- The EU delegation to the OPCW meeting supported the conclusions of London that Moscow is highly likely to be responsible for the Salisbury incident. The notorious "highly likely" once again. At the same time, the so-called investigative journalists published an alleged real name of Alexander Petrov. But there are no such surnames as Mishkin, Chepiga, Boshirov on Interpol's website. There are Petrovs, but none of them are named Alexander. The British authorities neither confirm nor deny this information in the media. There are no such individuals on either the American or European sanctions lists. What's happening?
Alexander Nekrasov, a political scientist, is live from London. Alexander, you have... I imagine how disturbed all those pseudo-investigators are and the Russian liberal media supporting them. They expected that they will deliver a terrifying strike against Russia but suddenly the incident with Kokorin and Mamaev happened. And the people aren't so concerned about the nonsense they say in England.
Alexander Nekrasov, political scientist (Great Britain): Vladimir, good evening. Well, I want to say the following: all those theories, that the newspapers and TV-reports dabble in, they do sound like nonsense but what is interesting today? Today, Bellingcat, the website which investigates literally anything, held a press conference in the Parliament. Elliot Higgins, the founder of the website, as I already told you before, started his career as a women's underwear shop assistant. Today he was in the Parliament and talked about how his journalists picked up the trail of Alexander Mishkin, who was Alexander Petrov. You know, I should give you the details because you'll understand what this is about at once. Look how the scheme worked: first of all, the name Alexander, as he told, caused suspicion. Alexander Petrov, so they took the name Alexander.
— It's a rare name in Russia, indeed.
— They compared Alexander with the same date of birth as Petrov's.
- Mhm.
- July 1978. The 7th of July, 1978. Believe it or not, but that's how they found Mishkin. That's how... Do you understand? A completely incoherent statement which explains nothing. It gets even worse. By the way, only young journalists gathered there because, as I understand, the serious journalists just don't even take this seriously. So, only very young people went there. Of course, Elliot was asked, how did it all, how did he found that all out. He calmly answered that they have no secret sources, that all of the data is gathered on the internet. Do you understand? Everything is from the internet. They compare some details, photos, some, I don't know, documents, which have shown up somewhere. And wonderful things turn up: that based on all those things, one can easily find out the names of the Main Intelligence Directorate employees, which they still call GRU. And one may basically track their whole career, and even find out where they've been, what they've done and so on. So you do understand that such a position shows that the British intelligence, which, by the way, confirmed nothing. But according to the state company BBC, I now call them only like that, as they understood, the British police and intelligence agencies do not deny this information. It's unclear what it means.
- They don't confirm either.
- The official representative confirmed nothing. So, what do we have in the final analysis? That British intelligence, it seems, has given away its functions to the Bellingcat website where 5-6 desperate enthusiasts work, who surf the internet, and ask everyone on the internet if they know something about a certain case. Then they gather answers from people all over the world, analyze them, and present a theory. When they were asked if they thought that maybe they were supplied with nonsense, they said that they check everything. You see, that's where the suspicions arise.
- I don't agree with you, Alexander, no-no-no. Alexander, I'm sorry, but they conducted a very good search. It says there, for example, "we heard that Mishkin's grandmother showed her fellow villagers a photo of Mishkin with Putin". But there's no photo and we haven't found the grandmother either. But we did hear such things. The Military Medical Academy. we asked 1,000 graduates of the Military Medical Academy. Two of them said "maybe". But when one asks an easy question: well, you talked about the life of two people, Mishkin and another one, whose surname starts on "ch". But how are they related to Boshirov and Petrov? They haven't proved that the first is Boshirov and the second one is Petrov. So I listened to this story with a great interest because according to Bellingcat the two Heroes of Russia went to Salisbury, earlier, in London, they hired a woman with low social responsibility, partied all night long, smoked drugs. But then they dressed up in uniform and went to Salisbury like that. Where did the British counter-intelligence look? How did they check their documents when they issued visas? They're all probably fired by now.
