"We have no reason to believe Bastrykin"

The head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, said that he did not take Novaya Gazeta journalist Sergei Sokolov into the forest and did not threaten him, which the publication’s editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov wrote about in an open letter the day before. This, Bastrykin believes, is “nonsense and insinuations of unscrupulous colleagues” and “delirium of an inflamed brain.” On the evening of June 14, Bastrykin will meet with Muratov in person. PublicPost contacted Novaya Gazeta and found out what the publication thought about Bastrykin’s response.

Dmitry Muratov's open letter to Alexander Bastrykin was published in Novaya Gazeta on June 13. In the letter, Muratov stated that the chairman of the Investigative Committee personally threatened his deputy and Novaya columnist Sergei Sokolov with death. “After your plane landed late in the evening, Sokolov was put into a car by your guards and taken without explanation to a forest near Moscow. There you asked the guards to leave and were left alone with Sokolov. ... In the heat of the moment, you rudely threatened the life of my deputy. And you even made a good joke , noticing that you yourself will conduct this business...” writes Muratov.

The Investigative Committee did not comment on the letter on June 13, and a series of single pickets were held near the Investigative Committee building in Moscow on Tekhnichesky Lane, which were carried out by journalists from the capital ( read more about the pickets and arrests on PublicPost ). The next day, June 14, an interview with Bastrykin appeared in theIzvestia newspaper. The head of the Investigative Committee said that he had not been in the forest for a very long time, and the Novaya Gazeta version was “nonsense” and “delirium of a fevered brain.” “I couldn’t even imagine that Novaya’s journalists and editorial staff would stoop to outright lies,” Bastrykin said. He drew attention to the fact that Muratov’s open letter, “where facts and outright lies are very competently mixed,” appeared a week after the incident. “And strangely enough, this letter appeared immediately after the searches that the Investigative Committee carried out on the leaders of the non-systemic opposition,” he noted. “Novaya Gazeta has received another share of the glory of fighters against the authorities,” Bastrykin said and added that he had nothing to apologize to the publication.

Dmitry Muratov himself has not yet seen Alexander Bastrykin’s interview, Novaya Gazeta press secretary Nadezhda Prusenkova told PublicPost, because he is on the plane. The editor-in-chief of the publication urgently flew to Moscow - at 17.30 he and several other editors-in-chief of the media meet with Alexander Bastrykin. The meeting will take place at Interfax.

“The situation is such that there is our word - the word of Sergei Sokolov - against the word of Alexander Bastrykin. We have no reason to believe Bastrykin, we have reason to believe Sokolov,” Nadezhda Prusenkova commented on the interview. “We will all wait for Muratov’s evening meeting with Bastrykin. Maybe Muratov will be able to refresh Bastrykin’s memories and recall the details of that meeting. And then, after this conversation, we will watch, we will decide. There are many options: from writing an application to the competent authorities - to a psychiatric examination of all employees of Novaya Gazeta, if they made up this whole story from beginning to end.” “Still, the key point here will be a personal meeting, when a lot becomes clearer,” she added.

“My personal opinion: it seems to me that after a day of silence, such an unctuous interview in the unctuous newspaper Izvestia is a rather weak attempt to justify himself and look cheerful. This interview seems completely unconvincing to me. He has no time for trips to nature... This is a frivolous conversation, and “It looks funny,” said the Novaya press secretary.

Nadezhda Prusenkova emphasized that Dmitry Muratov’s open letter did not appear after searches of the oppositionists on the eve of the “March of Millions” - it was published in the first issue after the holidays. “Everything is logical here. Due to the holidays, our Monday issue was not published. There was a gap. Therefore, it was published in the first issue after the holidays, on Wednesday,” she explained.