Navalny accepts National Guard director's ‘duel’ challenge, but the latter says his timing is ‘disgraceful’

Anti-corruption activist and opposition politician Alexey Navalny has accepted the “duel challenge” from National Guard director Viktor Zolotov, but the latter’s spokesman is not happy. “I think it’s blasphemy. It’s self-promotion on people’s bones. It’s really beyond the pale,” Valery Gribakin, one of Zolotov’s advisers, told the radio station Govorit Moskva, adding that Zolotov hasn’t seen “Navalny’s latest opus” and doesn't plan to watch it.

In an interview with the magazine RBC, Gribakin called Navalny’s decision to publish his response to Zolotov on October 18 — a day of mourning, following a massacre at a college in Crimea — “a disgrace.”

In his response to Zolotov, Navalny accused the National Guard director of being a thief, an accomplice to Boris Nemtsov’s assassination, and a national embarrassment. Instead of fighting, Navalny proposes a debate on a national television network, and he's given Zolotov a week to think it over.

On September 11, Zolotov threatened to beat up Navalny in a fist fight, in retaliation for an investigative report by the Anti-Corruption Foundation that claims the National Guard intentionally bought food supplies at marked-up prices from a company owned by a former Interior Ministry official. At the time of Zolotov’s challenge (presented in a bizarre video shared online), Navalny was in jail for “illegal protesting.”