Russian President Vladimir Putin has been informed of the death of Alexei Navalny, whose causes must be investigated by doctors, was the first reaction of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov when asked to comment on the tragic event of the loss of the 47-year-old symbol of pro-Western opposition in Russia, causing international reactions and condemnation statements by many foreign leaders against Moscow and the Russian leader personally.
“The Federal Penitentiary Service is dealing with all investigations and no special orders are needed for this matter,” said Mr. Peskov, who is accompanying Vladimir Putin on his tour of factories in the Chelyabinsk region.
A little earlier, with a brief announcement by the competent agency, which oversees Russian prisons, the death of Alexei Navalny was announced, after previously “after a walk inside the prison he felt unwell and lost consciousness.” According to the Russian Interfax news agency, “a first aid medical unit arrived at the prison in less than seven minutes after the incident and it took another two minutes to reach the patient, where for half an hour they continued the resuscitation efforts, which had been started by the prison doctors, but without result”.
A special forensic commission from the headquarters of the head of the Russian prisons authority was announced to be leaving for the “Yamal district rural prison No. 3” in Siberia, with the mandate to fully investigate the circumstances and causes of the death of Alexei Navalny, the who is considered by his supporters and Western capitals to be a political prisoner and by the Russian Authorities and his opponents to be an instrument of Western secret services.
According to the Russian service of the BBC, citing Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmish, who lives outside Russia, his relatives and associates do not know more details about the circumstances of his death, which they cannot yet confirm, as one of his lawyers was preparing to leave by air for the settlement of Harp, where the prison is located, some 3,300 km from Moscow.
Navalny’s mother recently called for no condolences, as she said “I saw my son in prison on the 12th of the month, we were visiting him, he was alive, healthy and happy,” according to the BBC’s Russian service, which he cites doctors, who dispute the most likely version, first reported by the Russia Today network, that the death was caused by a “thromboembolism”. “Without a forensic examination and an autopsy it is not possible to make a diagnosis of the presence of a clot,” said Alexander Polupan, a specialist anesthetist at the BBC’s Russian service.
Navalny’s lawyer Leonid Solovyov said he last met his client the day before yesterday and then “everything was normal”, but now at the behest of his family he is not commenting on the incident but investigating the situation. Journalist Yulia Ioffe wrote that she met Navalny’s wife Yulia yesterday, who told her that “everything is fine, considering the bad circumstances.”
Alexei Navalny has faced numerous and successive prosecutions by the Russian authorities against him, the latest of which was his sentencing to 19 years in prison in August 2023 for “founding an extremist organization and public calls for extremist action”, as described by the “Foundation for Countering of corruption’, which was judged to be financed from abroad and acting as a ‘foreign agent’. Navalny had been the head of the Moscow organization of the historical liberal party “Yablako”, founded the “Russia of the Future” party in 2019, but had started his career as a nationalist, participating in the “Russian Marches” of the 1990s-2000s.
Source: KYPE
