Putin critic Alexei Navalny reveals his new prison in Instagram post. Этот вопрос беспокоит только тех, кто заключенным не был.…” • … MBX Media also specified that the bots mainly followed their regional pages, though their main account was receiving an average of two follow requests per minute. Read full article. Moreover, on April 12, two employees of the newly opened campaign headquarters in Makhachkala were reported missing. Why do they even do this?”, Alexey Navalny’s boldest investigation yet describes a vast network of shell companies and frontmen working to build and sustain Vladimir Putin’s supposed seaside getaway, Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation investigates the Russian president’s billion-dollar residence on the Black Sea, Meduza demands Alexey Navalny’s immediate release from prison, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov fields questions about Alexey Navalny’s arrest. A video posted on Navalny’s Instagram account on Thursday showed members of his team in plastic gloves inspecting his hotel room in Tomsk shortly after … Even as Russia maintains that it played no role in the poisoning of Mr. Navalny, the new details — released on Thursday in a post on Mr. Navalny’s Instagram account — underscore his team’s deep concerns for his well-being and their fears that he could fall victim to the kind of attacks directed at other Kremlin critics. Давайте объясним, откуда взялось то, про что нам непрерывно…” He also invited anyone who has been blocked from the platform to contact him for help. The president’s spokesman has denied all reports about “Putin’s palace.” All the same, the video version of the investigation racked up 25 million views within 24 hours of its release. In an Instagram post, he said three of the 15 people he was housed with had tuberculosis, a contagious disease that spreads through the air. A water bottle that was found in a hotel room where the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny stayed before being poisoned contained traces of Novichok, his aides claimed Thursday.. The bot attacks began after Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation published a major investigation into a billion-dollar “palace” supposedly built for Russian President Vladimir Putin on the Black Sea. Based on the German findings, Mr. Navalny’s team, according to the Instagram post, now believes that he was poisoned in that hotel room, not at the airport as they had originally suspected. His continued existence even fueled conspiracy theories that he was in fact a government puppet, paid to play the role of an opposition figure, while never actually seeking power himself. He and his team seemed to be bracing for an attempt on his life. “Yesterday we opened the headquarters in Makhachkala, and today our coordinator Eduard Atayev has gone missing. A similar poison was used by Russian military intelligence operatives who traveled to Britain in 2018 to attack Sergei V. Skripal, a former intelligence officer who had served prison time in Russia for spying for the British before being traded in a spy swap. Thousands of suspicious Instagram accounts have begun following Russian opposition figures linked to jailed anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny. They are definitely made for mass following,” the organization said. This comes after his Anti-Corruption Foundation published a major investigation about a billion-dollar luxury mansion built for Vladimir Putin on the Black Sea. "It was decided to gather up everything that could even hypothetically be useful and hand it to the doctors in Germany. The authorities in multiple Russian cities have detained several members of “Team Navalny” over the past two days. Apparently, they’re trying to get pages blocked,” reported Team Navalny’s St. Petersburg office on Wednesday night. MBX Media also reported that “inactive users with similar names” began following their Instagram — and the accounts of their regional affiliates — en masse on Wednesday night, noting that the users’ Instagram handles “almost always included numbers.” The outlet responded by setting all of their accounts to private temporarily. Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is beginning to lose feeling in his hands, his lawyer has said. Navalny has been suffering severe back pain and loss of feeling in his legs, according to social media posts from his team. “Some hellish influx of bots on Instagram. It’s possible that these fake accounts were trying to get opposition figures and independent media outlets blocked from Instagram. Kremlin chafes at Navalny team taking suspected evidence. Russian opposition figure Lyubov Sobol (another FBK employee) also reported the very same fake accounts flooding into her social media following, as did Navalny’s press secretary Kira Yarmysh. Алексей Навальный (@navalny) added a video to their Instagram account: “Откуда взялась злосчастная бутылка? According to Open Russia, the other accounts subject to the attack also saw an influx of about 3,000 suspicious followers. A video posted on Navalny’s Instagram account on Thursday showed members of his team inspecting his hotel room in Tomsk before he left the city on Aug. 20 and collapsed on a flight home. Indeed, at meetings with supporters around Russia, he was frequently asked how he remained alive, given his vicious criticism of the Kremlin and Russia’s most powerful figures. Georgy Alburov, an employee of Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), was one of the first to report an influx of suspicious new followers. Such statements convinced Mr. Navalny’s team that the Russian authorities had no interest in conducting a real investigation. “At that moment, they did the one thing that was possible,” the statement said. Eduard Atayev, the coordinator of Team Navalny’s office in Makhachkala, has gone missing along with his aide Murad Manapov. The independent television network Dozhd (TV Rain) also reported that “suspicious accounts with the same types of photographs and names in