, 2021
Five days after a legal body of the United Nations dismissed British claims of sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, the Foreign Office continues to avoid meaningful engagement the issue.
The United Nation’s International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ruled on January 28 that Mauritius has sole sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, thus delivering a fatal blow to the UK’s weak legal position.
The UN body’s judgment follows a ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in February 2019 that the UK must end its occupation, which in turn triggered a vote to that effect in the UN General Assembly in May 2019.
Despite the gravity of the situation, the British Foreign Office has hitherto released just a single terse statement on the issue, essentially reaffirming the UK’s recalcitrant attitude.
“The UK has no doubt as to our sovereignty over the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), which has been under continuous British sovereignty since 1814. Mauritius has never held sovereignty over the BIOT and the UK does not recognize its claim”.
That curt statement, and the subsequent silence, underscores the UK’s resolve to flout international law and maintain a stranglehold over the occupied Chagos Islands.
But despite London’s oft-stated determination to hold onto the Chagos Islands indefinitely, there will inevitably be concerted legal push back by the international community, the state of Mauritius and even by individual aggrieved Chagos islanders.
On the issue of Chagos islanders – who were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands by the UK in the mid-1960s – the long-delayed issue of compensation by the British government is finally attracting attention.
According to the Observer (January 31), less than £12,000 of a £40 million fund set up to compensate Chagos islanders for the loss of their homeland has actually been given to those islanders living in Britain.
The fund was reportedly set up four years ago and yet the Foreign Office has distributed less than one percent in direct support to Chagos islanders who have lost homes and livelihoods as a result of the 55-year British occupation.
According to the Observer, which claims to have seen internal documents, the “English council” tasked with allocating the money has “abandoned the work” and “returned the funds” to the Foreign Office.
The FCO’s mistreatment of Chagos islanders over a 55-year period has even elicited criticism from some sections of the ruling Tories, a party committed to keeping occupied territories around the world.
The Tory MP Henry Smith, whose Crawley constituency is home to the majority of Chagossians living in the UK, has described the process of extracting compensation money from the Foreign office as “tortuous”.
“While there’s some uncertainty among the Chagos community about engaging with the UK government over these funds, it’s outrageous that next to none of this funding has actually been utilized. The fact that this sort of funding hasn’t been deployed is another failure of Foreign Office promises over half a century to the Chagossian community”, Smith said.
It remains to be seen if class action undertaken by the Chagossian community – coupled with pressure from the UN and the broader international system – will produce a shift in the UK’s position in the mid to long term.
Top Navalny aide asked alleged British spy for millions in funding: intelligence video released by Russia’s FSB
RT | February 1, 2021
Surveillance footage, recorded in the early 2010s, appears to show a close associate of Alexey Navalny seeking cash and intelligence from an alleged British spy and suggesting his anti-corruption work may benefit firms in London.
The tape, which was first reported by RT television on Monday, is said to have been filmed by the Federal Security Service (FSB) sometime in 2012 and allegedly shows a meeting between Vladimir Ashurkov and an employee of the British Embassy in Moscow. Ashurkov is the executive director of the FBK, Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption organization.
The person he met at a Moscow cafe was identified as James William Thomas Ford, then Second Secretary for political affairs of the UK embassy in Russia. The FSB suspected he was an MI6 agent working under diplomatic cover. The discussion presents problematic optics for Navalny and the FBK team, and appears to support the Russian government’s claim that they deserve to be considered foreign agents.
Part of Ashurkov’s pitch, recorded secretly by the security service, was dedicated to fundraising.
“If we had more money, we would expand our team, of course,” he said, adding that his goal of obtaining “a little money” like “10, 20 million dollars a year” would make a huge difference. “And this is not a big amount of money for people who have billions at stake. And that’s the message I am trying to project in my fundraising efforts and talking to people in the business community,” he said.
