Alexei Navalny, Prominent Putin Critic, Dies: Russia

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s biggest foes, died Friday while being held in a Russian penal colony in Kharp, a city in northern Russia, the Federal Prison Service said. He was 47.

According to the statement released by the country’s prison agency, Navalny lost consciousness after he felt unwell during a walk. While emergency services attended to him, they did not manage to revive him, they added.

Navalny’s spokesperson Kira Yarmysh said Navalny’s lawyer was travelling to Kharp to find out more, adding that they were not in a position to confirm his death yet.

“As soon as we have some information, we will report on it,” Yarmysh wrote on X.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters Putin was notified of Navalny’s death, adding that the Federal Penitentiary Service is investigating the events.

World leaders have been sharing their reaction to the reports of Navalny’s death, with U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak calling the development “terrible news.”

“As the fiercest advocate for Russian democracy, Alexei Navalny demonstrated incredible courage throughout his life,” Sunak wrote. “My thoughts are with his wife and the people of Russia, for whom this is a huge tragedy.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose country is at war with Russia, told a news conference in Berlin, “Alexey Navalny died in a Russian prison — it is obvious for me that he was killed.”

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the Biden administration was “actively seeking confirmation” of the news.

“If it’s confirmed, it is a terrible tragedy, and given the Russian government’s long and sordid history of doing harm to its opponents, it raises real and obvious questions about what happened here,” Sullivan told NPR.

Navalny was serving a 19-year sentence on extremism charges after he was convicted for the fifth time in August over his foundation’s activities and statements by his associates. He decried the charges as politically motivated.

In December, he was transferred to a penal colony in the Yamalo-Nenets region near the Arctic Circle in December after his allies had previously reported losing contact with him for three weeks. Navalny’s supporters said his transfer there was yet another effort by Putin to suppress him.

Navalny’s death comes ahead of Russia’s presidential election scheduled for next month. Putin is all but certain to win reelection.

Last year, Navalny had been reportedly suffering from stomach pains. Yarmysh said in April that she feared the illness could have been caused by a slow-acting poison.

“His health is not a good condition,” Yarmysh told Reuters at the time. “We can’t rule out the idea that he is being poisoned, not in a huge dosage as before, but in small ones so that he doesn’t die immediately but for him to suffer and to ruin his health.”

Navalny had been unable to eat the prison food because it was worsening his symptoms, Yarmysh said, and he’d been forbidden from accessing alternative food. The Kremlin referred Reuters’ questions about the situation to the penitentiary service, which did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

At the end of April, more than 100 public figures, including various journalists, actors, musicians and filmmakers, released a letter calling for Putin to release Navalny.

“Visits from relatives and phone calls are forbidden, his attorney-client privileges have been canceled,” the letter read. “Despite running a fever, he is required to stand all day.”

Navalny, leader of the Russia of the Future party, was Putin’s most prominent critic. He was evacuated to Germany in August 2020 after being poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent ― the same type of chemical weapon used to poison former Russian military official Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in 2018.

Navalny fell ill while on a flight from the Russian city…