Russia will not discuss “speculations” about the involvement of dissident Alexei Navalny in a prisoner exchange with the West, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday, as quoted by The Moscow Times.

“These are speculations that deserve neither official comment nor informal discussion,” she said at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, where President Vladimir Putin also spoke a day earlier.

Zakharova made the comment after The Wall Street Journal reported late last week, citing several Western officials on condition of anonymity, that Navalny could be involved in a trade between Russia and the West in which Moscow would get back more of its spies. and intelligence agents.

According to WSJ sources, among the top operatives the Kremlin would like to acquire from the West is Vadym Krasikov, sentenced to life in prison in Germany for the August 2019 murder of Chechen Georgian Zelimkhan Khangochvili in a park in central Berlin.

Asked on Wednesday about a possible exchange that would include Navalny, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on the subject.

Alexei Navalny returned to Russia from Germany, where he was cured of poisoning with the nerve agent “Novachok” in his homeland, in January 2021. He was detained at the Moscow airport and soon sentenced to two years and 8 months in prison with execution.

Since then, the Russian authorities have opened several trials against him, most recently he was sentenced to an additional 19 years in prison for “extremism”.