Jailed Russian opposition leader and Putin critic Alexei Navalny has died, according to Russian media that quoted Siberian prison officials here he was serving his sentence.
Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s staunchest domestic critic of the last decade, was serving a 19-year prison sentence on charges of extremism. The case was considered politically motivated.
Latvian president Edgars Rinkevics said „He was brutally murdered by Putin.”
Whatever your thoughts about Alexey @Navalny as the politician, he was just brutally murdered by the Kremlin. That’s a fact and that is something one should know about the true nature of Russia’s current regime. My condolences to the family and friends.
— Edgars Rinkēvičs (@edgarsrinkevics) February 16, 2024
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Navalny ‘paid for his courage with his life.’
The EU said it held President Putin’s Russia solely responsible for the death.
He called his sentence political revenge for leading the anti-Kremlin opposition of the 2010s and did not expect to be released during Putin’s lifetime.
„On February 16, 2024, in correctional colony No. 3, convict Navalny A.A. felt unwell after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness,” a statement said.
Medical workers and an emergency medical team were called, but he could not be resuscitated.
The 47-year-old was last seen in January when he was moved to a Russian prison in the Arctic Circle. He smiled and laughed while in court via video-link.
He was repeatedly placed in a tiny punishment cell over alleged minor infractions, like buttoning his prison uniform wrong.
Prison officers refused to give him mail,and he was deprived of writing supplies, denied food he had ordered and paid for in addition to regular meals, and relatives were barred from visiting, Navalny argued in his lawsuits.
A former nationalist politician, Navalny helped foment the 2011-12 protests in Russia campaigning against election fraud and government corruption, investigating Putin’s inner circle and sharing the findings in slick videos that garnered hundreds of millions of views.
In 2013 he won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral contest that few believed was free or fair. He aggravated the Kremlin for years, identifying a palace built on the Black Sea for Putin’s personal use, mansions and yachts used by the ex-president Dmitry Medvedev.
In 2020, Navalny fell into a coma after a suspected poisoning using novichok by Russia’s FSB security service and was evacuated to Germany for treatment. He recovered and returned to Russia in January 2021, where he was arrested on a parole violation charge and sentenced to his first of several jail terms that would total more than 30 years behind bars.
Demonstrators at the gates of the Russian embassy. ‘Putin, you have blood on your hands.’
