Putin denies involvement in poisoning of Navalny
» President Vladimir Putin of Russia denied Thursday that he was behind the near- deadly poisoning of his most prominent political opponent, telling journalists with a laugh that if Russian agents had wanted to kill Alexei Navalny, “they would have probably finished the job.”
But Putin also made a startling admission: He confirmed that Russian intelligence agents had been tracking Navalny’s movements across the country.
Navalny, a 44- year- old opposition leader with an online audience of millions, was poisoned with a militarygrade nerve agent in Siberia in August. He fell ill on a commercial flight and survived thanks to the pilot’s emergency landing and the ambulance crew that met him on the tarmac.
Putin, speaking at his annual, hours- long news conference, insisted U. S. intelligence was behind the uproar over the attempted poisoning. He said an investigation by an international group of journalists published Monday that uncovered apparent involvement by Russian intelligence also was engineered by the United States.
“This patient in the Berlin clinic has the support of American intelligence agencies,” Putin said, referring to Navalny while pointedly refusing to say his name. Navalny was flown to Germany after the poisoning, where he has remained while recovering. “The intelligence agencies of course need to keep an eye on him. But that does not mean that he needs to be poisoned — who needs him? If they had really wanted to, they would have probably finished the job.”
Putin’s comments at one of his most high- profile television events of the year showed how mounting evidence that the Russian state had tried to assassinate Navalny was putting the Kremlin on the defensive, in full view of the Russian public. They also showed that Putin was resorting to a tried- and- true method of deflecting blame: Americans’ fault.
“The proof is so ironclad that it’s impossible to argue with them,” Navalny said in a post on Facebook about Putin’s comments. “We are now in the zone of a confession.”
German military scientists determined in September Navalny had been poisoned with one of the Russianmade Novichok family of nerve agents. Those results were confirmed by labs in France and Sweden as well as by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a global watchdog.
The investigation by the journalists of Bellingcat, a research group that special
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izes in open- source investigations, used leaked telecommunications data to show that officers from a Russian spy unit with expertise in poisons had trailed Navalny for years and were nearby when he was poisoned. By Thursday, a YouTube video by Navalny describing the investigation had drawn more than 13 million views.
Voluminous databases of private information, including cellphone records, are widely available on the black market in Russia. Bellingcat has said that such records — as opposed to data from intelligence agencies — allowed its reporters to track the movements of Russian spies.