‘I’ll turn you into beefsteak’
MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s close ally and chief of the National Guard on Tuesday challenged Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny to a “duel” and threatened to turn him into “steak”.
Wearing his uniform, Viktor Zolotov spouted threats and insults in a video message to Navalny, who last month alleged corruption in the National Guard and is in jail for violating anti-protest legislation.
“You, Mr Navalny, have never faced payback,” Zolotov said, after rubbishing Navalny’s corruption expose as slander.
“I simply call you to a duel, to the ring, to the tatami, to wherever. And I promise to make a juicy beefsteak out of you in just a few minutes,” he said in the video posted on the National Guard’s official website.
Navalny in late August published a video he addressed to the rank and file employees of the National Guard, the agency tasked with dispersing protests.
Agency leadership, he tells the soldiers, “literally takes food out of your mouth for profit”.
The expose alleges that the agency purchases low quality food for soldiers at over-inflated prices.
Navalny is not set to finish his 30-day jail term until late this month.
His team, however, reacted to Zolotov’s message with a mixture of horror and ridicule. The video has “open, very serious threats”, said Navalny’s former head of campaign staff Leonid Volkov on Twitter, adding Zolotov “must have forgotten” that Navalny is locked up and cannot reply.
“They can’t even hire good PR people with their stolen billions,” wrote Lyubov Sobol, who works for Navalny’s anticorruption centre.
“Six minutes of threats and not a single word to refute facts and evidence in the investigation.”
Previously Navalny had alleged Zolotov – a former head of Putin’s security detail who was appointed to the current newly-created post in 2016 – was “very rich” and that his family owned luxury properties. – AFP