Russian President Vladimir Putin held his annual marathon year-end press conference Thursday, fielding questions for just over four and a half hours.
In one …
Russian President Vladimir Putin held his annual marathon year-end press conference Thursday, fielding questions for just over four and a half hours. In one of the livelier exchanges, he disputed reports of his government’s culpability in the attempted poisoning murder of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, sarcastically claiming that if his covert agents had been dispatched to kill Navalny, “they would have finished it.” Putin was responding to a question about an investigative report CNN published Tuesday that concluded a unit of the Russian FSB security service, the successor to the infamous KGB, had been spying on Navalny and his staffers for some time before the attempt on his life in August. The investigative report identified these FSB agents and noted one of them is a specialist in “toxins and nerve agents.” The German doctors who treated Navalny after he was airlifted to Berlin confirmed he was poisoned with Novichok, a Russian nerve agent also used in the attempted assassination of former spy Sergei Skripal in 2018. Putin avoided using Navalny’s name, instead referring to him as “the patient in the Berlin clinic.” After claiming Russian agents would have done a better job of killing Navalny, and making much of the fact that he allowed Navalny to be taken to Germany for treatment, he bizarrely insisted the United States was the party that attempted to poison Skripal. CNN noted that in the course of mocking its report, Putin “essentially confirmed that FSB agents did indeed trail Navalny.” Putin snapped at a BBC journalist that Russia is “more white and fluffy than you,” meaning the Russian government is morally superior to those of the United Kingdom and United States.
