Was Navalny frog-poisoned?

Europe’s political elites, captured and groomed decades ago by Washington, have been allotted the task of continuing to bog down Russia in Ukraine to free up the US to pursue its overarching goal of encircling China. As their citizens face ever greater impoverishment, selling increased arms-spend will not be easy. We can expect more vilification of Russia …

I’m wondering if there are links between (a) this story, from yesterday’s Guardian …

… (b) this story two days earlier, also in the Guardian …

Intelligence agencies say deadly toxin in skin of Ecuador dart frogs found in Navalny’s body and highly likely resulted in his death

What is dart frog toxin, which is said to have been used to kill Alexei Navalny?

Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, was killed by dart frog poison administered by the Russian state two years ago, a multi-intelligence agency inquiry has found, according to a statement released by five countries, the UK, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.

The US was not one of the intelligence agencies making the claim.

Navalny died in a remote Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence. Samples from his body were secured before his burial and sent to the laboratories of two countries.

The UK, describing the poisoning as barbaric, said it would be reporting Russia to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, as a flagrant violation by Russia of the chemical weapons convention (CWC) …

Read in full …

… and (c) this one the following day – yup, that was the Guardian too!

A few things to unpack here:

• I wouldn’t want to be one of them there conspiracy theorists – all the Serious Media and Grown Up Journalists say these are Very Foolish Persons (except where Big Bad Vlad is the putative arch-conspirator) – but doesn’t the temporal proximity of these Guardian stories seem, other than to coincidence theorists, an incy bit noteworthy? On the one hand we have calls for increased arms-spend justified by the Russian Threatski, just when Western publics are enduring – thanks in large part to their leaders’ earlier responses to said threatski – living standards in free fall in the name of austerity.

And on the other? A most fortuitous resurrection of the Navalny story …

Putin poisons hotel water; Navalny is taken to Omsk hospital. No one kills him there – because poll ratings for this far right xenophobe are a fraction of Putin’s? – though a hospital is an ideal rub-out venue. The authorities approve transfer to Berlin, medics find Novichok. Merkel accuses Russia, EU imposes sanctions. Makes perfect sense doesn’t it? 

… but with a new twist. Navalny banged up for a Very Long Time in a far-flung gulag, we learn, wasn’t enough for Big Bad Vlad. This Major Threat had to be eliminated once and for all. And what more eco-friendly way to do the deed than a toxin derived from a South American dart frog?

• Do read that second story – it isn’t long – linking Navalny’s death to Big Bad. Bearing in mind, as too few do, that “we have evidence”  is not evidence, what factual basis is being offered? We are told that “samples from his body were secured before his burial and sent to the laboratories of two countries”. Secured how and by whom? Which two countries? What chain of evidential custody?

As with the dirty war on Syria, evidence-free (or even evidence-defiant) claims are given spurious credence by others of equally dubious provenance – in this case the discredited official account of the Skripal poisonings in Salisbury, UK. ¹ And as with the dirty war on Syria, the OPCW, though its ‘impartiality’ is no longer unimpeachable, is invoked.

Much more can be said. Do your own digging and, please, don’t assume the business models of corporate media, right wing or ‘liberal’, leave them free to speak truth, whole truth and nothing but on such matters. That said, Peter Hitchens of Britain’s reactionary Mail newspaper put Guardian etc to shame by doing his job and interrogating specious accusations during the empire-serving propaganda blitz on Syria.

Read critically. As we the many are once again primed to cheerlead for war to defend the eyewatering wealth of a criminally insane few, the survival of humanity demands no less.

• Europe’s quisling leaders …

The entire Left in most Western countries – by ‘Left’ I mean the Social Democratic Left, the Green Parties and perhaps most of the entire political establishment – is now led by individuals who have been through the US ideological factories … the think tanks, the annual meetings etc. You know, the Leaders of Tomorrow type programs for which these people go to the USA on junkets, and become part of a network of leaders with a similar understanding of what is to be done, both domestically and internationally. People like Starmer, Macron, Von der Leyen and Baerbock … they belong to these circles. So in answer to the question – why are European governments acting so manifestly contrary to the interest of their economies, their people etc? – the only reason I can find is that at the present moment the United States is in this sweet spot where the people it has groomed have taken power in major European capitals.

Canadian political economist Radhika Desai, September 9 2024

… place the interests of Washington and Wall Street – for reasons brilliantly explored by Nel Bonilla in her essay, Elite Capture & European Self-Destruction – above those of their citizens and economies. ²

Says Brian Berletic:

From the start this was to be a proxy war fought to the last Ukrainian. There’s a whole policy paper where this is spelled out in detail; the Rand Corporation’s 2019 paper, Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground. Its table of contents shows geopolitical measure number one as provide lethal Aid to Ukraine, and this was begun under the first Trump Administration: increase support to the Syrian ‘rebels’, promote regime change in Belarus, exploit tensions in the South Caucus [South Ossetia and Georgia] reduce Russian influence in Central Asia [Kazakhstan, Armenia and Azerbaijan] and challenge Russian presence in Moldova. They also talk of economic measures to hinder petroleum exports, reduce gas exports and hinder pipeline expansions or just blow up the pipelines, impose sanctions, enhance Russian brain drain.

