Alexei Navalny talking about Catherine Solotsinskaya in his video today

by Sarah Hurst

Catherine Solotsinskaya, the ex-wife of Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov, has lost her job as head of the Russian Centre for Science and Culture in Paris after Alexei Navalny drew attention to her expensive apartment on Place Victor Hugo. In a video published today Navalny showed a letter that Solotsinskaya wrote asking to resign from the job, but he assumes she was fired.

Navalny says he is happy that Solotsinskaya has lost her job working for an organisation that is part of Russian government agency Rossotrudnichestvo, but he still wants Russians to get back the money for her apartment, which he alleges Peskov bought for Solotsinskaya and their daughter Liza Peskova for 1.8 million euros in September 2016. The average Russian would have to work for 297 years to earn that much money, Navalny said. Rossotrudnichestvo has also been in the news because on Saturday Ukrainian nationalists vandalised the agency’s offices in Kiev and burned a Russian flag.

Indictments pile up 

Putin himself continues to maintain a low profile with less than a month before his rigged election is due to take place. He has refused to appear in campaign ads, but a YouTube video has been released, probably by the Russian government, in which a man in his fifties who doesn’t feel like voting is punished by the arrival of soldiers from a new regime who want to conscript him, and a gay man moving into his home.

Peskov, meanwhile, has dismissed Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russians, headed by “Putin’s chef” Yevgeny Prigozhin, for interfering with the 2016 US presidential election via social media as “baseless”. But the reality is that Mueller’s investigations of Trump-Russia links are proving even more powerful than Navalny’s corruption investigations, and there will be many more bombshells as the full truth comes out.