For the first time, the British state propaganda organ has said too much too loudly in defence of one of its Russian assets, and confirmed the combination of celebrity, political ambition, and money which has made the poisoning of Alexei Navalny a faulty fabrication; and Navalny's attempt to make political capital out of it, a modest success for the British secret services; an immodest failure for the German Foreign Ministry, Defence Ministry, German Army, and the Berlin medical clinic which goes by the name of Charity.
The difference between the evidence of success and failure is the problem the BBC has attempted to overcome in an unusually long interview Pevchikh recorded with the BBC in Berlin, published on September 18.
She is recorded as saying that she and her colleagues from the Navalny group had been having breakfast in the restaurant of their Tomsk hotel when they received the news that Navalny's flight to Moscow had been diverted to Omsk, and that he was in hospital with symptoms of poisoning. She then went to his hotel room, she said, to recover the evidence of the poisoning - three blue-capped bottles of Saint Springs water drunk by Navalny during the night before.
The time shown on the wrist watch of Pevchikh, in the film she directed and released last week, 28 days after the event, shows a time when Navalny's flight was still in the air. This was more than an hour before his poisoning had been discovered and reported to his team in Tomsk, and to the rest of the world.
Navalny's dogs were barking, but their caravan had failed to start according to plan. The BBC has demonstrated what that plan was.
Comment: Don't worry, Christmas is allegedly not cancelled, though you may be out of a job. And do listen to what the authorities tell you. They are never wrong and absolutely have your best interests at heart: It's almost as if they're making insanely idiotic decisions on purpose...