Alexei Navalny, an imprisoned Russian opposition leader and one of President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critics, has died in prison, Russian authorities said Friday.
According to a statement from Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service, Navalny “felt unwell after a walk” on Friday and “almost immediately” lost consciousness.
“The facility’s medical workers immediately arrived at the scene and an emergency medical team was called in,” the prison service for the Yamalo-Nenets region said in its statement. “All necessary resuscitation measures have been carried out, but they did not yield positive results.”
A longtime anti-corruption advocate who organized large protests against the Kremlin, Navalny was a thorn in Putin’s side for years. While in prison, he remained a strident political voice, speaking out against Putin and filing lawsuits against Russia’s prison service over living conditions.
Navalny survived multiple poisoning attempts, which the Kremlin denied orchestrating. He was imprisoned in January 2021 on fraud and other charges, all of which he denied. In August last year, he was sentenced to an additional 19 years in prison on top of his 11.5-year sentence.
Navalny’s lawyers said in December that they had lost contact with him, and nearly three weeks later he was located in a high-security penal colony above the Arctic Circle, The Associated Press reported.
His last public appearance was at a court hearing Thursday, during which he was seen joking with the judge, according to a video of the hearing published by Russian news outlet SOTAvision.
Navalny’s associates and supporters were skeptical of the claim of his death on social media. “We have no reason to believe state propaganda,” Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief of staff, wrote on X on Friday, in the platform’s automated translation from Russian. “If this is true, then not ‘Navalny died’, but ‘Putin killed Navalny’ and only that. But I don’t trust them one penny.” Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, said in impromptu remarks at the Munich Security Conference on Friday that she does not know whether to believe the news from state media, as Putin and his government “are lying constantly,” according to an English language translator on Navalny’s YouTube channel. “But if it is the truth, I would like Putin and all his staff — everybody around him, his government, his friends — I want them to know that they will be punished for what they have done with our country, with our family and with my husband,” she said. “They will be brought to justice, and this day would come soon.”
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.
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