The FBK’s stated goal is to expose alleged cases of corruption in Russia. While it is essentially a type of journalistic organisation, its work is ultimately tied to Navalny’s aims of gaining political power. Ashurkov outlined the organization’s activities as “mass protests, civil initiatives, propaganda, establishing contacts with the elite and explain to them that we are reasonable people and we are not going to demolish everything and take away their assets.”
At the time of the meeting, Vladimir Putin had just returned to the Kremlin, and was taking a tougher line on foreign meddling in Russia’s domestic affairs. His predecessor, Dmitry Medvedev, had been more liberal and Western-leaning and Putin’s comeback was greeted negatively in the US and Britain.
In addition to explaining the FBK’s financial needs, Ashurkov said it could use information provided by the British government, particularly the Serious Fraud Office, for its exposés. The agency “has access to a lot of information that would not be available to us, from British sources” on certain Russian people. He named businessmen Roman Abramovich and Alisher Usmanov, who both have assets in United Kingdom, as examples.
Other UK government agencies could have helped as well, the activist suggested, while London, in general, was “already taking a tougher stance towards Russia.”
The FBK’s activities would have benefited British business too, the activist said. “We will release a report on VTB bank [a major financial institution in Russia] in association with Henry Jackson society [a neo-conservative lobby group with an avowed anti-Russian agenda] in London,” he said. Allegations of corruption involving one of the largest Russian banks would “make the case that it represents a threat to European financial markets and their integrity because it is a significant player in Europe.”
“And they make it more difficult for British firms like Lloyds or RBS or other big banks like Barclays to compete.”
The British diplomat did not commit to helping FBK during the conversation, citing the Russian legislation on foreign agents that was primed to come into force in November 2012. But he suggested turning to Transparency International for grants. Ashurkov said he doubted working with Transparency “would be effective.”
Ashurkov is currently residing in the UK, having left Russia in 2014. In his home country, he is wanted on allegations of committing fraud to finance Navalny’s 2013 campaign for the office of the mayor of Moscow.
He was one of the witnesses invited by the British Parliament for its 2018 inquiry into alleged corruption in Russia. His name was also listed in the leaked documents of the Integrity Initiative, an apparent British state-run clandestine information warfare operation linking public figures to coordinate them in supporting London’s preferred narratives and political goals.
The year the tape was allegedly filmed is incidentally the same as when a British government official finally acknowledged that an infamous fake rock espionage incident in Russia was genuine. The scandal broke in 2006 and involved British diplomats using a WiFi device disguised as a rock to collect intelligence from sources in Russia.
“The spy rock was embarrassing,” Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, told the BBC at the time, adding that Moscow made its allegations public for political reasons. The purpose, the broadcaster suggested, was to justify the passage of the foreign agents law.
RT has reached out to Mr Ford, Mr Ashurkov, as well as the UK Foreign Office and UK Embassy in Moscow for their comment on the story, but has yet to hear back from any of them.
UK Climate Assembly was undemocratic
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 29, 2021
Ben Pile lifts the lid on the undemocratic Climate Assembly:
London, 29 January: The UK Climate Assembly, which claimed to have delivered a mandate for a green revolution, could not have delivered a mandate of any kind, according to a new analysis published by the Global Warming Policy Forum.
According to the report’s author, Ben Pile, the Assembly was set up to deliver a preordained result:
It was in no way a democratic process. Almost everyone involved with convening the assembly, and almost everyone who spoke to it, was involved with environmental campaigning to some extent. Most can be linked to a small group of wealthy environmental funders.”
Pile says that the Assembly was actually set up because the public were unpersuaded of the case for radical action.
Politicians agreed the net zero target without debate and at best lukewarm public support. The Assembly was an attempt to provide a justification for strong policy measures, but it is ridiculous to suggest that a project like this could deliver some sort of a mandate. The assembly was an attempt to sidestep the democratic process.”
The UK Climate Assembly: Manufacturing Mandates can be downloaded here
https://www.thegwpf.com/climate-assembly-was-undemocratic/
Ben’s conclusion sums it up nicely:
Particularly intriguing is Ben’s exposure of the flagrant bias of the speakers and organisers. I have already highlighted the fact that the four Expert Leads, who organised the assembly, are all part of the climate mafia. Ben goes further:
This is really quite disgraceful, and is the sort of thing that would have been at home in the USSR.
