The Kremlin’s poisoned critic, Alexei Navalny, claims in a new viral video that Russian President Vladimir Putin owns an opulent billion-dollar palace that was built with funds obtained fraudulently, according to reports.
The video report detailing the allegations was released by Navalny’s team on Tuesday, two days after the dissident was arrested for 30 days after his return to Moscow. As of Wednesday, it had already received over 35 million views.
Navalny, in the filming, says Putin’s allies, including oil chiefs and billionaires, paid for the construction of the $ 1.35 billion palace on the Black Sea, the BBC reported.
“[They] they built a palace for the chief with that money, ”says Navalny, according to the report. He added that it was built “with the biggest bribe in history”.
The Kremlin struck back on Wednesday, denying that Putin owns the palace.
“All of these statements are absolutely unfounded,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told the Moscow Times, citing Interfax. “This is pure nonsense.”
Peskov said the palace “has nothing to do with the president or the Kremlin, so we have no desire to be interested,” according to the report.
The video claims that the palace is equipped with a casino and an underground ice rink.
“It has impregnable fences, its own port, its own security, a church, its own authorization system, a no-fly zone and even its own border checkpoint,” said Navalny, according to the BBC.
“It is a separate state within Russia. And in this state there is only one irreplaceable tsar: Putin, ”he says.
Navalny was taken into custody on Sunday night after flying home for the first time since he was poisoned last summer.
His arrest was ordered by the Moscow prison service in connection with alleged violations of a suspended sentence in an embezzlement case that he insists was forged.
The dissident went into a coma during a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on August 20. Two days later, he was transferred from one hospital in Siberia to another in Berlin.
Laboratories in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, established that he was exposed to a Soviet-era nerve agent, Novichok.
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