Although Alexey Navalny’s organisation was disbanded after being recognised as an extremist organisation, one of his former members is mentioned in a video showing how activists seem to want to destabilise the situation in Russia, and in particular to organise provocations during the Russian parliamentary elections which will take place in a few days, in order to have them declared illegitimate.
A video showing activists (including a volunteer indicated as working for the former head of Navalny’s headquarters) described as belonging to the Golos (foreign agent in Russia) organisation, explaining how to organise provocations to be ejected from polling stations in order to artificially increase the recorded violations and thus declare the Russian parliamentary elections illegitimate, has been circulating for just a few hours and the scandal is already spreading on social networks like Twitter.
In this video in Russian, of which a version with English subtitles is available on Twitter, we, astonished, discover activists “training” “observers” for the upcoming Russian legislative elections. And the least we can say is that the training provided is very strange.
Leaked footage from US/EU-funded NGO briefing in Russia:
— Murad Gazdiev (@MuradGazdiev) September 14, 2021
“Our job is to show these elections are illegitimate… Unfortunately, there are fewer violations… So we have written instructions to get all of you kicked out of voting stations, to show these elections are illegitimate” pic.twitter.com/9A9KQSZSwp
The training took place in St Petersburg, and the presenter, Natalya Zaostrovtseva, is heard explaining to the future “observers” that their aim is not really to observe the elections so that they are more democratic, but to organise provocations so that they are declared illegitimate.
“We don’t have much time, but I want to remind you that our task is to show that these elections are illegitimate. How are we going to do that? Our analysts say that we will not be able to record as many violations as in 2011. This is because of several reasons… fewer observers and fewer violations. The political landscape has been cleaned up. But we have a plan. At the end of this conference, each of you will receive a booklet with instructions. We are going to create the conditions to make sure that every one of you is kicked out of the polling stations. So we can record and demonstrate that there are electoral violations,” says the presenter.
What this activist is telling us is fascinating. These people who claim to be fighting corruption, instead of rejoicing that there will be fewer violations in the parliamentary elections because, and I quote, “the political landscape has been cleaned up” (which is normally a good thing), are organising to create provocations to artificially inflate the numbers of violations, and thus declare the elections illegitimate.
What confirms that this is a conference preparing pseudo-observers for the elections that will take place in a few days and not others that have taken place before, are two facts: 1) you can clearly see several people wearing masks, which indicates that these are elections taking place during the coronavirus epidemic, 2) the presenter says that there will be fewer observers this year, which is the case for the parliamentary elections because, precisely because of the epidemic, Russia has asked the ODIHR (the OSCE office in charge of election observation) to limit the number of observers they will send, which has led the organisation to refuse to come altogether.
The argument put forward by the ODIHR for finally refusing to come, saying that the sanitary reason invoked by Russia was not clear and did not justify insisting so much on the restriction of the number of their observers, is totally bogus.
When we see the European countries members of the OSCE setting up ultra-strict confinements, sanitary passes and so on in the name of the coronavirus pandemic, to say that the sanitary argument does not justify limiting the number of foreign observers who will be able to enter and walk freely in the polling stations in Russia at the risk of contaminating a bunch of voters is a total hypocrisy
Either there is a serious pandemic and everyone accepts that each country should take the measures it deems appropriate and comply with them, including limiting the number of people who can enter the territory of the country in question, or it is said that the sanitary argument does not hold and this means that there is no serious pandemic. But it can’t be both.
In any case, the fact that the ODIHR is not involved in the observation of the Russian elections does not seem to prevent it from getting involved in this story. Indeed, the ODIHR logo is clearly visible in the top left corner of the presentation behind the presenter, entitled “Presentation on common mistakes made by polling station commissions”.
So ODIHR will not be coming to observe the Russian elections because they will not be able to do everything they want to do, but they find themselves associated with people who seem to want to organise provocations during these parliamentary elections. Several of us have asked ODIHR to explain why their logo is present at this conference and their answer is that they have nothing to do with it.
This event has no connection with ODIHR or our work on elections. We will not be observing this week's elections in Russia and have not engaged in any training for citizen observers in Russia – see more here: https://t.co/7KjGmijNue
— OSCE/ODIHR (@osce_odihr) September 14, 2021
And the same excuse is given for the one who is named as the presenter of the conference.
If you look at the description of the video, it says that Natalya Zaostrovtseva is a volunteer working for Irina Fatyanova, the former director of Alexey Navalny’s headquarters. Of course Russia’s foreign media agents, led by The Insider (the Russian version of Bellingcat, classified as a foreign agent in Russia) swear to us that this is not true, that Fatyanova doesn’t know her, and moreover the Golos organisation’s (also a foreign agent in Russia) trainings for observers are reportedly taking place elsewhere in Fogel’s bar or a place called “Open Space”.
