Putin breaks silence on Navalny’s death, calling it an ‘unfortunate incident’

President Vladimir V. Putin described the death of jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny as an “unfortunate incident” and claimed he was willing to release him in exchange for Russian prisoners held in the West.

Mr. Putin said at a news conference after Russia’s presidential election that “some people” had told him before Mr. Navalny’s death “that there was an idea to exchange Mr. Navalny for some people held in prisons in Western countries .”

“I said, ‘I agree,’” Mr. Putin said. “Only with one condition: ‘We’ll trade him, but make sure he doesn’t come back, let him stay there.’”

He added: “But this happens. That’s life.”

The comments, in response to a question from NBC News, were Mr. Putin’s first on Mr. Navalny’s death in an Arctic penal colony — and a rare moment, if not the first, when the Russian president used Mr Navalny spoke out in public.

Aides to Mr Navalny claimed after his death that he was about to be released in a prisoner swap. A Western official told The New York Times at the time that “early discussions” about the possibility of such a swap were underway when Russian authorities reported on February 16 that Mr Navalny was dead.

The Western official said the discussions involved swapping Mr. Navalny with two Americans imprisoned in Russia — Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and Paul Whelan, a corporate security manager and former Marine — in exchange for Vadim Krasikov. Mr Krasikov is currently imprisoned in Germany and was convicted of killing a former Chechen separatist fighter in Berlin in 2019.

“This is a sad event,” Mr. Putin said of Mr. Navalny’s death. “But we have also had other cases where people have died in prisons. And what, didn’t this happen in the United States too?”

When Mr. Navalny was alive, Mr. Putin’s dislike for him was such that he never said his name in public, according to the Kremlin’s archive of Mr. Putin’s interviews and speeches.

Mr Navalny almost died in 2020 after he was poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent during a trip to Siberia. Western officials described the poisoning as an assassination attempt by the Russian state.