US intelligence agencies have determined that Russian President Vladimir Putin probably did not order opposition politician Alexei Navalny killed at an Arctic prison camp in February, the Wall Street Journal has reported.
Mr Navalny, aged 47 when he died, was Mr Putin's fiercest domestic critic. His allies, branded extremists by the authorities, accused Mr Putin of having him murdered and have said they will provide proof to back their allegation.
The Kremlin has denied any state involvement. Last month, Mr Putin called Mr Navalny's demise "sad" and said he had been ready to hand the jailed politician over to the West in a prisoner exchange provided Mr Navalny never return to Russia.
Mr Navalny's allies said such talks had been under way.
The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, said today that US intelligence agencies had concluded that Mr Putin probably did not order Mr Navalny to be killed in February.
It said Washington had not absolved the Russian leader of overall responsibility for Mr Navalny's death however, given the opposition politician had been targeted by Russian authorities for years, jailed on charges the West said were politically motivated, and had been poisoned in 2020 with a nerve agent.
Mr Navalny earned admiration from Russia's disparate opposition for voluntarily returning to Russia in 2021 from Germany, where he had been treated for what Western laboratory tests showed was an attempt to poison him with a nerve agent.
Mr Navalny said at the time that he was poisoned in Siberia in August 2020.
The Kremlin denied trying to kill him and said there was no evidence he was poisoned with a nerve agent.
Reuters could not independently verify the WSJ report, which cited sources as saying the finding had been "broadly accepted within the intelligence community and shared by several agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the State Department's intelligence unit".
The US assessment was based on a range of information, including some classified intelligence, and an analysis of public facts, including the timing of Mr Navalny's death and how it overshadowed Mr Putin’s re-election in March, the paper cited some of its sources as saying.
It cited Leonid Volkov, a senior Navalny aide, as calling the US findings naive and ridiculous.