“I do everything my TV tells me to do” – That’s why we’re hurtling towards the Great Reset
THE DAILY EXPOSE • JANUARY 18, 2021
If the current pandemic of dictatorial tyranny sweeping across the world has taught us anything, it is that the majority of humanity has been so well trained to obey authority that it is now incapable of free thought and afraid to ask questions. Never before have we seen such docile conformance to words echoing from the speakers of a television screen as when the Prime Minister of the UK announced in March 2020 that he had “one simple instruction” for the British people… ”You must stay at home”. But Mr Johnson spoke through the ‘telescreen’, and the nation listened.
Within an instant the UK economy came to a halt, without question, all because a man, in a suit, on the TV said it should. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed their doors to customers and staff. Schools and nurseries closed their doors to children, which in turn lead to parents being unable to work because they could not find care for their children. Unless of course the man, in a suit on the TV told them that there job was deemed essential, in which case it was fine to send their children to school and go out to work.
“Three weeks” was what the man, in a suit, on the TV said the country needed “to flatten the curve,”. But three weeks turned into five weeks, which turned into eight weeks, which turned into fourteen weeks. I wonder how many would have complied for so long with an instruction given to them by a man, in a suit, on the TV if it had not been for another man, in a suit, on the TV promising to subsidize up to eighty percent of their wages for sitting at home and not working?
Sounds great doesn’t it, sitting at home and still being paid. The people so eager to accept this scheme most likely didn’t realise that A) it was not the man, in a suit, on the TV paying these wages, it was in fact the British taxpayer. B) They would have to pay this money back in the future via higher taxes, and C) that’s only if they still had a job to pay those taxes as the only purpose of this scheme was to delay everyone’s unemployment to ensure that they complied. It was never about making sure you were going to be okay and have a job to go back to, it was about making sure you were complicit in the destruction of the job market as we know it, in order to bring in the new age of AI.
We bet the authorities could not believe their luck at how easy it was to get the vast majority of every man and woman in the land to obey an instruction that was emitted via the telescreen, and boy have they made the most of it ever since.
On the 3rd April 2020, Professor Jonathan Van Tam, deputy chief medical officer for England, told the British public via the ‘telescreen’ that he had spoke with a colleague in Hong Kong who had carried out an evidence review for the World Health Organisation and stated they “were of the same mind that there is no evidence that the general wearing of face masks by the public affects the spread of a disease in our society, what matters right now is social distancing. In terms of the hard evidence, we do not recommend face masks for general wearing by the public.”
Yet fast forward four months and the Government enforced the wearing of face coverings in all indoor public settings. However we did not instantly see a swarm of face nappy clad folk outdoors for over a week, and why was that? Because the man, in a suit, on the TV said this would not come into force for another week. That week came and went and on the day of enforcement there was not a smile to be seen. But what does that say about the majority of the British public and their acquiescence to authority. Not wearing a face covering because they genuinely thought it would work in the “fight against the virus”, but wearing it because a man, in a suit, on the TV said they would be subject to a £200 fine if they refused to do so. We know this to be true because they would have worn the face covering from the moment it was announced they were required otherwise.
Fast forward another few months and we were told by Professor Jonathan Van Tam, again via the ‘telescreen’ that he did not think there would “come a moment when we can have a big party and throw our masks and hand sanitiser and say ‘that’s it, it’s behind us’ like the end of the war? No I don’t.” Insisting that the wearing of face masks “may persist for many years and that may be a good thing”.
The contractions on the wearing of face masks alone should have been enough for the British public to wake up and question why they were partaking in the destruction of the world as they knew it, unknowingly bringing in a “new normal” and a chance for the globalists to fast forward their “great reset” agenda. But disappointingly it has yet to be the case.
