Navalny was part of discussions on a prisoner exchange
Aides to Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died this month, asserted Monday that he had been on the verge of being freed in a prisoner exchange with the West.
A Western official said “early discussions” on the possibility of freeing Navalny through such a swap had been underway when Russian authorities reported him dead Feb. 16. But the official pushed back on the Navalny team’s portrayal of the talks as having been in their final stages.
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A top aide to Navalny portrayed the prisoner-exchange talks as evidence of what she described as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motive to kill the opposition leader.
The aide, Maria Pevchikh, said that Western officials were in advanced talks with the Kremlin on a deal that would have released Navalny.
As part of that deal, Pevchikh said, Germany would have released Vadim Krasikov, the man convicted of killing a former Chechen separatist fighter in a Berlin park in 2019.
Pevchikh said in the video that the West had been insisting on Navalny’s release as part of any deal to free Krasikov, whom Western officials describe as a Russian intelligence agent. By killing Navalny, she said, Putin took the possibility of his release off the table, and he planned to “offer someone else when the time comes” in order to bring home Krasikov.
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