Russian President Vladimir Putin said that if Russia wanted poisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny dead, forces would likely have “finished it.”
The strongman’s remarks came on Thursday during his annual news conference and followed the release of an extensive investigation by CNN-Bellingcat into the 44-year-old dissident’s poisoning while in Siberia. The investigation found evidence that Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, formed an elite unit specializing in nerve agents that had been tailing Navalny for years before he was poisoned.
“What, we don’t know that they are tracking location? Our special services know this perfectly well, the FSB officers and officers of other agencies know it. They use their phones where they deem necessary not to conceal their location. And if it’s like that — and it is — it means this patient in the Berlin clinic is enjoying the support of the U.S. special services in this,” Putin said.
“And if that’s correct, then that’s interesting, then of course [our] special services need to keep an eye on him. But that doesn’t mean he needs to be poisoned, who needs him anyway? If [they] wanted to, they would’ve probably finished it,” the Russian leader added.
The attack occurred on Aug. 20. After initially being held by doctors in Russia, he was finally released to Germany, where investigators determined he was poisoned with a Novichok-class nerve agent, a potent toxin produced in Russia since the time of the Soviet Union.
“But in this case, his wife asked me, and I immediately gave the order to let him out of the country to be treated in Germany. … This is a trick to attack the leaders [in Russia],” Putin said about the dissident’s hospitalization in Berlin.
Earlier this week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also reacted to the investigation. He brushed off all of the accusations and said details revealed about the apparent assassination attempt were “funny to read.”
