Whistleblower lawyer, blogger and opposition leader Alexei Navalny has dismissed an interview with him posted on the Voice of America web site on January 31 as a fake.
“Voice of America has gone completely nuts. [They] have published a huge fake 'Interview with Navalny',” the blogger said on his Twitter account on Wednesday.
The interview, titled “If you want to do something well, do it yourself,” features details from Navalny’s childhood, his participation in a nationalist march and his opinion of opposition activists.
“They [opposition activists] are not fighters, they are bureaucrats from the opposition…they just waste people’s energy,” the VoA article quotes Navalny as saying.
The allegedly faked interview also quotes him denying his alleged links with U.S. officials who it was claimed were funding his opposition activity.
The Voice of America said on its official Twitter account that it is “scrutinizing the details of how the interview with Navalny was done.”
The interview is still available on the VoA web site.
In early January, flyers were handed out at a rally in Ekaterinburg showing Navalny standing next to the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, with a caption saying Berezovsky had funded Navalny’s anti-Putin campaign.
Navalny said the photo was a fake, and reproduced similar photos of himself standing next to an alien and Vladimir Putin.
