Putin points to jailed Trump supporters, Ashli Babbitt after criticism on Alexei Navalny
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Vladimir Putin has accused the US of ‘persecuting political opinions’ for arresting the MAGA mob at the Capitol siege, ahead of his summit with Joe Biden on Wednesday.
The Russian president was asked about his jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an interview filmed in Moscow last week before his meeting with Biden in Switzerland.
And he replied by hitting back at the US, equating the arrest of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol with his treatment of Navalny.
‘We have a saying: ‘Don’t be mad at the mirror if you are ugly,’” Putin said. “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.’
‘You are presenting it as dissent and intolerance toward dissent in Russia. We view it completely differently,’ he told NBC News. “Do you know that 450 individuals were arrested after entering the Congress? … They came there with political demands.”
There is truth to what the Russian president said, as some Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol are still jailed today, held in solitary confinement for a trespassing charge.
After criticism for using a nerve agent on Navalny, Putin highlighted the murder of Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter who was shot inside of the Capitol on Jan.6 by an officer who still remains nameless, and faced no repercussions.
‘Did you order the assassination of the woman who walked into the Congress and who was shot and killed by a policeman?’ Putin said of Babbitt.
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