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Moscow (dpa) - According to research by his adversary Alexej Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin is said to have had a huge palace built with bribes in massive amounts.

In a video, the 44-year-old shows aerial photos of the gigantic property on the sunny Black Sea coast - with parks, a church, a helipad, a bridge and an orangery.

The two-hour film is tough - and it is a greeting from the Moscow prison, where Navalny has been held since his return from Germany.

During the five months in Germany, where Navalny was recovering from an assassination attempt with the neurotoxin Novitschok, he apparently thought often of the Russian President.

From there, he not only made Putin responsible for the attack and called him a "murderer".

Navalny also went to Dresden, where Putin served as a KGB officer in GDR times in close cooperation with the Stasi communist ideals.

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Using the traces that Putin left there and with photos, Navalny traces in his new film how Putin has accompanied his friends from the secret service from then to now - and made him the “richest man in the world”.

And with a look at the palace pictures from the Black Sea, he calls him a "tsar" who has lost all measure, enriched himself and made his friends into dependent servants by stealing public funds.

"A simple Soviet officer has become a madman who rakes in money and luxury," says Navalny.

The video was viewed around 22 million times by Wednesday afternoon.

It goes viral on the net - the Kremlin-critical media in Russia know no other topic than the return of Navalny and his new video.

The state media are silent.

But Putin's spokesman Dmitri Peskov was once again forced to comment on the enigmatic palace under the pressure.

It was “Navalny's old record”, all “nonsense”, the President and the Kremlin had nothing to do with it, Peskov emphasized.

And anyway, the Kremlin doesn't want to say anything more about it.

But even after Peskow's statement, the question, which has been asked for years, remains open to whom the palace now belongs.

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For months there has been speculation that Putin is staying on the Black Sea much more often than in Moscow.

There have been reports of government aircraft movements.

Peskov said that flights by the Russian leadership were secret.

In December, Putin himself said of the reports about himself that they were deliberate indiscretions spread by Western intelligence services.

Navalny is also accused of working for the US secret service CIA.

He rejects that - and calls himself a real patriot, which is why he continues to fight against Putin.

The Putin opponent reconstructs the veiled ownership of the largest private estate in Russia on the basis of numerous documents that were first shown in this way.

The closely guarded and spaciously fenced palace with more than 17,500 square meters is located in a wine-growing region near the city of Gelendzhik.

A tunnel leads to the beach, they say.

According to the research, "minor officials" from the presidential administration were temporarily registered as owners.

The property with the palace in Italian design is almost 40 times the size of Monaco, they say.

The cost should be around 100 billion rubles (1.3 billion euros).

The video shows floor plans of the palace: including saunas, wellness and massage areas and an armory with Kalashnikov assault rifles.

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«Putin lives in extreme luxury.

He lives the life of an Arab sheikh and someone who can turn things into gold at a glance, ”says Georgi Alburov, who played a key role in the research.

The ramified corporate networks and frequent changes of ownership did not allow any other conclusion than that Putin was the real owner of the palace.

Alburov says on the Internet channel Doschd that the most important result of the research is that Putin will never be able to live there because of the attention.

According to Navalny, it is the largest corruption scandal in Russian history.

Dozens of hectares of forest were cleared for the construction, the unique coastal landscape was destroyed, says the environmentalist Dmitri Shevchenko on the Internet channel Doschd.

Such a land grab, including serious interventions in nature, is only possible with the help of government agencies.

Schwetschenko says he used to be on the site himself.

The film is seen as Nawalny's response to his imprisonment and persecution by the Kremlin.

The government opponent was sentenced to 30 days in prison on Monday after his return to Russia in a controversial express trial in a Moscow police station.

Behind the actions of the judiciary and behind the assassination attempt on August 20, he sees a “killer squad” from the domestic intelligence service FSB under Putin's orders.

Putin and the FSB deny the allegations.

This Saturday, Navalny's supporters have called for protests - for the release of the Kremlin opponent and against Putin.

© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210120-99-104142 / 2

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