Kremlin accuses Alexei Navalny of ‘comparing himself to Jesus’

A Kremlin spokesman has accused the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny of having a “persecution complex” and of “comparing himself to Jesus”, in an extended and unusual attack indicative of anger over recent revelations about the FSB domestic intelligence service.

Last week, the investigative website Bellingcat published details of the eight FSB officers who allegedly poisoned Navalny in August. Then on Monday, Navalny released a recording of a bombshell telephone call in which he tricked an FSB officer into revealing details of the alleged plot, which apparently centred on the application of novichok to the “inner seams” of Navalny’s boxer shorts.

In a briefing with journalists on Tuesday, Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Vladimir Putin, avoided saying whether the president had heard the recording, which was published as a video by Bellingcat, but Peskov did make an extended attack on the opposition leader.

“I can say that the sick [man] has clearly expressed [a] persecution complex,” said Peskov, avoiding naming Navalny by name. “One can also establish certain delusions of grandeur. Because, as people have said, he compares himself to Jesus. And the rest, of course, is an expression of Freud. The fixation on the crotch area.”

It is not clear where Navalny has compared himself to Jesus. The final sentences refer to an admission by the FSB officer Konstantin Kudryavtsev that the best source of physical evidence of the attack would come from the lining of Navalny’s underpants.

That detail has become the punchline for jokes shared among Navalny supporters. On Tuesday, police arrested the film director Vitaly Mansky for protesting outside the FSB headquarters with a pair of boxer shorts. Earlier, the cartoonist Sergei Elkin released a caricature of Putin announcing a battle plan against a pair of white underpants.

“It’s good. But my underpants were dark blue!” Navalny wrote.

Russian police still have not opened a criminal case into the poisoning. Peskov said on Tuesday the Kremlin “cannot speak unequivocally about any poisoning, we don’t have any data as to that”.

A YouTube clip of Navalny’s call with Kudryavtsev quickly went viral, attracting more than 13m views in one day. Shortly after its release, journalists and opposition activists descended on Kudryavtsev’s apartment complex in Moscow. Police arrested Lyubov Sobol, an opposition activist who works with Navalny, at the scene.

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Navalny apparently dupes FSB agent into revealing agency’s role in novichok plot – video

The confession to Navalny followed what had already been an excruciating month of leaks for the Kremlin, with Bellingcat investigators using leaked phone and travel records to show how FSB agents tied to a chemical warfare lab had tracked Navalny since 2017.

Peskov said the investigations had not changed Putin’s opinion of the intelligence service, of which he served as director from 1998-99.

“You know that the Federal Security Service [FSB] plays a very important role under the constitution,” Peskov said. “It defends us from terrorism, defends us from extremism, defends us from various deadly dangers. And, undoubtedly, it plays this role very well and very effectively.”

In a denial released on Monday evening, the FSB said the phone call was a forgery, but also said the use of an application by Navalny that displays a fake caller ID number is regularly used by foreign intelligence.

“The so-called ‘investigation’ uploaded by A Navalny to the internet about the acts supposedly taken against him are themselves a planned provocation, meant to discredit the FSB and the employees of the Federal Security Service, the execution of which would not be possible without the organisational and technical support of foreign intelligence,” it said.

Navalny was poisoned shortly before boarding a commercial flight from Tomsk, a city in Siberia, to Moscow in August. Once he fell ill, pilots made an emergency landing in Omsk and were met by ambulance crews who probably saved his life. Navalny was later evacuated to Germany, where he received treatment at the city’s Charité clinic.

He has not returned to Russia since the poisoning.