Instead we are now stuck in a cycle of stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives, repeat. Whenever a man, in a suit, on the TV appears on the British public’s ‘telescreen’s’ they stand to attention and hang on every word that echoes from the speaker. We don’t hold much hope that this will change anytime soon, instead we are stuck firmly on the road to the ‘Great Reset’ and we’re hurtling towards it at a few hundred miles per hour.
They do everything their TV tells them to do…but do you?
UK Labour’s recent hire shows ‘complete submission to Zionist lobby’, rights group says
MEMO | January 25, 2021
The UK Labour Party’s decision to appoint a former Israel spy to work in his social media team demonstrates its leaders “complete submission to the Zionist lobby”, a UK-based human rights group has said.
The Arab Organisation for Human Rights in the UK (AOHR UK) criticised the appointment of Assaf Kaplan, who worked as an analyst and officer in Unit 8200 of the Israeli Military Intelligence between 2009-2013, where he monitored, collected, and analysed information on all Palestinians, regardless of their status.
“Unit 8200 constantly breaches international laws and conventions, as it dates back to the period before the establishment of Israel when it was known as Shin Mem 2, which worked on collecting information for Zionist gangs that committed massacres against the Palestinians,” AOHR UK said.
“In September 2014, 43 officers published a letter revealing the filthy role of this unit and how the information it gathered led to the killing of thousands of innocent Palestinians, especially during the wars on the Gaza Strip.”
AOHR UK confirmed that Kaplan’s CV, as well as the past and present of this unit, are known to officials in the British Labour Party, thus raising many questions about the reasons behind his employment given the risks he poses to the security of the party
AOHR UK explained that as a result of his work, Kaplan should be in “prison, not the British Labour Party.”
The rights group went on to call on the leaders of the Labour Party and its supporters to reject this appointment.
Infectious Diseases Expert Says UK Lockdown is Not Working
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | January 21, 2021
Infectious diseases expert Professor Steven Riley says current data shows that the national lockdown in the United Kingdom is not working.
Riley, who is professor of infectious disease dynamics at Imperial College London, cited a React study which shows “the prevalence of infection increased between 6 and 15 January,” after the national lockdown was announced on January 4.
“It’s long enough that, were the lockdown working effectively, we would certainly have hoped to have seen a decline,” said Riley.
The professor added that current research “certainly doesn’t support the conclusion that lockdown is working.”
As we highlighted last week, a peer reviewed study by Stanford researchers found that mandatory lockdowns do not provide more benefits to stopping the spread of COVID-19 than voluntary measures such as social distancing.
The researchers found “no clear, significant beneficial effect of [more restrictive measures] on case growth in any country.”
While numerous studies show that lockdowns have no impact on reducing the spread of viruses, an avalanche of data shows that they cost lives.
Academics from Duke, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins have warned that there could be around a million excess deaths over the next two decades as a result of lockdowns.
Thousands of doctors and scientists are on record as opposing lockdown measures, warning that they will cause more death than the coronavirus itself.
Will Sir David Attenborough attempt to save Red-listed Kittiwakes from giant wind turbine project?

Global Warming Policy Forum – 19/01/21
On the 31st of December last year Alok Sharma, then Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, gave planning consent for the giant Hornsea 3 offshore wind farm. He decided to over-ride planning inspectors who had advised refusal on the grounds of unacceptable environmental impacts on the Red-listed Kittiwake populations of the East Coast, whose resting and nesting sites are protected by Natura 2000 legislation, some of the strongest environmental protection in Europe.
In giving consent Mr Sharma said that that contribution of the Hornsea 3 scheme to reaching Net Zero was more important than the affect on the local environment and its bird populations, and justified ignoring Natura 2000 protection.
This sets a precedent that the renewables industry has already identified as “opening the floodgates” for any major industrial development that can make a claim, however tenuous, to low carbon credentials.
The GWPF has written to Sir David Attenborough, asking him to intervene personally to reverse this decision and request a moratorium of the mega-project before it is too late.

