The Kremlin’s poisoned critic, Alexei Navalny, claims in a new, viral video that Russian President Vladimir Putin owns a lavish billion – dollar palace allegedly obtained by fraud.
The video report outlining 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 been viewed more than 35 million times.
Navalny, in the footage, claims that Putin’s allies, including oil chiefs and billionaires, paid for the construction of the $ 1.35 billion Black Sea Palace, the BBC reports.
‘[They] built a palace for their boss with this money, ‘Navalny said according to the report. He added that it was built “with the largest bribe in history.”
The Kremlin fired back on Wednesday, denying that Putin owned the palace.
“These are absolutely unfounded allegations,” Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying by the Moscow Times, referring to Interfax. “This is pure nonsense.”
Peskov said the palace “has nothing to do with the president or the Kremlin, so we do not want to be the least bit interested,” according to the report.
According to the video, the palace is equipped with a casino and an underground ice rink.
“It has impassable fences, its own harbor, its own security, a church, its own permit system, an airfield and even its own border checkpoint,” Navalny told the BBC.
“This is a separate state in Russia. And in this state, there is a single, irreplaceable tsar: Putin, ‘he says.
Navalny was arrested Sunday night after flying home for the first time since being poisoned last summer.
His detention has been ordered by the Moscow prison service in connection with alleged violations of a suspended prison sentence in a case of embezzlement which he insists is being tracked down.
The dissident fell into a coma on August 20 while on a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow. Two days later, he was transferred from a hospital in Siberia to one in Berlin.
Laboratories in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, have determined that he was exposed to a Soviet nerve agent, Novichok.
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