Citing Capitol Riot, Putin Says U.S. Cracks Down On Its Political Dissidents

Ahead of his meeting with President Joe Biden on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the U.S. goes after its political dissidents citing the January 6 Capitol riots. Russia has come under heavy criticism for its treatment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Navalny was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in August 2020. Since he returned to Russia, he has been imprisoned by federal authorities.

“We don’t have this kind of habit of assassinating anybody,” he told NBC News. “We have a saying, ‘Don’t be mad at the mirror if you are ugly.’ It has nothing to do with you personally. But if somebody blames us for something, what I say is: ‘Why don’t you look at yourselves? You will see yourselves in the mirror, not us.'”

When asked about Russian cyberattacks, Putin said he would like to work with Biden to fight cybercrime, though he claimed that there has been no evidence of  Russian involvement.

The FBI recently found a Russian-linked group named REvil was behind a cyberattack at a meat-producing group JBS USA. In January, Biden placed sanctions on Russia after U.S. intelligence agents found another Russian-linked group to be behind an attack on U.S. government agencies.