President Vladimir Putin Critic Alexei Navalny, 47, Dies in Arctic Circle Jail
Russia’s most significant opposition leader for the past decade, Alexei Navalny, has died at age 47 years in an Arctic Circle jail, the prison service said.
Seen as President Vladimir Putin’s most vociferous critic, Navalny was serving a 19-year jail term on charges widely considered politically motivated.
The Kremlin, the seat of Russia’s government, said it has no information on the cause of Navalny’s death.
However, according to the prison service of the Yamalo-Nenets region, where the opposition leader had been serving his sentence, Navalny died after “feeling unwell” and “losing consciousness”.
His imprisonment in 2021 sparked scores of demonstrations across Russia, leading to thousands of detentions. From prison, Navalny denounced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine via social media and encouraged anti-war protests across the country.
The Kremlin critic was quietly relocated to a penal colony in Siberia in December – a move which sparked a two-week search by his team who lost contact with him during the unannounced transfer.
The death of Putin’s most high-profile critic is likely to send shockwaves through parts of Russian society, and punctuates a merciless crackdown on dissidence in Russia that has accelerated during its war with Ukraine.
Navalny was detained and sent to a Russian prison in 2021 after he had returned to Russia from Germany, where he was recovering from Novichok poisoning he blamed on the Russian government. The Kremlin repeatedly denied any involvement.
He held no illusions about the risks he faced in his native country, but refused to stay away. Just weeks before leaving Germany, he told CNN: “I understand that Putin hates me, I understand that people in the Kremlin are ready to kill.”
Concerns mounted over Navalny’s health in early April 2023, as his team reported that he was experiencing severe stomach issues and had lost weight.
“We do not rule out that all this time in prison he could have been poisoned with something to make his health deteriorate slowly but steadily,” Navalny’s spokesperson Kira Yarmysh said in a Twitter post on April 11.
But Navalny’s death is bound to raise questions in Russia and abroad, in light of his past poisoning and the attacks on other Kremlin opponents before him.
Former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko died in Britain in 2006 after being poisoned with a rare radioactive isotope, polonium-210.
The nerve agent Novichok nearly killed former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the English city of Salisbury in March 2018. Russia denied responsibility.
In 2015, Russia’s former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, then the most visible leader of the opposition, was gunned down on a Moscow bridge within sight of the Kremlin. Navalny took up Nemtsov’s mantle, becoming Russia’s most prominent opposition figure.
Navalny fell gravely ill in August 2020 while on a return flight to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk. The pilot made an emergency landing in Omsk, where Navalny was taken to hospital for urgent treatment before being transferred to Germany, still critically ill.
The German government said Navalny was poisoned with a chemical agent from the Novichok group, a conclusion supported by two other labs in France and Sweden. Novichok agents are highly unusual, so much so that very few scientists outside of Russia have any real experience in dealing with them.
In July 2019, he was hospitalized with symptoms of an allergic reaction after being held in a special detention center. He expressed suspicion that his condition could have been caused by poisoning, although Russian state news agency TASS reported at the time that doctors found no signs of poisoning.
He was also barred from running for political office over his criminal conviction in the 2014 fraud case – a conviction the European Court of Human Rights ruled was politically motivated.
Navalny is survived by his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and their two children.
