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Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny has died in a maximum-security prison in the country’s far north, the prison service has said.
Navalny — President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent opponent and a fierce critic of his invasion of Ukraine — fell ill after a walk in the prison’s yard and “lost consciousness almost immediately”, the Russian prison service said on Friday.
“All the essential measures to resuscitate [Navalny] were carried out and did not give positive results. Emergency services doctors confirmed the inmate’s death. The reasons for his death are being clarified,” the prison service added.
Navalny’s exiled team of supporters had “no confirmation of this for now”, his spokesperson Kira Yarmysh wrote on X. She said a lawyer for Navalny, 47, was travelling to the remote prison colony where he was transferred last year.
In an unannounced speech at the Munich Security Conference, his wife Yulia Navalnaya said on Friday: “If it’s true, I want Putin, his whole entourage, Putin’s friends and his government to know they will be held responsible for what they have done to our country, my family, and my husband. And that day will come very soon.
“I want to call on the whole world community [ . . . ] to get together and defeat this evil, this horrific regime we have in Russia right now,” Navalnaya added. “This regime and Vladimir Putin should be held personally responsible for all the horrible things they have been doing to my country, Russia, in recent years.”
US secretary of state Antony Blinken met Navalnaya at the conference on Friday after reports of her husband’s death emerged. Blinken offered condolences “if the reports of Alexei Navalny’s death are true, and reiterated that Russia is responsible for his death”, his spokesperson said.
Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, told Russian newspaper Kommersant that Putin had been informed of Navalny’s death. Peskov told reporters he had been told of Navalny’s death “from Moscow” and said he did not know the cause.
Western leaders were quick to suggest that Navalny’s death was caused by the Russian government.
US vice-president Kamala Harris, speaking at the Munich security conference, said: “This is of course terrible news, which we are working to confirm . . . This would be a further sign of Putin’s brutality. Whatever story they tell, let us be clear, Russia is responsible and we will have more to say on this later.”
European Council president Charles Michel said: “For his ideals, he made the ultimate sacrifice. The EU holds the Russian regime solely responsible for this tragic death.”
French President Emmanuel Macron said: “In today’s Russia, free spirits are sent to the gulag and condemned to death. Anger and indignation… My thoughts go out to his family, loved ones, and to the Russian people.”
Garry Kasparov, an exiled former opposition leader, wrote: “Putin tried and failed to murder Navalny quickly and secretly with poison, and now he has murdered him slowly and publicly in prison. He was killed for exposing Putin and his mafia as the crooks and thieves they are.”
Russian propaganda figures implied the west had somehow been involved in Navalny’s death. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the condemnation from western leaders was “self-incriminating”.
Margarita Simonyan, editor of state news network RT, said: “I won’t even try to explain [to the west] that everyone forgot about him long ago, that there was no point in killing him, especially before the elections [next month] — it’s to the benefit of the opposite forces.”
A charismatic anti-corruption activist, Navalny was jailed just over three years ago after returning to Russia from Germany following treatment for a nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on Putin.
The Kremlin then steadily moved to isolate him from the outside world by holding him in increasingly restrictive conditions in notoriously harsh, remote prison colonies.
In December, he was relocated to a prison in the Yamalo-Nenets region of Russia, above the Arctic Circle, after disappearing from public view and falling out of contact with his legal team for several weeks.
Despite his sentence, Navalny had continued to exchange regular messages with supporters through letters and his lawyers in which he regularly spoke out against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Kremlin had attempted to cut Navalny off even further by arresting several of his lawyers last year on charges of being part of an “extremist group”, which carry a sentence of up to six years in prison.
It also repeatedly punished him by holding him in solitary confinement on 27 separate occasions for alleged infractions of prison rules, most recently from Wednesday.
Dmitry Muratov, editor of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and a Nobel laureate, wrote that the repeated stints in the punishment cell had probably contributed to his death. “You can’t move, the food’s not nutritious, there’s not enough air, it’s cold all the time,” he wrote. “Alexei Navalny was put through suffering and torture for three years. As Navalny’s doctor said to me: the body can’t handle that.”
That same day he was sent to the cell — Valentine’s Day — Navalny posted on social media a message to his wife, Yulia: “Baby, I know that everything with you is like in the song — there are cities between us, airport landing lights, blue snowstorms and thousands of kilometres. But I feel you by my side every second and I love you all the more.”
Additional reporting by Henry Foy in Brussels, Felicia Schwartz in Munich and Leila Abboud in Paris
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