both the Cyrillic and Latin [alphabets]” had begun following their Instagram en masse. Given the substance used, the German authorities and others say there is no doubt that the Russian government was behind the poisoning, a breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention to which it is a signatory. An analysis by German military scientists at the Institute for Pharmacology and Toxicology in Munich found traces of a nerve agent in the Novichok family in Mr. Navalny’s blood and urine, as well as on one of the bottles. Thousands of bots descended upon the Instagram accounts of Russian opposition figures — and several independent media outlets — on the night of Wednesday, January 20. Read: Germany Calls Russian Opposition Leader Alexei Navalny's Recovery 'encouraging' "This is a bottle from a room in a Tomsk hotel where Navalny himself and our entire film crew stayed. The Russian returned to the country earlier this year after he was treated in Germany having been poisoned with a nerve agent. “A lot of fake accounts subscribe to an account and then, apparently, they plan to file a massive number of complaints with the aim of [getting] an automatic response from Instagram and blocks,” Klimarev explained. Mr. Navalny’s team removed as much as they could from his room at the Xander Hotel in Tomsk, Russia. It is unclear how Mr. Navalny’s team was able to sneak the bottle and other items out of the country without the Russian officials knowing. “So we decided to grab everything that might hypothetically be of use and give that to the doctors in Germany.”. Dit bericht bekijken op Instagram Een bericht gedeeld door Алексей Навальный (@navalny) However, according to his team’s Twitter post on April 1, the Russian opposition leader blames his weight loss from 93 to 85 kilograms on the fact that guards wake him up every hour at night. Алексей Навальный shared a photo on Instagram: “Почему заключенные объявляют голодовки? Navalny’s precise location had been unknown after his legal team said last week that he had been moved from the nearby Kolchugino jail and that they had not been told where he was being taken. Mikhail Klimarev, the director of the “Internet Protection Society,” shared this theory on his Telegram channel ZaTelekom. Team Navalny’s office in Samara also came under attack: “Apparently, the troll factory has been repurposed and is now working to get pages blocked.”. When Mr. Navalny was flown from a Siberian hospital to Berlin on Aug. 22, the evidence went with him. “The attempted assassination of Navalny was part of a systemic effort to silence dissident voices in Russia,” a statement by the European Parliament said. According to the news site Znak.com, similar reports came from Team Navalny offices in several other Russian cities, including Belgorod, Vladivostok, Volgograd, Kemerovo, Pskov, Rostov-on-Don, Tambov, Tyumen, Cheboksary, and Yaroslavl. Pic: Instagram/@NAVALNY Mr Navalny was jailed earlier this year for parole violations - although this reason was said to be politically motivated by most in the West. The civil society organization Open Russia wrote about the same issue on its Telegram channel after 3,000 bots tried to follow their Instagram in one night. Thousands of suspicious Instagram accounts have begun following Russian opposition figures linked to jailed anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny. Based on the German findings, Mr. Navalny’s team, according to the Instagram post, now believes that he was poisoned in that hotel room, not at the airport as they had originally suspected. The same bots are also targeting the accounts of independent Russian media outlets en masse, in what appears to be an attempt to get them blocked from Instagram ahead of the rallies in support of Navalny planned for this upcoming Saturday. “We’re sure that this is being done in the lead-up to the 23rd, in order to block our work,” Novaya Gazeta wrote on Twitter, referring to the countrywide rallies in support of Navalny planned for this upcoming Saturday (in Moscow, a “Free Navalny!” rally is set to begin at Pushkin Square at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, January 23). Immediately after Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, showed symptoms of poisoning last month, members of his team rushed to the Siberian hotel where he had been staying and grabbed anything that could possibly be used as evidence — including a water bottle that tests showed was tainted with a highly toxic nerve agent. Construction of the complex was allegedly financed through a corruption scheme linked to state-controlled and private companies associated with members of Putin’s inner circle. “They called a lawyer, went to the hotel room, which Navalny had just left, and began to identify, record and pack up everything that they found, including bottles of water from the hotel.”. The plastic water bottle, Mr. Navalny’s team and German investigators say, eventually helped German military scientists determine that the opposition leader had been poisoned with a class of chemical weapon called a Novichok, a Soviet-designed poison that Russian operatives have used in at least one previous assassination attempt. “It’s just to give it even more political legitimacy.”, On Thursday, the European Parliament passed a nonbinding resolution calling for an international investigation into Russia’s possible use of a chemical weapon as well as “ambitious restrictive” measures, including financial sanctions against “corrupt individuals.”. Reportedly, fake users also began targeting the social media accounts of various Team Navalny offices across the country. 159 Followers, 400 Following, 492 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Vasya_Navalny_Official (@vasya_navalny) In a video posted on Instagram, members of Mr. Navalny’s team swiftly donned rubber gloves and scoured his room at the Xander Hotel in Tomsk, packing evidence into blue plastic bags. A video posted on Navalny’s Instagram account on Thursday showed members of his team in plastic gloves inspecting his hotel room in Tomsk before he left the city on … This screenshot of an Instagram post was published on March 15. A video posted on Navalny’s Instagram account on Thursday showed members of his team in plastic gloves inspecting his hotel room in Tomsk shortly after he left the city on Aug. 20 and collapsed on a … Aides of the Russian opposition leader collected items from his hotel room in Siberia as soon as he fell ill, according to a video posted on his Instagram account. Navalny's team said in an Instagram post on Thursday that a German lab had found traces of the nerve agent on one of several hotel water bottles … Colleagues of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said Thursday that a water bottle with a trace of the Novichok nerve agent was found in his hotel room in the Siberian city of Tomsk after he fell ill on a flight from there to Moscow last month. The office’s staff then proceeded to lock their account temporarily. Putin's 'love child', 17, follows ALEXEI NAVALNY on Instagram – and is regularly trolled about having Vladimir for a father. If those results confirm the German, French and Swedish findings, the German government would move quickly to impose financial sanctions on Russia through the European Union, according to a senior German security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “We don’t doubt our own result,” the official said. Aleksei A. Navalny, a prominent Kremlin critic, in Moscow in 2019. Several thousand bots joined our Instagram. On Aug. 20, those doubts were put to rest when Mr. Navalny began choking and screaming on a flight to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk. Immediately after Mr. Navalny’s plane made an emergency landing, his aides spoke with members of the team who had stayed in Tomsk to tell them what had happened, according to Mr. Navalny’s Instagram post. On Thursday, September 17, Alexey Navalny’s team shared a post on Instagram, explaining that they found the water bottle with traces of the substance used to poison him at the Xander Hotel in Tomsk. 4.2m Followers, 335 Following, 1,854 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Алексей Навальный (@navalny) The independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported a bot attack on its Instagram, as well. Aleksei Navalny Was Poisoned at His Hotel, His Team Says, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/world/europe/aleksei-navalny-poisoning-water-bottle-russia.html. in a post on Mr. Navalny’s Instagram account, a class of chemical weapon called a Novichok, Mr. Navalny began choking and screaming on a flight to Moscow. This comes after his Anti-Corruption Foundation published a major investigation about a billion-dollar luxury mansion built for Vladimir Putin on the Black Sea. “All of the accounts are empty, their names contain a strange combination of letters and numbers. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the world’s chemical weapons watchdog, is expected to release in the coming days the results of its own analysis of biomedical samples collected from Mr. Navalny by its team of experts, the agency said in a statement on Thursday. Since then, Dozhd has set its Instagram account to private and decided to review each new follower request manually. These arrests and disappearances have been accompanied by searches of the Team Navalny headquarters in St. Petersburg and Voronezh, while … Eduard isn’t picking up his phone and the last time he was online was yesterday at around 15:00. Navalny, 44, had started refusing food on March 31 in order to pressure the prison authorities to provide him with medical assistance for the acute pain in his legs and back. 3,580 Followers, 206 Following, 554 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Штаб Навального | Владивосток (@teamnavalny_vl) Navalny's lawyers and team use social media to share news of his status in prison. Laboratories in France and Sweden this week confirmed the German findings that Mr. Navalny had been poisoned with a nerve agent from the Novichok family. ... Navalny’s team said in a tweet. A video posted on Navalny's Instagram account showed members of his team searching the room he had just left in the Xander Hotel in Tomsk on Aug. 20, an hour after they learned he had fallen sick in suspicious circumstances. 215.3k Followers, 122 Following, 1,132 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Команда Навального (@teamnavalny) Russia has insisted since Mr. Navalny first fell ill that he was not poisoned, and has instead offered a number of alternative theories, like he had been using cocaine or that he had low blood sugar and simply needed to eat some candy. “It’s all hands on deck at the troll factory! The civil society organization Open Russia has been targeted too, as have the independent media outlets Novaya Gazeta, Dozhd, and MBX Media, as well as its regional affiliates. The bottle in question became the key piece of evidence that allowed laboratories in several countries to confirm that the opposition figure was poisoned with a Novichok-type nerve agent. The team posted a video on Instagram where they can be seen inspecting the room and packing things could have been used in poisoning Navalny. “It was absolutely clear to us that Navalny was not lightly ill or got overheated and that a Raffaello candy would not help,” the Instagram post read. Navalny Team Alleges Novichok Found in Hotel Water Bottle Navalny fell ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow on Aug. 20 and was flown to Germany, where he … Het team van Navalny probeert een contrast neer te zetten." 11.4k Followers, 59 Following, 649 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Штаб Навального в Петербурге (@teamnavalny_spb) Create an account or log in to Instagram - A simple, fun & creative way to capture, edit & share photos, videos & messages with friends & family. The rush to grab evidence suggests that Mr. Navalny and his team had been prepared for the eventuality that there would be an attempt on his life.