Earlier this month, Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation published a scathing report accusing Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of secretly masterminding a corrupt empire worth billions of rubles. On Friday, Medvedev finally responded directly to Navalny — by banning him on Instagram.

Indirectly, Medvedev also extended (misspelled) birthday greetings to an Instagram user named Natalia Teterina, after the woman criticized Navalny’s report in a comment on one of the prime minister’s photos.

“Navalny is a typical political hitman, and his report doesn’t contain a single proven fact — it’s nothing by lies and defamation!” Teterina wrote online. “It’s all especially disgusting to me because they published this hit job on my birthday!”