- Well, you see, Vladimir We're trying to find some hypothetical logic but we'll never find it because it's not even science fiction, it's some obscure nonsense. I believe we must draw our conclusions based on more serious facts. First, judging by the campaign that was launched in March of 2018 around that poisoning and the expanding number of accusations against Russia of hacking attacks, sabotage, infiltration, and so on we come to the following conclusion: The only efficient intelligence is Russian, represented by Boshirov and Petrov. They're the only efficient agents. The Western intelligence agencies are powerless. Boshirov and Petrov wander around Europe and America. Maybe a couple of other agents as well and do whatever they want. And the Western intelligence agencies can't stop them.
We're left with a rather odd conclusion. It seems to me that right now, that the British Parliament and the parliaments of the Western countries must ask themselves a simple question: What are we paying our intelligence agencies for if the Russians do whatever they want? You heard about their last revelation that Russia's trying to capture Libya? If the Russians do whatever they want, deploy their troops wherever they want, their spies roam freely any country they want, with no problems with visas or entering the country, and infiltrate the British Embassy in Moscow, remember we spoke about that, to issue visas for Boshirov and Petrov then, I'd ask... If I were a member of the British Parliament I would ask: Why are we paying our guys from MI5, MI6, and the others? What are they doing? You see, the picture's rather odd. In the meantime, another question arises: If the Western intelligence agencies are so powerless and passive horrified by the Russian GRU (alone, all other services are sleeping) roaming around their countries then what the agencies that were investigating the situation in Iraq before the 2003 invasion by the British and American troops doing? They had a blast there. Oh, and which agencies were were hanging out in Libya before it got destroyed by the West? And what about the agencies in Syria that caused all that chaos? And which agencies were working in Afghanistan making it the largest opium producer in the world (95% of it). And which agencies were in Ukraine when that mess began in 2013? It was so well organized that it must have had a conductor.
You see, we come to a rather odd conclusion. On the one hand, we have the vile Russians with their GRU and on the other hand, we have their own record with a brand-new line, Yemen which has been so devastated that even British charity funds say that there's a genocide going on there and two million kids are at risk of dying of hunger. But the Western agencies have visited Yemen as well. The situation's rather odd, don't you think? On the one hand, we have a frightening image of wild Russian spies two wild Russian spies from a single organization, to be exact. And on the other hand, they completely ignore the fact that the Western agencies have been very active over the last century. Extremely active. We often receive reports that US special forces were killed in some African country with British special forces wandering around somewhere nearby. Those reports flash past the Western audience and quickly disappear. And never appear again. Everybody seems to have forgotten that when the civil war began in Libya Obama openly signed a decree that allowed the CIA to conduct subversive operations in Libya. Everybody seems to have forgotten about that. The same thing with Syria: Intelligence agencies were allowed to conduct subversive operations there.
You see? We need to hold a skeptical approach towards the unruly outcry that the vile Russians are going to attack the Baltic states, or Poland or even Britain, according to the recent statements, destroying all infrastructure. That's why Britain must prepare for a cyber-war and be ready to cut off Moscow's electricity and energy supply to show its power.
- Alexander, you should tell them that we managed to survive the times when Chubais was in charge of RAO UES. We're not scared of our lights going off. Our people are resourceful. We're used to stuff like that. We've got our own generators and candles, in case we need them. We're self-sufficient. We can do without the British.
But curiously enough, everything you've said is right. Let me just add two details two names: Snowden and Assange. Each showed us what country wiretapped every leader and international organization and read all of the email correspondence of those leaders. Snowden gave us a clear answer. Assange published multiple intercepted reports on their activities. It's not Russia that's spying on the entire world conducting secret operations.
There's another thing I can't grasp: Has the Skripal case been closed? Has there been a court verdict? Have they told us when and how exactly it happened? Even if we ignore who Petrov and Boshirov are nobody has proven that those two directly approached the door handle and smeared something over it so that Skripal and his daughter got poisoned by touching it. Nobody has told us how that Novichok ended up in the Nina Ricci bottle at the bottom of the second-hand basket only to poison some British folks a couple months later. Nothing has been proven yet. No evidence has been presented in court.
