For the first time since his death, he reacted officially.
After his expected victory in the Russian presidential election this Sunday, Vladimir Putin spoke of the death of his opponent Alexeï Navalny, which occurred last month.
“As for Mr. Navalny, he is dead.
Yes, he died, it’s always a sad event, but we have had other cases where people in prison have died,” the president said in a speech broadcast on public television.
The Russian president also raised the idea of a possible prisoner exchange including Navalny, before his death.
According to Vladimir Putin, when the idea of exchanging Navalny for “some people who are in penal institutions in Western countries” was raised, he “agreed.”
“There was only one condition: that we trade him so that he doesn’t come back,” he said.
Vladimir Putin was largely re-elected thanks to an election calibrated to guarantee his triumph, in the absence of an opposition decimated by repression and not even able to present a candidate.
The other three candidates in the election were all in line with the Kremlin, whether on Ukraine or the repression that culminated in the death of Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison in mid-February .
An election without opposition
In this context, the wife of Vladimir Putin's late critic No. 1, Yulia Navalnaïa, called on her supporters to show up in numbers by all going to vote at the same time, at noon on Sunday, against the Russian president.
She herself voted after several hours of waiting in a huge crowd at the Russian embassy in Berlin.
“I wrote (on the ballot paper) the name Navalny because it is not possible (…) that a month before the elections, the main opponent of Putin, already imprisoned, would be killed,” he said. she explained to the press after voting.
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Her supporters chanted “Ioulia, Ioulia, we are with you!”
», AFP noted on site.
She also called Vladimir Putin a “killer” and a “gangster”.
“It’s not me who gives you hope, it’s you who give me hope that everything is not in vain, that we will still fight.
Thank you to everyone who came in every city around the world.
You are my support and support.
I love you all so much,” she said later, thanking her supporters around the world.
After the announcement of Vladimir Putin's victory, with more than 87% of the votes, Alexeï Navalny's team denounced a score having "no link with reality".
Poland and the United Kingdom, for their part, judged that the Russian presidential election had been neither “free” nor “fair”, with Warsaw concluding that it was therefore “not legal”.