Alexei Navalny plays the Kremlin at its own game

Speaking on Thursday, Vladimir Putin’s chief spokesperson reacted fiercely to Navalny’s allegation that Putin was responsible for his poisoning. Navalny is correct in his assertion. As I noted on Sept. 10, Novichok agents are only accessible to the big three Russian intelligence services (the FSB, the SVR, and the GRU) and only deployable with Putin’s approval. Saying the same thing to the German magazine Der Spiegel, Navalny has clarified what no one in the Kremlin wants to admit — that Navalny’s assassination cannot be excused as the work of a few disgruntled Chechens.

The Kremlin is rattled. Germany has been infuriated by Moscow’s refusal to offer any credible answers on what happened to Navalny and is considering killing off Russia’s Nord Stream II energy pipeline in retaliation. That would be a huge loss for Putin, who needs that pipeline to consolidate his energy blackmail strategy in Europe. And so, Putin’s propagandists are moving into action. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has declared that Navalny’s “accusations against [Putin] are absolutely groundless and inadmissible, moreover, we consider a number of these statements to be absolutely insulting and also unacceptable.” But Peskov overplayed his hand. The faux pas came when he added that the Kremlin has evidence that “specialists from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency are working with [Navalny] these days.”

This casual accusation is designed to delegitimize Kremlin critics by tarring them with the brush of foreign allegiance. It’s an effective insult in Russia, which remains home to a deeply proud and patriotic people. But Navalny wasn’t willing to take the hit without riposte. The investigative journalist demanded that Peskov make a “publication of evidence and facts that point to my ‘work with CIA specialists.’ Show it on television directly, during prime time. I’m giving you permission. If the government authorities, on whose behalf Peskov speaks, have evidence of the nonsense he’s talking about, then this is a matter of Russia’s state security, and I demand that this evidence be published.”

This is Navalny at his best, humorous but also playing the Kremlin at its own game. He knows that if the Kremlin truly had evidence of his engagement with the CIA, they would be blaring that evidence across the airwaves. The evidence would, after all, destroy Navalny’s credibility as a Russian patriot who simply wants to make his country more democratic and just. But the evidence doesn’t exist. In turn, Navalny is now pledging to sue Peskov for defamation. It’s another clever maneuver in that Navalny himself is frequently subjected to defamation suits from the corrupt officials he has identified.

Other top Putin puppets are taking up a similar charge. Consider Putin’s chief state news propagandist, Dmitry Kiselyov, for example. This week, Kiselyov’s evening TV show has aired video of him walking around in a bathrobe in a room at the hotel where Navalny was poisoned. Kiselyov absurdly claimed that because he only had one bottle of water in his own room, Navalny’s team must have faked its own video investigation in the dissident’s room. The fake is proven, Kiselyov says, because Navalny’s video showed three water bottles — one of which was smeared with Novichok. It’s not a particularly convincing rebuttal, but this is standard fare stuff from Kiselyov. When he’s not walking around in a bathrobe, he’s suggesting that Russian nuclear ballistic missile submarines could run with active sonar before launching nuclear weapons at America. This would not be a clever strategy for said submarine crews.

Regardless, it’s clear that Navalny again has Putin and his cronies rattled. The dissident was supposed to die quickly on Russian soil, but he survived. And now, he’s back to work, using his new platform to double down on that which got him targeted in the first place — his pursuit of the truth, something that Putin’s regime fears more than just about anything else.