I must admit that up until last week I had never heard of Alexei Navalny.
Now we are being told that Navalny is a very vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin who has been organizing opposition support in Russia and plotting mayhem in the streets of neighbouring Belarus. The reason we know this is because Navalny is presently (at time of writing) in a coma in hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk.
Western intelligence sources have already claimed that Navalny’s condition is the result of an attempted assassination by Russian Intelligence operatives. Of course Putin himself is the logical suspect for ordering this ‘hit’ on his political nemesis.
The plotline conjured up by those western intelligence reports is that Navalny ingested the poison when he drank a cup of tea at the airport in Tomsk. He was waiting for a flight to Moscow. However, once airborne, Navalny began exhibiting symptoms and the pilot quickly rerouted to make an emergency landing at Omsk.
Since western intelligence reports are unquestionably reliable the question begs what the hell is wrong with the Russian GRU secret service? Why are they so fascinated with the use of poison and elaborate James Bond style, over elaborate execution plots?
If they wanted Navalny dead without garnering international attention why not just shoot him, take his wallet and have the Tomsk police chief rule it as a robbery gone bad? Case closed.
Instead these GRU clowns plant an agent in the Tomsk airport to slip the poison into his takeout cup of tea. The poison must be very slow acting as Navalny is able to board the plane before submitting to it. The midflight reaction guarantees there are multiple witnesses to his distress which in turn leads to an emergency landing by the pilot. All kinds of attention, and once again the GRU’S intended target doesn’t die.
Did these GRU agents learn nothing from their high profile failed assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal?
According to western intelligence narrative, in March 2018, two GRU agents entered the U.K armed with the deadly nerve-agent Novichok.
They were intent on killing Skripal — a convicted double agent who had been released from a Russian jail in a 2010 spy swap with the U.K.
Skripal had settled down in the sleepy country town of Salisbury with his daughter Yulia. The GRU assassins thought the best means of eliminating Skripal was to smear the super deadly Novichok agent on the door handle of the Skripal residence.
The two Skripals — Sergei and Yulia — were both found in distress in a nearby park on March 4, 2018. The pair were hospitalized in critical condition. The U.K announced that Novichok was the substance and that meant the GRU and, by extraction, Putin was to blame.
In a show of solidarity allied nations including Canada expelled Russian diplomats from embassies all around the world to protest this outrage.
Again one has to ask why the GRU would not have simply shot Skripal, taken his wallet and have this incident swept under the carpet as a common robbery? Instead they created an international backlash against Russia and in the end both Skripals fully recovered within a few weeks.
Putin and the GRU should take lessons in extra-judicial executions from the U.S. When Donald Trump wanted Iranian General Qasem Soleimani killed, the CIA did not have an agent lace his tea cup with poison at a civilian airport.
Nor did any U.S. spies wipe a nerve agent on his family doorknob.
Hell no. On Jan. 3, 2020 a predator drone operator at the U.S. base in Doha, Qatar simply pushed a button and fired a missile into Soleimani’s entourage at the Baghdad airport.
Unlike Putin and the cowardly GRU, there was no phony denials of Soleimani’s execution on the part of the U.S.
President Trump gleefully hailed Soleimani’s death and took full credit. That’s how the big boys take care of their nemesis.
