How Alexey Navalny was poisoned and by whom

Talked to someone in North America this week: “Heard your friend Putin just poisoned another opposition politician.” Porton Down and the Skripals were part of a long game: events like this are is how you condition a population to respond like Pavlov’s dogs.

Paint the Russians as poisoners and you only have to sacrifice a pawn for a new round of sanctions. The timing here makes it more than obvious that a Navalny poisoning would be to help US policy. This month has been taken up with the attempt at overturning the Belarussian state (it’s early in that game yet, there’s some more moves to be made but they depend on putting the Russians on their back heel) and sabotaging Nord Stream II.

Poisoning your own man at risk of death and/or lifetime disability is a substantial sacrifice to make, but to a cynical imperialist mind well worth it to either win Belorussia, shut down Nord Stream II or even both.

Micron makes the medical case in more detail.

I do not really see the point of delving into complicated medicinal debates. Even if one of us here was a qualified MD, even a doctor would need to have access to the patient’s records to have an informed opinion. So, we are all shooting in the dark anyway.

The problem is intractable. Russophobes will never trust the Russian doctors and results of tests done in Russia, as nobody can fully exclude falsification or political pressure.

Sane people (sorry, I meant non-russophobes) will not trust Germany either. I mean, Navalny was practically given a BND escort and Angela Merkel’s spokesman has already gone on the record accusing Russia in an underhanded way. How can you trust whatever the German doctors will say, in an hospital a few hundred meters from Germany’s political decision centers and literally swarming with BND operatives ? Which doctor will have the guts to contradict political leadership and risk being found at the bottom of the Spree in a few weeks ?

Only conclusion is that the beliefs that Navalny was or was not poisoned are equally infalsifiable and cannot be proven. I do not see what could be admitted as conclusive proof by all the parties.

So we can only fall back to the good old cui bono analysis. And here, simple logic dictates that poisoning Navalny is easily the worst move of the decade for Russia, at the worst possible time : when Russia is trying to stabilize the Belarusian situation, as well as completing Nord Stream II pipeline. We are asked to believe that Putin basically said “hey you know what, screw the international situation and my carefully nurtured strategic projects, I absolutely need to eliminate a guy who polls at around 2% for some elections no one outside Russia cares about, and which my party would have won anyway”. The same guy who for years has gone out of his way to appease Turkey in Syria, and has systematically been extremely cautious in the Donbass despite half of Russia clamouring for annexation.

When faced with all this, the only answers I saw until now from MSM/Russophobes are either
1. Putin doesn’t care about international opinion, he kills whomever he wants. Sure, then why doesn’t Putin annex Donbass, or bomb the Turkish military to smithereenr, or kill dozens of guys much more nefarious and influential than Navalny ?
2. Putin is just an evil madman.

It’s a testament to the West’s extraordinary propaganda machine that there are still people who can utter or imply such insanities without being laughed out of the room.

Any one silly enough to blame the Russian government for what happened to Alexey Navalny has either not been paying attention or is deliberating disseminating false information. Both type of players are useful to the US propaganda war on Russia (and China and Iran and Venezuela). The US list of evil enemies is becoming awfully long. Heck, long time targets Cuba and North Korea and Syria had to be temporarily shelved to leave enough attention for those four.

Imagine being a US asset now though. You would have to wonder when your masters are coming for you, when your sacrifice will be considered worthwhile.