Russian Opposition Leader Navalny Dies in Prison
Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died, the Russian prison service has said. Navalny, Russia's most significant opposition leader and a strong critic of Vladimir Putin, was 47.
In prison since 2021, Navalny was serving a 19-year prison sentence on charges he said were political. In December he was moved to a penal colony in the Yamalo-Nenets district, an area north of the Arctic Circle.
Critics said the prison move was designed to silence Navalny.
The Yamalo-Nenets prison service said that Navalny "felt unwell" after taking a walk on Friday, February 16. He then fell unconscious and an emergency medical team was unable to resuscitate him.
The cause of death has not yet been established.
However, Navalny's lawyer, Leonid Solovyov, told the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta that he had visited Navalny two days before his death and at that time "everything was fine."
Speaking to Reuters, Dmitri Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta said that Navalny's death was "murder" and was caused by his mistreatment in prison.
For over a decade Navalny had campaigned against government corruption and organized major anti-government protests. He investigated Putin and his associates and criticized them in popular videos.
In 2020, Navalny fell into a coma after being poisoned and had to be evacuated to Germany for emergency treatment. Navalny blamed Putin for the poisoning, but the Russian government denied trying to kill him.
He returned to Russia in 2021, and was then immediately arrested and later sentenced to the first of several jail terms.
Reacting to the news of Navalny's death, his close political associate Leonid Volkov wrote on X, previously known as Twitter, that while there is no way to confirm what happened, the authorities' announcement was essentially a confession that they had killed him.
On February 14, Navalny's last post on the social media platform Telegram was a Valentine's message to his wife Yulia with a picture of the two together. "I feel that you are there every second, and I love you more and more," he wrote.
