Donkey ears

The Investigative Committee under the Prosecutor General's Office opened a criminal case against a certain Dmitry Kopylov for attempting to bribe Novaya Gazeta journalists. This young man, calling himself Dmitry Krestovsky, came to the newspaper’s editorial office in mid-March and, saying that he was an intermediary in the black PR market and had already succeeded in adjusting the editorial policies of many publications, offered to adjust the policies of Novaya for 3-4 million rubles. .

Krestovsky, aka Kopylov, turned out to be poorly prepared, since he did not know newspaper terminology at all. Or it was a completely stupid provocation, considering that the young man arrived in a Mercedes without license plates. He named a well-known journalist as a recommender, who, as Novaya writes, admitted in a telephone conversation that he had collaborated with Krestovsky. The editors of Novaya quickly contacted the department for combating economic crimes of the Moscow Main Internal Affairs Directorate, and while trying to transfer 89 thousand as an advance for a commissioned publication, the young man was detained, Kommersant writes on April 2. The UPC website states that the publications were supposed to be aimed at discrediting the Patriarch and the state policy pursued in Russia.

Meanwhile, the editorial staff recalled that this provocateur participated in Nashi’s actions, in particular, throwing a rake under Mikhail Kasyanov’s car in 2007. And also in 2005, he conducted a survey of the population near the Mendeleevskaya metro station, after which he was beaten, and told TVC about the work of election observers. In addition, as Kommersant reports from the words of Novaya deputy editor-in-chief Valery Shiryaev, even the day before Kopylov’s arrest, the Nashi apparatus did not deny that he was their activist. True, after the arrest, the movement’s press secretary, Kristina Potupchik, stated that Kopylov had not appeared with them for a year. Novaya contacted Kopylov himself, and when asked if he was an Nashi activist, he answered: “Did you work at gas stations as a child, did you earn extra money?” Kopylov allegedly knew nothing about the action against Kasyanov. During his arrest, he had with him the ID of an “operational officer” of the “Committee for Combating Organized Crime and Corruption.” Neither such a committee nor Lieutenant General I.A. Sitnikov, whose signature was on the certificate, seemed to be found in reality.

Meanwhile, provocations against Novaya continue: they were sent a parcel with donkey ears supposedly from the administration of the President of the Russian Federation (should we understand that the senders consider the presidential administration to be a donkey?). The newspaper believes that the point of such provocations is to make them as absurd as possible, and then put Kopylov’s case on a par with them, in order to possibly free him from prosecution, Kommersant writes.