Alexey Navalny: Vladimir Putin’s biggest rival in Russia died in prison, prison service announces

Alexei Navalny, the most important opposition leader in Russia in the last decade, died in prison this Friday, according to the prison service.

47 year old Navalny was considered the biggest critic of the President. Vladimir Putin And was serving a 19-year sentence for crimes that opponents considered political.

Late last year he was transferred to the Arctic Penal Colony, considered one of the harshest prisons in the country.

The Yamalo-Nenets District Prison Service said he “felt unwell” after taking a walk on Friday.

“He lost consciousness almost immediately,” the service said in a statement, adding that an emergency medical team arrived at the scene and tried to revive him but were unsuccessful.

Tass news agency reported that the cause of his death was being investigated.

Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said her team had not received information about the death, but the rival’s lawyers were traveling to Siberia.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that Putin had been informed of Navalny’s death.

While the causes are being investigated, Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya said: “I don’t know whether I should believe this terrible news or not.”

At a conference in Munich, Navalnya said that, at the moment, news comes only from Russian state sources.

“We really can’t trust Putin and his government,” he said.

He then said that, if the news is confirmed, Putin and his allies should take responsibility for the death and “whatever they are doing to Russia”.

For her part, Navalny’s mother Lyudmila said her son was “alive, healthy and happy” when she last saw him on February 12.

“I don’t want to hear any condolences,” he said in a Facebook post quoted by the Novaya Gazeta newspaper.

Navalny had been in prison since 2021 and in December he was transferred to the Arctic penal colony in Siberia.

The charges against him are widely considered to be political. He was one of Putin’s most vocal and harsh critics.

He was first sentenced to three and a half years for breaching the terms of a suspended sentence embezzlement of funds,

He was tried again in February 2022. This time this allegation has been made Navalny had stolen US$4.7 million Of donations given to their political organisations.

Navalny said during a court hearing, “They are going to extend my sentence indefinitely. What can we do?”

The opponent was found guilty and sentenced to spend nine years in a “strict regime penal colony”.

Last year in August, His sentence was extended to 19 years after he was found guilty of creating and financing an extremist organizationNavalny denied the allegations.

For more than a decade, Navalny exposes corruption within Russian power, His video investigation received millions of views online.

The rival created a network of regional offices to campaign and run as a presidential candidate in 2018, but was vetoed.

In 2020, was poisoned in siberia, Western laboratories later confirmed that the cause was exposure to a nerve agent. He was treated in Germany.

upon recovery He returned to Russia in January 2021 and was immediately arrested.

Before going to prison he lived in Moscow with his wife Yulia and two children.

Analysis by Sarah Rainsford – BBC Eastern Europe correspondent

When Navalny survived an assassination attempt with Novichok nerve agent, he knew he would never be safe in Russia again.

However, after recovering from poisoning in Germany, he returned home.

As a politician, he could not contemplate the life of a political expatriate, becoming increasingly isolated and irrelevant.

He said he wanted to stay in Russia regardless of the risk.

However the danger was great.

Navalny was arrested upon landing in Moscow in January 2021 and has been detained since.

He appeared on video from jail from time to time for the hearing of several criminal cases against him, all pretext to keep him behind bars.

He was emaciated; His head was shaved, his prison uniform was too big for him. But it never felt more insulting.

Navalny never gave up his hopes and beliefs for what his team called “the beautiful Russia of the future”: an end to Putin’s long and repressive rule and a future of political change in his country.

But since his arrest Putin has waged war in Ukraine, Navalny’s political organization has been banned as “extremist”, members of his team have been arrested, and well-known Putin critics have been deported from the country. Have fled away or been put in jail.

The families of those prisoners will be scared even today.

For him and for all those who imagined a different Russia, the outlook had never been so bleak.

Many world leaders immediately reacted to this news.

US Secretary of State Antony BlinkenSaid that Navalny’s death only “underscores the weakness and poverty at the center of the system Putin built.”

“If these reports are credible, our thoughts are with his wife and family,” Blinken said at a conference in Munich, Germany. He said that “Russia is responsible” if the deaths were confirmed.

NATO Secretary General Jens StoltenbergSaid he was “saddened and disappointed by the reports coming from Russia.”

Navalny’s death is “terrible news”, said British Prime Minister Rishi SunakSaying that the opponent “demonstrated incredible courage during his life.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz He said the activist “paid for his courage with his life.”

One of the strongest reactions was from the European Union.

Charles Michel, President of the European CouncilSaid that the bloc holds Russia “fully responsible” for Navalny’s “tragic death”.

In a publication in X, Michel wrote that the rival “fought for the values ​​of freedom and democracy” and made “definite sacrifices” for his ideals.

“I express my deepest condolences to his family and to those who fight for democracy around the world in the most difficult circumstances.” Warriors die, but the fight for freedom never ends“Michelle said.

Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky called on the world to “respect the memory” of the man who was “imprisoned and tortured to death for standing up to Putin.”

For her part, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that “Western allegations” about Navalny’s death were “self-revealing” and that she believed the West had already drawn its own conclusions.

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