``I think everyone is looking at that with a grain of salt,'' Foreign Affairs Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne told The Canadian Press.

Officials say investigators In Siberia have been working on "establishing all the circumstances of the incident."

Alexei Navalny's allies say the Kremlin is behind the illness of its most prominent critic, accusations that officials denounced as ``empty noise.''

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the accusations, saying they "absolutely cannot be true and are rather an empty noise.''

Alexei Navalny is in a serious condition after drinking tea on Thursday morning that his allies believe was laced with poison.

Navalny was in a coma in a Siberian hospital on Thursday after drinking a cup of tea that his spokeswoman said she believed was laced with poison.

He was in intensive care and on an artificial lung ventilator in an Omsk hospital, his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said.

The particular sleight of hand used this time was different, Matthew Fisher says, but the result of Russia's national referendum was the same: the country will get a lot more Putin.

Moscow and many other regions have been in lockdown for nearly two weeks to stem the contagion, but hospitals in the capital are still being pushed to their limit, officials said.

Trump arguably has stronger backing at home at the moment than the strongman in the Kremlin, whose personal popularity has been in slow decline, Matthew Fisher says.