YEREVAN, MARCH 18, ARMENPRESS. Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a late-night news conference after early results indicated he had won the presidential election in a landslide, that he supported an idea to release opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a prisoner exchange just days before he died, the Guardian reports.

“Believe it or not, but the person talking to me didn’t even finish their sentence when I said ‘I agree’. But unfortunately, whatever happened, happened,” Putin said.

It was the first time Putin has commented on Navalny since his death, which he called a “sad event”.

“I agreed under one condition: we swap him, and he doesn’t come back. But such is life,” said Putin. “When things like that happen you cannot do anything about it – that’s life.”

Navalny’s allies last month also said that talks with Russian and Western officials about a prisoner swap involving Navalny were underway. The politician’s longtime associate Maria Pevchikh said the talks were in their final stages just days before the Kremlin critic’s sudden and unexplained death in an Arctic penal colony on February 16.

Pevchikh claimed that there was a plan to swap Navalny and two U.S. citizens held in Russia for Vadim Krasikov, Associated Press reports. He was serving a life sentence in Germany for the 2019 killing in Berlin of Zelimkhan “Tornike” Khangoshvili, a 40-year-old Georgian citizen of Chechen descent.

She didn’t identify the U.S. citizens that were supposedly part of the deal. There are several in custody in Russia, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, arrested on espionage charges, and Paul Whelan, a corporate security executive from Michigan, convicted of espionage and serving a long prison sentence.