One small problem is that, like their Bellingcat mentors, The Insider journalists are having trouble covering all the tracks. It turns out that Irina Fatyanova, a candidate who was thrown out of the parliamentary elections by the Russian electoral commission because of her membership of an extremist organisation (Navalny’s), is also organising “training sessions” for “observers”, at an address that is neither the Fogel bar nor the “Open Space”, as indicated on her official website.
The address given is 51 A, Pionerskaya Street in St. Petersburg, the address of Fatyanova’s headquarters.
And regarding the fact that Fatyanova would not know Natalya Zaostrovtseva, it seems that she knew her well enough to have the address of her Instagram account (while the Instagram pseudo does not contain her full name), and throw it to her groupies who went to harass the young woman by calling her a “bitch”, an actress, etc., pushing her to restrict access to her account.
Почему её посчитали волонтеркой? Да потому что она откуда-то достала мерч кампании и сегодня в день распространения этого фейка выложила в инст.
— Фатьянова Ирина (@irmachinsky) September 14, 2021
Ну вот можно у Натальи Заостровцевой спросить под этим постом в комментах, ок ли ей в провокациях таких участвовать, много ли платят? pic.twitter.com/3GPWdJluSR
Another strange thing is that one of Fatyanova’s groupies posted in response to this tweet that she had “kicked her out” (meaning, from her Instagram contacts). If this girl is a complete stranger to Fatyanova’s headquarters, how come they had her in their contacts?
Second problem, in the image that Fatyanova puts in her Twitter post to send her henchmen to harass Natalya, we can clearly see that the young woman is carrying a purple bag with the slogan of… Fatyanova clearly displayed on it (“I am not afraid, and do not be afraid”, “Я не боюсь. И вы не бойтесь”)!
The same purple bag as the one worn by a Fatyanova volunteer, whose photo appears on her Twitter feed:
Нам нужны автоволонтёры! 🚘Это люди со своими машинами, которые смогут:
— Фатьянова Ирина (@irmachinsky) September 4, 2021
1. Все три дня голосования доставлять на избирательные участки необходимые вещи (например, воду, зарядки, документы) и возить мобильные группы. pic.twitter.com/XxxLdDbSzh
Fatyanova herself, in the comment posted on Natalya’s Instagram account, clearly states that she is wearing the bag that her volunteers are carrying. When I see this I have a bit of trouble buying the “I don’t know her” excuse.
Another strange thing is that The Insider claims that the second recognizable person in the video (the blonde on the right at the beginning), Anastasia Tokareva, who belongs to the Yabloko party (the “ecologists”, but who are actually part of the same Russian pseudo-opposition as Navalny), was invited there without really knowing why, allegedly to make some money, and that she has been a supporter of the party for only one month.
Problem is, the young woman has an Instagram account herself (since 2019), on which she clearly indicates that she joined the Yabloko party on 3 April 2021. So this is a proven lie by The Insider and the other pro-Western media who are trying to clumsily debunk this story. Because they know where her Instagram account is, and it took me less than two minutes to find the information there.
The Yabloko party claims that she would not have come if she had known what the conference would be about (but she doesn’t leave when the presenter outlines her provocative plan, strange).
Clearly, we have excuses that are not backed up by anything other than assertions, put forward by people from a team known for its dubious methods and its immoderate use of lies. Indeed, I recall that a former activist from Navalny’s team, Marina Romanova, admitted to receiving 50,000 rubles for accusing the police of beating her! In reality it was members of Navalny’s team who beat her.
Нам нужны автоволонтёры! 🚘Это люди со своими машинами, которые смогут:
— Фатьянова Ирина (@irmachinsky) September 4, 2021
1. Все три дня голосования доставлять на избирательные участки необходимые вещи (например, воду, зарядки, документы) и возить мобильные группы. pic.twitter.com/XxxLdDbSzh
Need I also remind you of the incredible series of lies both in the Navalny case and in his pseudo-documentary on Putin’s “palace” which was never his property and never looked like what Navalny showed in his video.
As for The Insider, they work hand in hand with Bellingcat (and with the same processes) and Navalny. Bellingcat’s bias, dubious methods and funding from NATO governments have long been proven.
I remind you that a former commander of the DPR won his libel suit against Bellingcat, that a witness to the MH17 crash has also just filed a complaint against them for the same offence, and that one of The Insider’s journalists is currently being sued for the same thing by the Dutch journalist Max van der Werff. This means that what this media outlet is saying should at the very least be taken with huge reservations, to say the least.
Some commentators have called for the Russian Investigative Committee to look into this video and I hope that it will do so in order to get to the bottom of who is involved in this story, and whether or not Navalny’s former collaborators are once again associated with provocations related to the Russian elections.
Christelle Néant
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