The imprisoned Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny is dead, reported the prison service of the Yamalo-Nenets region, where he was serving his sentence. He died at age 47, about 100 days before he would have turned 48 on June 4.
Mr Navalny, an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been in a Russian prison since 2021 on charges widely believed to be politically motivated.
Kira Yarmish, Navalny’s spokeswoman, said her team had not yet received confirmation of the death, but the lawyer was now traveling to Siberia.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Russian Penitentiary Service was conducting all investigations into Navalny’s death, but had no information on the matter.
When Navalny survived the Novichok nerve agent assassination attempt in the summer of 2020, he knew he would never be safe in Russia again.
Still, after recovering in Germany from the poisoning, he flew home. Navalny was arrested as soon as he landed in Moscow in January 2021 and has been locked up ever since.
He appeared via video link from prison periodically for hearings on multiple criminal cases against him – all excuses to keep him behind bars.
He was exhausted. His head is shaved, and his prison uniform was becoming more and more baggy. But he always sounded defiant, despite being sentenced to 19 years in prison last year for founding and financing an extremist organization. Before that, he had 9 years for fraud and contempt of court.
Alexei Navalny was last seen in a video call in January, joking about his prison garb at the Arctic penal colony he was transferred to a month earlier. The IK-3 colony, called “Polar Wolf”, is located in the northern city of Harp, about 1,900 km northeast of Moscow.
It is considered one of the strictest prisons in Russia and most of those held there have been convicted of serious crimes.
Speaking to reporters in a video call, Navalny appeared in good spirits, joking that he had not yet received Christmas mail as he was “quite far away”.
A statement on his death said he “felt unwell” after a walk on Friday.
He “almost immediately lost consciousness,” the statement continued, adding that emergency medical personnel were immediately called and attempted to resuscitate him, but were unsuccessful.
“The doctors from the Emergency Service found the death of the prisoner. The cause of death is being ascertained.’
Navalny never gave up hope and faith in what his team called “the beautiful Russia of the future” – the end of Putin’s long and repressive rule and the prospect of political change in his country, the BBC writes.
But after the activist’s arrest, Putin launched a war against Ukraine, Navalny’s own political organization was banned as “extremist”, members of his team were arrested, and all known critics of Putin fled the country – or were jailed.
Today, the families of these prisoners must also be horrified.
For them, and for all those who envisioned a different Russia, the outlook has never been so bleak.
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