- Vladimir, the thing is if you take any controversial case that's ever taken place here you'll see that nobody has ever bothered to prove anything. There haven't been any court verdicts and no investigation conclusions submitted to the prosecutor’s office. It hasn't happened once. The thing is that this propaganda war, this information war is structured around spinning the same record trying to convince ordinary people that Russia is bad, over and over again. We must understand one simple thing. Many so-called Russian liberals keep saying that the Western press is free while the Russian press is oppressed. Let's view this simple example that will show you that the Western "free" press is rather peculiar. How many articles about the so-called corruption in Russia have the Western media published? A torrent of articles. "It's clear that Russia is a deeply corrupt state" that's their point. And then, I ask the British journalists: "Why don't you write about your state being corrupt? Where's your corruption? Your own oligarchs stole 200 years worth of money from your country in 2008 You're bankrupt for the next 200 years".
When the financial collapse happened in 2008 you must remember that Britain did the whole world a disservice by maintaining those offshore zones where trillions of non-British dollars disappeared. They just vanished. I was told that when people tried to reach their offshore bank they were told that nobody was there and the bank was closed. That's it, the bank's gone! The money's gone as well. You see? And I ask them: "How so? Your oligarchs stole that money." I call them oligarchs because they keep calling our businessmen oligarchs. "Oligarch" is a wrong term. Who's an oligarch? It's a financier who created an industrial facility with the help of the government. As far as I know, our oligarchs created nothing. The British ones haven't created anything either. They are more of budget-stealing kind of oligarchs. When all the money vanished back in 2008 Prime Minister Gordon Brown saved the banks by feeding them taxpayer money. Some say it was a trillion, some say two trillion, and some even say three trillion. They were distributed between several points. As I've said, the country lost 200 years worth of funds. It's just a scandal. The Russian oligarchs could never dream of such level of corruption.
- You're wrong, Alexander! If Bellingcat starts digging today it will discover that the 2008 crisis was the first operation of Petrov and Boshirov. By the way…
- Petrov and Boshirov are responsible for everything by default we don't even mention them anymore. Petrov and Boshirov are everywhere.
- The Dangerous Twins.
- I mean, why don't they take a look at themselves? Why do they keep speculating about the Russian government, officials, billionaires, and so on? I always tell the Brits: "Are you all poor here?" I don't mean that some of them are thieves. But why do you keep speculating about Russia? Why are you so bothered by our domestic corruption? Why don't you take care of your domestic problems? Your domestic problems brought about the so-called "poverty at work" when the wages are extremely low. We're talking about millions of people, not some 100,000. They are forced to request welfare because they can't afford food and utilities. Right? Why aren't you bothered by that?
Why are you bothered by some foreign issues? A tragedy happened in Indonesia. Everybody rushed to report on it. How many people died, how many require help, and how much money do we need to send? Each channel airs a ten-minute news report on that issue. Nobody argues that it's a tragedy. But why doesn't anybody mention those 48,000 elderly people who froze to death last winter? It happened in Britain. A new winter is coming. They froze to death because heating costs too much. They didn't dare to turn it on.
- Alexander?
- 48,000…
- 48,000 dead?
- That's a lot.
- So they froze to death?
- Indeed.
- Unfortunately, our time is running out, Alexander. May I ask you a brief question? I won't even start talking about that weird "cyberattack against Russia" part. I'll leave it on the conscience of those fabricators. But I just want to understand why nobody critically examines that investigation studying the documents they submitted or check if they photoshopped the photos? Doesn't anybody try to inspect the evidence of those underwear-merchants under a looking glass?
- I tell you what, Vladimir since the so-called Salisbury poisoning that happened in March there hasn't been a single critical British article or statement with the exception of my TV and radio statements. It's surprising that there's no balance. It only confirms that simple fact that it's an organized and centralized campaign. Every newspaper, magazine, radio station, and TV channel receives the same orders. There's no more balance in the local press. That's the most obvious indicator that the media don't even bother to pretend they are free. Curiously enough, you were 100% right. That's a touchy subject and you rubbed salt into the wound of the Western free press.
- Thank you so much. What a brilliant story! The figurativeness of your speech and your deep knowledge on the subject never ceases to amaze me. And after a short break, we'll discuss how they're trying to deprive Russians of their pride.
Evening with Vladimir Solovyov
