Zelenskyy: After Navalny’s “murder,” it’s “absurd to perceive Putin as a supposedly legitimate head of a Russian state.”

While speaking at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy went after Vladimir Putin following Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death at a prison colony where he was being held for charges widely viewed as political punishment.

Navalny died less than a month before Russia’s election that will give Putin six more years of power. The anticorruption activist was detained immediately after returning to Russia in 2021 from Germany, where he was being treated for Novichok poisoning, a nerve agent used primarily by the Russian government. Supporters of Navalny and western officials are calling the Kremlin critic’s death a political assassination.

“Putin kills whoever he wants,” Zelenskyy told the crowd in Munich ahead of the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of his country. “After the murder of Alexei Navalny, it’s absurd to perceive Putin as a supposedly legitimate head of a Russian state, and he is a thug who maintains power through corruption and violence.”

Zelenskyy said Putin faces only two futures: Justice “in the Hague” or to be “killed by one of his accomplices who are now killing for him.”

“We all must do … everything possible to defeat the aggressor. Please, everyone, remember that dictators do not go on vacation,” the Ukrainian president added.