“Who needs to poison him,” he said during a nationally televised press conference, denying that Russia’s FSB spy agency was involved. “If they’d wanted to [poison him] then they probably would have finished the job.”
The Russian president said he had been told of Bellingcat’s report that accused the FSB of dispatching a hit squad to poison Navalny with a nerve agent similar to the one used in Salisbury in 2018.
Navalny, who nearly died in the attack, was evacuated to the Charité clinic in Berlin for treatment.
In the Kremlin’s first public reaction to the accusations, Putin accused US intelligence agencies of leaking information in the case. “It means that this Berlin patient has the support of the American intelligence services,” he said.
He also called Bellingcat, the online investigative collective founded by Eliot Higgins, a front for foreign intelligence agencies. “It’s not an investigation, it’s the legalisation of the materials of American intelligence agencies,” he said from his residence at Novo-Ogaryovo.
The Bellingcat investigation used mobile phone and travel data to identify and track eight FSB agents who shadowed Navalny up until the attack and who had ties to a chemical weapons agency.
The recent investigations into Russia’s security services have shown that data security has become an urgent issue of national security for the Kremlin.
“You don’t think we know that they’re tracking geolocations?” Putin said, attempting to laugh off the investigation. “Our intelligence agencies know that. Agents of the FSB and other special agencies know this. And they use their telephones where they think it’s necessary, not hiding their location.”
Putin’s remarks appeared to confirm one of Bellingcat’s key findings: that agents were indeed following Navalny. “Yes, he was being followed, it was the FSB, but they didn’t poison him and they didn’t try to kill him,” Navalny paraphrased Putin’s remarks in an online post.
Christo Grozev, the lead Russia investigator for Bellingcat, said: “Of all the possible defence narratives, Putin appeared to choose the worst of all. Essentially validated 100% of our findings.”
Putin also accused the US government of sponsoring other investigations into his family and associates. One, which was not mentioned on television, used property and business records to bolster claims that he had a daughter from a secret mistress.
“That’s the Department of State and US security services, they are the real authors. Anyway, this has clearly been done on their orders. This is absolutely obvious,” Putin said.
Speaking at an annual year-end press conference, Putin also addressed the coronavirus epidemic, which has killed 48,000 people in Russia, according to official statistics (and far more according to informal tallies). He said he had not yet been inoculated with Sputnik V, Russia’s coronavirus vaccine, because it was not recommended for people over 65.
Russia has launched a mass vaccination effort and says it has already inoculated more than 150,000 people. The vaccine is not being given to elderly people in Russia and is targeted at 18- to 60-year-olds who do not have significant risk factors.
“I listen to the recommendations of our specialists, which is why the vaccine has not been administered on me, as specialists say, but I will do so without doubt as soon as this becomes possible,” Putin said.
The press conference came shortly after Russia was accused of launching a huge cyber-attack against the United States that targeted federal government networks using popular software called Orion, made by the company SolarWinds.
Putin denied that Russian hackers had targeted the US, focusing on accusations that Moscow had meddled in the 2016 elections.
“Russian hackers never helped the current US president get elected and never meddled in the domestic affairs of this great nation. This is all speculations aimed to spoil relations between Russian and the United States,” Putin said.
He also said: “We believe US President-elect [Biden] will sort things out because he has both domestic and foreign policy experience.” Putin recognised Biden’s victory just days ago, saying he had not done so earlier because he did not want to get involved in a domestic political fight in the US.
Owing to the coronavirus epidemic, Putin was appearing from his residence at Novo-Ogaryovo by video link, though journalists still crowded into a hall in Moscow to ask questions.
Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, had promised that Thursday’s event would be “rather long and informative”. The televised event, which is always a spectacle, lasted nearly 4.5 hours and included 55 questions.
The president has made few public appearances since the start of the Covid crisis, mostly telecommuting from a windowless room that critics have derided as his “bunker”.
A recent report by the Proekt investigative outlet claimed Putin had been working from Sochi, a resort city on the Black Sea, where he has installed an identical office. The Kremlin has denied those reports, although travel records of top officials meeting Putin suggest they may be true.
No comments:
Post a Comment