Putin says his agents would have 'finished the job' if they had poisoned dissident Alexei Navalny

Russian President Vladimir Putin denied Thursday that his spy agencies poisoned opposition critic Alexei Navalny, saying that if they had, they would have "finished the job." 

Putin made the comments during his annual hours-long, year-end press conference in Moscow.

Navalny remains in Germany following a highly publicized August medical crisis, when he fell ill while flying from Siberia to Moscow. He was found to have been poisoned with the deadly nerve agent Novichok, a Soviet-era venom that has been used against other Russian dissidents.

Refusing to use Navalny's name, Putin used his news conference to debunk a new investigation that implicates Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) in administering the poison.

"This patient in the Berlin clinic has the support of American intelligence agencies," Putin said about Navalny. "The intelligence agencies of course need to keep an eye on him. But that does not mean that he needs to be poisoned – who needs him? If they had really wanted to, they would have probably finished the job."

Earlier this week, Navalny accused Putin of approving the plan to poison him. In a video posted to YouTube, Navalny outlined why he believed the results of an investigation led by the Bellingcat investigative group, which found that the FSB carried out the attack.

Putin dismissed the report, saying it was “not an investigation, it’s laundering of U.S. intelligence material.”

Putin held the press conference amid reports in the West that Russia had launched cyberattacks on U.S. government computer systems, and that Russia had bolstered its military forces along the borders with Eastern Europe and elsewhere.