The influential Russian journalist and Putin-confidante-turned-scatological-critic, Nevzorov, is under investigation for cooking up the Mariupol hospital bombing fraud. He is also, and more curiously, linked to the dissemination of the Moskva true-cross story.

Now it turns out that he has been living in Israel this past month.

What are his connections to Israel and the West, if any, and could they add substance to the thesis that the Moskva sinking may have been planned far in advance as a propaganda coup, not by the Ukrainians, but by the British or even the Israelis.

Nevzorov has a Comanche father and claims that if he has any tribal affiliation it is to the Comanches, not to Russia. He has no affinity to Russian nationalism, he says, and especially not to the Orthodox vision of Russia, which he claims is Nazism.

Interestingly, Nevzorov, whose maternal grandfather was a KGB officer, was a staunch defender of the Soviet Empire when it was on its last legs. His widely popular TV show took a hard-line against secessionists in Lithuania during that time, encapsulated in a term he coined, Nashi [ours], for the pro-Soviet fighters. This term was later adopted by Putin and reused during the incorporation of Crimea by the Russians, thus, Krym Nash.

It is quite strange that a term like this, so close in sound to the word Nazi, should have been whole-heartedly taken up by the Russian government. It sets Russia up to be cast as “fascists,” especially when taken along with the use of the letter ‘Z’ for Russian forces.

Z, as I blogged earlier, was used in a Russian cartoon in the 1973, in which children dressed in Ukrainian colors descend in a bathyscape called Neptune and discover a sunken ship with the letter ‘Z’ on it which is connected to Nazism. When someone on Twitter referenced this movie, the movie was apparently blocked. Was this just because of embarrassment or was someone unhappy over the discovery of the cartoon? Why would the government adopt the letter ‘Z’ given those associations and who came up with the idea? Could it be the same person who coined the term ‘Nashi’? A person with an interest in tarring pro-Russian forces as fascist?

Could that person be affiliated with foreign, subversive elements?

Nevzorov has visited his father’s home in an Indian reservation in in Oklahoma where he found his father has been a drug dealer, killed in a battle with the police.

Is he a dual Russian and US citizen? It is certainly possible. In any case, he has other interesting connections to the West.

Nevzorov was a consultant to Russian Jewish oligarch Boris Berezovksy in the 1990s, during what has been called the looting of Russia. Berezovsky was the subject of a critical book by the Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov, who was later murdered, some say, as a consequence of his journalism.

Berezovsky himself started out supporting Putin, and then became a fierce critic, fleeing the country to avoid prosecution and vowing to unseat the Russian president by all means, from his perch in the UK.  The oligarch’s circle there included Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian agent who defected to the UK and was later killed by radioactive Polonium poisoning.  A British court found the murder to have been the work of agents of the Russian state, but there is as much evidence that it was a framing of Russia by a third party. Also part of the Berezovsky circle, was the American Jewish microbiologist, Alex Goldfarb, whom some think actually committed the murder. Goldfarb heads an American anti-Putin group.

Berezovsky reportedly committed suicide in 2013 in the UK.

Again, there are questions about his end.

Nevzorov’s decades-long connections to such subversive elements and Byzantine intrigue, with British, US, and Israeli ties, suggests that propaganda he disseminates might have a foreign origin and foreign backing.

If that is so, the gifting of the true cross relic to the Moskva in 2020 could be a clue that the ship was chosen as a target at least then, and most likely even earlier. Perhaps, it was at the time Crimea joined Russia, given that that area has been a locus of conflict between Britain and Russia for centuries.