Moscow: Alexei Navalny, the fiercest foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin has died in jail, Russia’s prison agency said here. He was 47. Alexei Navalny crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests.
The Federal Penitentiary Service said in a statement that Navalny felt unwell after a walk Friday and lost consciousness. An ambulance arrived to try to rehabilitate him, but he died.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin has been informed of Navalny’s death and the prison service was looking into the death in line with standard procedures.
However, Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said on X, that the politician’s team had no confirmation of his death so far and that his lawyer was travelling to the town where he was held.
Navalny was serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism. He was moved in December from his former prison in the Vladimir region of central Russia to a ‘special regime’ penal colony – the highest security level of prisons in Russia – above the Artic Circle.
Navalny’s allies decried the transfer to a colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,900 kilometres (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow, as yet another attempt to force Navalny into silence.
Navalny has been behind bars since January 2021, when he returned to the Russian capital after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. Before his arrest, he campaigned against official corruption, organised major anti-Kremlin protests and ran for public office. He had since received three prison sentences, all of which he rejected as politically motivated.
In Putin’s Russia, political opponents often fade amid factional disputes or are sent into exile after imprisonment. Sometimes they are poisoned or face other heavy repression. But Navalny grew consistently stronger and reached the apex of the opposition through grit, bravado and an acute understanding of how social media could circumvent the Kremlin’s suffocation of independent news outlets.
Navalny faced each setback – whether it was a physical assault or imprisonment – with an intense devotion, confronting dangers with a sardonic wit. That drove him to the bold and fateful move of returning from Germany to Russia and certain arrest.
Navalny was born in Butyn, about 40 kilometres outside Moscow. He received a law degree from People’s Friendship University in 1998 and did a fellowship at Yale in 2010. He gained attention by focusing on corruption in Russia’s murky mix of politicians and businesses; one of his early moves was to buy a stake in Russian oil and gas companies to become an activist shareholder and push for transparency. By concentrating on corruption, Navalny’s work had a pocketbook appeal to Russians’ widespread sense of being cheated, and he carried stronger resonance than more abstract and philosophical concerns about democratic ideals and human rights.
Navalny’s popularity increased after the leading charismatic politician, Boris Nemtsov, was shot and killed in 2015 on a bridge near the Kremlin. Whenever Putin spoke about Navalny, he made it a point to never mention the activist by name, referring to him as ‘that person’ or similar wording, in an apparent effort to diminish his importance.