MI6 strikes again: Navalny’s aide Volkov beaten up in Lithuania
We are two days from the opening of polls in Russia for the 2024 presidential election and the Brits could not pass up an opportunity to spoil the mood by cooking up a follow-on atrocity to remind us of the murder of Alexei Navalny that they brought to the door of Putin in mid-February. This morning’s BBC News had extensive coverage of an attack on Navalny’s confederate and continuator of his mission, Leonid Volkov, who resides in Lithuania in self-imposed exile. The propaganda message was clear: opposition personalities must fear for their lives even if they live outside Russia. In the event, Volkov survived the attack of his assailant with hammer and tear gas (?) and gave an interview to reassert his determination to resist the Putin regime. He is said to have suffered bone fractures in his leg.
The Volkov story made a nice bookend to last night’s broadcast of Hard Talk with Stephen Sakur. The show was retrospective, putting on screen Sakur’s interviews with a succession of Putin opponents, most of whom are dead or in prison. We heard from Boris Nemtsov (dead), Alexei Navalny (dead) and Vladimir Kara-Murza (in a remote prison colony). Then there was the one survivor of Putin’s terror: Ksenia Sobchak, who filled in for Navalny in the 2016 elections after he was barred from running and has represented Russia’s chattering classes in the various movements to overthrow the regime ever since. Ksenia is still free as a bird and doing very well financially from her society gossip blog, all thanks to Putin’s loyalty to the memory of her father, Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St Petersburg whom Putin served for several years as deputy responsible for attracting foreign investments.
I will not explain here in detail why I say the Brits were behind the attack on Volkov. Suffice it to say that the Brits are the engineers of all anti-Russian false flag events these days, as they were the vanguard of anti-Assad phony chemical weapons attacks in the Syrian civil war. The British have officers on the ground in Ukraine to direct drone and cruise missile attacks on Russian positions. This was plainly stated by the conspiring Luftwaffe generals in their group telephone discussion that was so nicely tapped and leaked to the press by RT a week ago. So long as Russia does not respond in kind and target British assets and home territory of the island nation, the United Kingdom will continue to be ever more brazen.
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I am just a layman as regards military hardware, but I will stick my neck out a bit to mention one aspect of the controversy in Germany over sending Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine that barely is mentioned in our media. We hear time and again that the issue is the range of these missiles, 500 km, which would give the Ukrainians the possibility of destroying the iconic Kerch (Crimea) bridge and attacking other targets way behind Russian lines with devastating effect. That, presumably, would lead to a further escalation from the Russian side, exposing German military production centers to attack.
However, at least in Russian media there is another issue: the Taurus are said to be nuclear enabled, meaning they could carry tactical nuclear weapons. If that is true, then incoming Taurus missiles could well prompt the Russians to ‘launch on warning’ a strategic nuclear attack on Germany, or on the USA as they may choose.
There are rumors in Germany that Scholz’s decision against sending the Taurus to Ukraine was advised by none other than Joe Biden. If so, then the possible nuclear boomerang described above could have been the argument which prevailed.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024