VLADIVOSTOK, September 13. /TASS/. The Wall Street Journal’s claim that blogger Alexey Navalny might allegedly be the object of a prisoner exchange between Russia and the United States is a groundless rumor, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a news briefing on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum.

"These speculations require neither official commentary nor informal discussion," she said, when asked for an opinion on the WSJ report.

Zakharova stressed that information about prisoner exchanges could not be discussed through American periodicals.