Election fraud allegations will erode Putin’s legitimacy | Russia | Al Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/9/22/election-fraud-allegations-will-erode-putins-legitimacy
@kravietz Perhaps you are right, but Navalny seems like a right-wing CIA/MI6 puppet like Juan Guaidó. A tool in the regime change warfare.
If there was a slightest hint of Navalny being controlled by a foreign power, you'd have Russian state media all over it for the last year. Instead, they sentenced him based on a decade-old economic case where his and his brother's crime was making profit on sales of wood. And the direct pretext for his jailing this time was that he wasn't present at the probation office while he was unconscious in a hospital due to poisoning by FSB.
@modrobert Murad Gazdiev and RT just recently published a video of alleged ODIHR "training for Russian opposition" that was set up so lame that even pro-government journalists were embarrassed. A couple of years ago they also produced an "intercept of CIA agents planning MH17 bombing" that resulted in similar facepalms (and even there they managed to include Navalny). So you should definitely take whatever RT posts with a pinch of salt.
@kravietz I have no doubt Putin go after his political opponents, but have serious doubts about Navalny. Perhaps I'm biased due to his neo-nazi background.
But he has no neo-nazi background. Once again, this is something that has been invented relatively recently by RT - they inflated a few of his comments from >10 years ago where he was critical of immigrants from Caucasus. His views back then could have been described as "nationalist" but even that would be a far stretch. You could say Dmitry Rogozin, a prominent Kremlin politicians and head of Roscosmos, has way more "neo-nazi" background than Navalny but somehow RT doesn't care.
And then you have Margarita Simonyan, head of RT, accusing Navalny of being "neo-nazi" because of his 2011 comments, while she makes rather disgusting and openly racist comments on regular basis - her husband made a whole racist sketch about Obama, she defended him and argued about "criminal negroes" being a plague in the US.
@kravietz I'm pretty sure the reason for leaking the footage of Navalny's organization taking money from MI6 was to hang him out and make him look bad, but all the persons involved are named, so it's pretty hard to dismiss as evidence, regardless of what you think about RT.
Yes, except there's no "Navalny organization taking money from MI6" 🤷 If you take the video apart, it's a chain of unfounded accusations: you have Ford, who is a former UK diplomat, and "designated MI6 agent". Designated by whom exactly? By FSB of course, a very respected source. Married to Elizabeth Greenberg, again "designated as Swedish agent", which may sound convincing only from Russian villager's point of view where there's a "single evil West", but is otherwise nonsense.
@kravietz What initially got my skepticism going was how all of sudden the whole western mainstream media was calling out Russia for mistreatment of Navalny, a previously relatively unknown political figure in the west, it followed a similar pattern as Juan Guaidó (which was pretty much unknown even in Venezuela before mainstream media started its campaign). Why care so much about what happens to a politician in an enemy country, unless they have some other motive behind it?
@modrobert
If you periodically watched Russian and English-language media about Russia, you'd know it's simply not true. FBK activities received quite a lot of coverage for the last decade or so, so it was anything but "sudden".