All are measures to extend Russia. This isn’t about Ukraine; this is about Russia; about a US policy to overextend, encircle, contain and eventually collapse Russia as part of a much wider strategy to preserve American hegemony over the planet. It also includes a containment strategy aimed at China so the US is unlikely to get involved directly in the Ukraine because it also needs to deal with China. The USA has openly said this, including under the current Trump Administration. They explicitly said this back in February. I have repeatedly got over US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s directive to Europe on February 12 2025 in [Brussels]. He told Europe he was not talking about ending the war. He was not talking about peace. He was telling Europe, “you need to take over because we need to take on China. We cannot do both at the same time. We need to divide labor.”  He literally said it’s a division of labor; you need to double down on Ukraine while we deal with China and I warned people that if you listen to this directive it tells you everything about America’s true intentions. They have no interest in peace. They told you this all along if only you listened to what they were really saying instead of projecting your own hopes onto the incoming Trump Administration. ³

Podcast March 13 2025

So am I a conspiracy theorist? On balance, yes. I wrote to a Danish friend apropos the Guardian stories cited here, and the warmongering of his country’s Russophobic prime minister:

Europe’s political elites, captured and groomed decades ago by Washington, have been allotted the task of continuing to bog down Russia in Ukraine to free up the US to pursue its overarching goal of encircling China. As their citizens face ever greater impoverishment, selling increased arms-spend will not be easy. We can expect more vilification of Russia …

I fear that few will read that second Guardian story critically. Its tale of amphibian misconduct will fall with effortless subliminality into that dark well of unquestioned cultural ‘knowledge’ from which a single meme emerges with pristine clarity: Russia is Very Bad and Putin needs to be Put In His Place if not Taken Out. ⁴

So is Patrick Wintour, author of that non-story, an outright scoundrel? Setting aside my distaste for his dismal record of empire-friendly outpourings, I doubt it. I suspect he genuinely believes – see my post, Monolithic control at the Guardian? – his own inflammatory drivel. ⁵

Credulous reporters, i.e. most of those on corporate media payrolls, often confuse “we have evidence”  – when the claim originates with ‘our’ intelligence services – with actual evidence. (This is a matter less of intellectual faculties than of emotional disposition.) In any event, too career dependent on political access to rock the boat, most will witlessly promote whatever talking points serve empire designs.

At your expense and mine.

* * *

1. Coincidence theorists see no cause for concern in Salisbury’s proximity to Porton Down, of chemical weapons fame, nor with the fact the first person on the Skripals scene was the British Army’s most senior nurse.
2. For how the European Commission’s Mario Draghi sought to drape Europe’s abasement to Washington in the fig leaf of Military Keynesianism, see my post of September 2024, The Super Mario Plan for Europe.
3. Brian Berletic here makes a point frequently restated on this site. Both Trump’s admirers and  detractors overstate the novelty of the 47th POTUS. I’m not blind to America’s lurch to the right but see it as driven more by a US ruling class in varying degrees of alarm and disarray than by a man showing signs of dementia – yes, two in a row! – and assuredly not steering the ship. If we pay attention – not least by studying the abstracts, ToCs and introductions in such as the 2019 Rand Report on Extending Russia and 2009 Brookings, asking Which path to Persia? – we find, in Ukraine as in West Asia and Pacific, beneath a constant circus babble mistaken for democracy, a deep continuity of imperial policy.
4. The Guardian, March 18 2024:

   

   Here too claims and facts merge seamlessly while chains of circular referencing convey, to a backdrop of decades of media vilification it would be career suicide for a journalist to go against, the appearance of overwhelming evidence in an open and shut case. (Nor are we told Samantha de Bendern is on the payroll at empire think tank, Chatham House.)

   It would occur to vanishingly few Guardian readers – an intensely propagandised group priding itself on its critical thinking – that Putin’s electoral victory, by a margin Western leaders can only dream of, reflects (a) endorsement – for reasons set out here – of the 2022 SMO and (b) that after the traumas first of the collapse of the USSR and second the years of IMF disaster capitalism under Yeltsin (see Chapters 10-11 of Naomi Klein’s superb, The Shock Doctrine) the ethnically diverse peoples of the Russian Federation might view Putin, on whose watch their country’s fortunes have soared, as a national hero.

5. As American writer Upton Sinclair observed, “it’s hard to get a man to see a truth his salary depends on him not seeing”. Or as I say, “journalists who know what’s good for them please their editors, who, if they know what’s good for them please proprietors who need advertisers and/or billionaire sponsors like Soros and Gates”. This is what I mean by a systemic corruption that need not suppose – nor yet preclude – consciously dishonest practitioners.