Russian President Vladimir Putin today (Monday) denied allegations that he owns a huge palace on the shores of the Black Sea that cost no less than $ 1.5 billion to build.
Putin, who is under pressure due to the huge demonstrations that took place in the country over the weekend, said these things in a conversation with students. In response to a question about the interrogation, which was apparently pre-selected, the president responded by saying, “Nothing specified in the interrogation is listed as mine or by any of my close colleagues. And again none of this ever belonged to me.”
“This is recycled and false material from ten years ago,” the president claimed. Putin added an implicit warning to the tens of thousands of protesters who went out to protest the arrest of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the widespread corruption in the country, saying: “Everyone has the right to express themselves under the definitions set out in the law. dangerous”.
More than 3,000 people were arrested in demonstrations that took place in 112 different cities across Russia and were attended by more than one hundred thousand Russian citizens, who sacrificed their lives in the face of extreme cold, severe police violence and the risk of arrest.
The investigation, to which Putin referred, was published last week, just hours after Nabalny’s arrest at Moscow’s Shermetyovo airport, and tells the story of the construction of a huge Black Sea Palace built for the Russian president by taxpayer money and estimated to cost more than $ 1.5 billion. The Russian president’s claims that the palace has nothing to do with it contradict the fact that the Russian security organization, the FSB, owns and protects the territory, and the Russian emblem appears on the entrance to the compound. The airspace above the compound, which is 36 times larger than the Principality of Monaco, is closed to flights at the behest of the Russian authorities.
The investigation of Navalny’s men, published on a special website, revealed the excessive splendor of the new palace, which boasts a secret underground tunnel to the sea, a private casino, a strip club, a large church and a tea house built on a bridge at the edge of a cliff. Contractors who worked at the site said in the investigation that even the toilet brushes selected for the palace cost no less than 700 euros per unit. The video posted by Navalny’s organization on YouTube received almost 90 million views, most of them in Russia.
Navalny was sentenced last week to 30 days in custody before the trial began, as part of a case in which he was convicted as early as 2014. The opposition man returned to Russia from Germany after surviving an assassination attempt by a foreign media that managed to link the FSB and the Kremlin.