"It is a pity that you did not live in the Soviet Union. You would have had a brilliant career in newspaper Pravda. Frantically exposing foreign spies could be something you would have been very good at. It does not matter that you do not have a single piece of evidence that we [RT] do anything more than our job. So, we tried to film Navalny and his supporters? Is it illegal? Is this espionage? Well, then please write a revealing story about Bild employees, who in this case, I must admit, were a little more successful than us. If Russian intelligence wanted to know where Navalny was, it would have been enough to read Bild", Toktosunova wrote on her Telegram channel.
She also offered him to have a look at other "serious" issues with Bild.
"Your editor-in-chief presumably harasses female journalists, and you, Mr. Ropcke, dare to repost words of Navalny's right-hand man, who calls us [female bosses of RT DE and Ruptly] ‘bitches’", she continued.
She also took a jab at Lange, saying that the ex-employee was just angry that "we broke up with him."
"We at RT believe that you either fulfill someone's order, or feel the market situation well. The investigation was out a few weeks after we announced plans to create a channel in Germany. Since then, Commerzbank has suddenly decided that keeping our accounts is problematic for it; the office for the protection of the constitution is investigating our activities; and Bild has come out with a paranoid investigation", she added, addressing Ropcke.
Toktosunova also expressed the belief that "many in Germany see which one of us is a propagandist."
On Tuesday, the German tabloid reported, citing its own investigation and claims by ex-RT DE journalist Daniel Lange, that the broadcaster via its employees on the ground had been waging "espionage activities" against Navalny and his team in Berlin during the blogger’s treatment after his alleged poisoning. The ex-RT DE journalist leaked a chat where his chiefs assign him to try to "penetrate" into the Charite hospital. RT, which recently announced plans to launch the German-language channel, has dismissed the espionage allegations as "absurd" and is going to sue Bild.