Poisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny claims in a new viral video that Russian President Vladimir Putin owns an opulent billion-dollar palace that was built with fraudulently obtained funds, according to reports.
The video report detailing the allegations was released by Navalny’s team on Tuesday, two days after the dissident was jailed for 30 days on his return to Moscow. By Wednesday, it had already garnered more than 35 million views.
Navalny, in the movies, claims that Putin’s allies, including oil chiefs and billionaires, paid $ 1.35 billion for the construction of the Black Sea palace, the BBC reported.
“[They] they built a palace for their boss with this money, “Navalny said in the report. He added that it was built” with the largest bribe in history. “
The Kremlin fired on Wednesday, denying Putin owned the palace.
“All these are absolutely unfounded statements,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the Moscow Times, quoting 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 permit system, a no-fly zone and even its own border checkpoint,” Navalny told the BBC.
“It is a separate state in Russia. And in this state there is only one irreplaceable tsar: Putin “, he says.
Navalny was arrested Sunday night after flying home for the first time since being poisoned last summer.
His detention was ordered by the Moscow prison service in connection with alleged violations of the suspended prison sentence in a embezzlement case, according to which he insists he was arrested.
The dissident fell into a coma while on a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on August 20. Two days later, he was transferred from a hospital in Siberia to one in Berlin.
Laboratories in Germany, France and Sweden, as well as tests carried out by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, have determined that he was exposed to a Soviet-era nerve agent, Novichok.
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