President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia laughed off a question about the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny at a marathon news conference, where he praised his country’s Covid-19 response and President Trump.
MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia denied on Thursday that he was behind the near-deadly poisoning of his most prominent political opponent, telling journalists with a laugh that if Russian agents had wanted to kill Aleksei A. Navalny, “they would have probably finished the job.”
Mr. Navalny, a 44-year-old opposition leader with an online audience of millions, was poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in Siberia in August. He fell ill on a commercial flight and survived thanks to the pilot’s emergency landing and the ambulance crew that met him on the airport tarmac.
Mr. Putin, speaking at his annual, hourslong news conference, acknowledged that Russian intelligence agents were tracking Mr. Navalny’s movements across the country. But he insisted that American intelligence was behind the uproar over the attempted poisoning. He said an investigation by an international group of journalists published on Monday that uncovered apparent involvement by Russian intelligence had also been engineered by the United States.
“This patient in the Berlin clinic has the support of American intelligence agencies,” Mr. Putin said, referring to Mr. Navalny while pointedly refusing to say his name. Mr. Navalny was flown to Germany after the poisoning, where he has remained while recovering. “The intelligence agencies of course need to keep an eye on him. But that does not mean that he needs to be poisoned — who needs him? If they had really wanted to, they would have probably finished the job.”
The investigation by Bellingcat, a research group that specializes in open-source investigations, used leaked telecommunications data to show that officers from a Russian spy unit with expertise in poisons had trailed Mr. Navalny for years and were nearby when he was poisoned.
“This is not an investigation, this is the legalization of material from American intelligence agencies,” Mr. Putin said. “What, do we not know that they track location? Our intelligence agencies understand that well.”
Voluminous databases of private information, including cellphone records, are widely available on the black market in Russia. Bellingcat has said that such records — as opposed to data from intelligence agencies — allowed its reporters to track the movements of Russian spies.
“A few hundred euros could — and does — provide you with months of phone call data for an F.S.B. or G.R.U. officer, allowing investigators to trace the intelligence services’ operations, identify the colleagues of research targets, and follow the physical tracks of spies across Russia and abroad,” Bellingcat said in an article about the methodology of its Navalny investigation.
According to the Bellingcat report, three officers from the Federal Security Service, Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, followed Mr. Navalny to Siberia in August where he was meeting with supporters in preparation for local elections. They trailed him to the Siberian city of Tomsk where, just after midnight on Aug. 20, telephone metadata showed one of the operatives not far from the Xander Hotel, where Mr. Navalny and his team were staying.
Hours later, shortly after taking off on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow, Mr. Navalny was heard screaming in the airplane bathroom before collapsing, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing. By the time he arrived at a hospital in Omsk, another Siberian city, he was in a coma.
Mr. Putin eventually allowed Mr. Navalny to be flown to Berlin for treatment. German military scientists determined that Mr. Navalny had been poisoned with one of the Russian-made Novichok family of nerve agents. Those results were confirmed by labs in France and Sweden as well as by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the global chemical weapons watchdog.
But Russia has consistently denied any involvement, at one point alleging that Mr. Navalny could have been poisoned in Germany. On Thursday, Mr. Putin claimed that Western intelligence agencies were using the poisoning to increase Mr. Navalny’s prominence.
“This trick of political battle is used around the world,” Mr. Putin said.
The marathon news conference is a longtime tradition for Mr. Putin, a way to show with great fanfare that he is accountable to the people. The event typically has a circuslike atmosphere, with journalists from across the country packing a Moscow conference hall in their region’s traditional dress or with colorful signs in the hope of drawing the president’s attention.
This time around, because of the pandemic, journalists asked questions by video link from conference rooms across the vast country, as far east as the port city of Vladivostok, more than 5,500 miles away on the Pacific. Mr. Putin spoke remotely from a studio at his residence outside Moscow, in keeping with his practice since the start of the pandemic of avoiding virtually all physical contact with others.
The questions, as always, alternated between geopolitics and local matters such as the water supply in Crimea. Mr. Putin said he had yet to decide whether or not to run again in 2024, as changes to the Constitution this year would allow.
Sergei Shnurov, a rock star turned journalist, asked Mr. Putin why Russian hackers did not help President Trump win the American election and whether Mr. Putin planned to offer Mr. Trump a job in Russia next year. Mr. Putin responded by denying, as he always has, that Russia had ever intervened in American politics, and added some farewell praise for Mr. Trump.
“I don’t think Trump needs any help finding employment,” Mr. Putin said. “He has quite a large base of support inside the United States and as far as I understand he does not plan to depart from the political life of his country.”
American officials acknowledged on Monday that the State Department and parts of the Pentagon were among the government entities compromised by a sophisticated Russian hacking attack, but Mr. Putin did not comment on the matter. Instead, he said Russian-American relations had become “hostage to domestic politics” in the United States, referring to Democrats’ criticism of Mr. Trump as being too soft on Russia.
“We expect that the new president-elect of the United States will understand what is going on,” Mr. Putin went on, referring to Joseph R. Biden Jr. “He is an experienced man, both in domestic politics and in foreign policy, and we expect that all the problems that have arisen — if not all, then at least some — will be solved by the new administration.”
Questions early in the news conference focused on the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed 49,151 people in Russia, according to the official statistics, which are widely viewed as understating the toll. Mr. Putin, echoing a common refrain of Russian officials and the state media, acknowledged that Russia was hit hard but insisted that things were even worse elsewhere. He highlighted Russia’s development of its own coronavirus vaccine and the creation of thousands of dedicated hospital beds.
“There is a sea of problems, but this sea, this ocean is everywhere,” Mr. Putin said. “I can say confidently that we met these problems worthily, perhaps even better than in other countries.”
But the country is now in the midst of its fiercest wave of the coronavirus so far, recording more than 500 deaths a day. Vaccination is proceeding slower than expected, hobbled both by production problems and mistrust. And the medical system is still struggling to cope, a fact that journalists and regular Russians who submitted their own questions online asked the Russian leader to address.
“People are calling me from the regions and saying that it is very hard to live right now, horribly hard, harder than it’s ever been in Russia,” a journalist from the Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid told Mr. Putin.
Mr. Putin said widespread vaccination of Russians against the coronavirus was necessary to stop the pandemic’s spread in the country, and the Russian-developed shot is now available free at clinics across the country. But Russians are not rushing to get the vaccine, and Mr. Putin said on Thursday he had yet to get the injection himself because it was not yet approved for people older than 60.
“I’m a law-abiding person, in this sense, and I listen to the recommendations of our specialists,” Mr. Putin, who is 68, said when asked whether he had already been vaccinated. “I will definitely do this as soon as it becomes possible.”
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