The team of late Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, who died in a Siberian penal colony last week under unclear circumstances, said he could have been exchanged for a Russian convicted of murder in Germany.
"Navalny should have been released in the next few days because we had reached a decision on his exchange," said the political director of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, Maria Pevchikh, in a video published on YouTube on Monday.
She said Vadim K., who is serving a life sentence in the August 2019 killing of a Chechen in a Berlin park, could have been handed over to Russia in exchange for Navalny and two US citizens.
An offer was made to Russian President Vladimir Putin at the beginning of February, in which the Russian man, who was convicted in Germany in December 2021, was to be released, she said.
However, Pevchikh did not say who exactly was involved in drawing up these alleged exchange plans nor how specific they were.
A German government spokeswoman, Christiane Hoffmann, said: "At the moment, I cannot comment on this."
Pevchikh accused Putin of having personally ordered the killing of Navalny and that he had not wanted to release Navalny at any price.
She suspects that Putin realized that the West was prepared to exchange Vadim K. and then decided to get rid of Navalny as a bargaining chip, Pevchikh suspects.
"This is the absolutely illogical, irrational behaviour of a crazy mafiosi," she added.
Vadim K. murdered an exiled Chechen in Berlin in 2019 and a German court had found that Russia ordered the murder.
There had been repeated speculation that Putin wanted to free him as part of a prisoner exchange. Most recently, he virtually confirmed this in an interview with right-wing US talk show host Tucker Carlson.
