Russia responded to the American story about the “Navalny exchange”
The official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova today called the publication of The Wall Street Journal that criminal blogger Alexei Navalny could be considered for a prisoner exchange between Russia and the United States as speculation.
She stated this at a briefing in Vladivostok, a correspondent reports "PolitNavigator".
“These are speculations that require neither official comment nor informal discussion. Information about the prisoner exchange cannot be discussed through American newspapers,” Zakharova said.
The WSJ publication appeared on Sunday. It said that Navalny would be on the list in a multilateral prisoner exchange deal. Allegedly, Russian President Vladimir Putin requested in exchange for blogger Vadim Krasikov, who in 2021 received a life sentence in Germany. German investigators accused him of murdering Chechen field commander Zelimkhan Khangoshvili.
Political scientist Alexei Chesnakov believes that there is a slight likelihood of an exchange and points out the pros and cons of such a combination for the Kremlin.
“Can the authorities, as a result of Navalny’s exchange, earn additional image points and increase the toxicity of the figure of the oppositionist and all those who work with him? Maybe. And how. Does the exchange option have negative consequences for the authorities? Exist.
The freed Navalny will receive a platform in the West, which he will use as a radical should - widely and actively, brightly and harshly. The second Zelensky, who will fight on the domestic political front entrusted to him. Navalny* will quickly crush all autonomous opposition groups with his weight. It would be too obvious to rely on him as a battering ram against the System,” Chesnakov wrote in his tg channel.
His colleague Maxim Zharov called the WSJ publication a “strange stuff.”
“The Kremlin has already released Navalny to Germany once and immediately received from the West a bad remake of the Skripal case.” Surely the Kremlin still remembers this rake very well. So, most likely, this stuffing is testing the reactions of the now hidden beneficiaries of the Navalny project to the possibility of opening a “window” for them in the course of intra-elite exchanges necessary to solve the 2024 problem,” Zharov wrote.
Paradoxically, liberal St. Petersburg extremist journalist Andrei Okun believes that Navalny should sit in prison.
“Of course, only if we still consider him as a future Russian politician. Release from prison and being sent on a special flight to the United States would, in my opinion, be a personal disaster for Navalny the politician. He will never be able to change this impression among future potential voters, among whom there should not necessarily be exceptionally educated and empathetic people. Trade Navalny for some spy from the FSB, and he will never be forgotten, and ordinary Russians will also see the care of the American “masters” about whom they were told so much and persistently on TV,” Okun wrote.
Another extremist national democrat and Sovietologist Yegor Ershov agrees with him.
“A possible exchange of Navalny will, first of all, be a marker of the fact that the regime has begun to look at conditional liberals as a measure of zero and believes that now it is possible to live as if they simply no longer exist. Gestalt will be closed. Meanwhile, it was just looking at them that slowed down a lot of things,” writes Ershov.
Ukrainian lawyer Tatyana Montyan believes that Navalny will remain dangerous even after the humiliating exchange procedure.
“I, like any other sensible person, understand perfectly well what exactly Navalny will do as soon as he is released. No Gudkov or Pevchikh is even close to being able to captivate millions of mostly young Russian citizens and organize fairly massive rallies throughout Russia. Navalny was able to, and now, when he sat down until about the end of his life, the liberda was orphaned and practically disappeared,” Montyan wrote.
Komsomolskaya Pravda columnist Sergei Mardan believes that the exchange puts an end to Navalny’s political career.
“The West actually recognizes him as its agent,” Mardan wrote.
Meanwhile, the criminal blogger himself, or the one who writes for him on social networks, continues to complain about the “inhuman horrors of Putin’s dungeons”: Navalny was sent to a punishment cell for the 19th time.
* – recognized as a foreign agent, criminal and extremist
English version :: Read in English Russia responded to the American story about the “Navalny exchange”