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Vladimir Putin held his annual press conference on Thursday, a rare occasion when journalists and the general public have the opportunity to hold the Russian president to account.
He then commented on the alleged assassination attempt on opposition poet Alexei Navalny, who was poisoned by the nerve agent Novitjok on August 20 this year.
During question time, Putin claimed that the Kremlin critic is cooperating with American intelligence and that therefore the Russian security service FSB has been monitoring Navalny, it reports. various Media.
However, the president denied that the FSB was involved in the assassination attempt: Navalny is not “important enough to be a target,” according to Putin.
“If they wanted to poison him, they probably would have quit their jobs,” Putin said.
– Instead, we gave him the green light so that he could leave the country and receive care abroad.
Secret Unit FSB Agents
The statement comes only days after the publication of one investigation which points to the FSB as responsible for the assassination attempt.
The case has been mapped by the Bellingcat group of investigative journalists in collaboration with media outlets The Insider, CNN and Der Spiegel. According to the investigation, which was released Monday, a large amount of travel and phone data shows that the FSB has been monitoring Alexei Navalny for several years.
In 2017, 2019 and 2020, FSB agents from a secret unit specialized in toxic substances will have traveled to the same destinations as Alexei Navalny on more than 30 occasions.
Reject the investigation
The report also claims that the FSB may have tried to poison Alexei Navalny on several previous occasions, including a month before the opposition politician quickly fell ill on a plane bound for Moscow.
President Putin rejects the investigation, which he believes consists of information from the US intelligence service.
– It is not an investigation, it is a legitimation of accusations by the US intelligence service, said the president at the press conference.
