Donald Trump on Sunday hemmed and hawed when asked if he blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
“I don’t know, but perhaps, I mean possibly, I could say probably. I don’t know.” Trump told Fox News host Howard Kurtz. “He’s a young man, so statistically he’d be alive for a long time. If you go by the insurance numbers, he’d be alive for another 40 years. So something happened that was unusual.”
Navalny died in a Russian prison camp last month at the age of 47. He had been in and out of prison and house arrest for years, as well as hospitals as he had survived multiple attempts on his life over that time.
Many Putin critics and world leaders ― including President Joe Biden ― have blamed Putin for Navalny’s death.
But Trump, a longtime Putin admirer, wouldn’t go that far.
“I don’t know, you certainly can’t say for sure, but certainly that would look like something very bad happened, right?” said Trump:
