Hundreds of photos from inside President Vladimir Putin’s secret palace have been published by a group of friends of the imprisoned Russian activist Alexei Navalny. Google Drive hosts both a video and a cache of images that were released with the image release.
These are a few of the images:
Approximately a year after the Anti-Corruption Foundation first alleged the palace existed, it was released. In January 2021, the paper claimed Putin had been secretly building a 17.691-square-meter palace at a cost of 100 billion rubles, or about $1.3 billion, since 2014.
It was reported that the palace was being built near Gelendzhik on the Black Sea. According to the foundation, it was funded by a corruption scheme in which Putin’s inner circle paid for access and influence. But the Kremlin denied these allegations at the time. ‘These are all absolutely unfounded statements. This is pure nonsense and a compilation, and there is nothing else there,’ the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
The 2021 report by the foundation showcased mock-ups of the palace’s possible layout. There is a second set that features what it says are real pictures of the interior, which the video report compares to spots on the blueprint. The updated images appear to have been taken when the palace was partially under construction.
For more than a decade, Navalny has been Putin’s chief critic. Navalny was poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent in Siberia in August of 2020, but he survived. He returned to Russia not long after the earlier palace video, on January 17, 2021, and was arrested immediately. After being convicted of embezzlement and missing parole meetings, he was later found to have violated a 2014 suspended sentence.
Navalny is serving a 3-1/2-year sentence at a prison camp. An investigation by the open-source news outlet Bellingcat found in December 2020 that Navalny was poisoned by the Russian FSB spy agency. Russian officials deny involvement.
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