LONDON (Reuters) – U.S. intelligence companies have decided that Russian President Vladimir Putin in all probability did not order opposition politician Alexei Navalny killed at an Arctic jail camp in February, the Wall Road Journal reported on Saturday.
Navalny, 47 when he died, was Putin’s fiercest home critic. His allies, branded extremists by the authorities, accused Putin of getting him murdered and have stated they may present proof to again their allegation.
The Kremlin has denied any state involvement. Final month, Putin known as Navalny’s demise “unhappy” and stated he had been prepared handy the jailed politician over to the West in a prisoner trade offered Navalny by no means return to Russia. Navalny’s allies stated such talks had been underneath approach.
The Journal, citing unnamed folks aware of the matter, stated on Saturday that U.S. intelligence companies had concluded that Putin in all probability did not order Navalny to be killed in February.
It stated Washington had not absolved the Russian chief of general duty for Navalny’s dying nonetheless, given the opposition politician had been focused by Russian authorities for years, jailed on expenses the West stated have been politically motivated, and had been poisoned in 2020 with a nerve agent.
The Kremlin denies state involvement within the 2020 poisoning.
Reuters couldn’t independently confirm the Journal report, which cited sources as saying the discovering had been “broadly accepted inside the intelligence neighborhood and shared by a number of companies, together with the Central Intelligence Company, the Workplace of the Director of Nationwide Intelligence, and the State Division’s intelligence unit.”
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The U.S. evaluation was based mostly on a spread of knowledge, together with some categorised intelligence, and an evaluation of public information, together with the timing of Navalny’s dying and the way it overshadowed Putin’s re-election in March, the paper cited a few of its sources as saying.
It cited Leonid Volkov, a senior Navalny aide, as calling the U.S. findings naive and ridiculous.
