Alexei Navalny, who has led the main opposition to Vladimir Putin for years and was the subject of an Oscar-winning doc, has died, according to state reports citing the Russian prison service. He was 47.
The BBC quoted the Russian prison service as saying Navalny “felt unwell” after a walk on Friday and “almost immediately lost consciousness.” The local Tass News agency reported that a cause of death is still being established.
Navalny is globally recognized as the most vocal Russian critic of Putin across the past two decades. He has spent the past few years, and many years of his adult life, in prison. Most recently, he was serving a 19-year jail term for offences that were widely deemed to be politically motivated.
He was moved to an Arctic penal colony, considered one of the toughest jails, late last year.
Navalny’s lawyer Leonid Solovyov told Russian media he would not be commenting, although his close aide Leonid Volkov wrote on X: “Russian authorities publish a confession that they killed Alexei Navalny in prison. We do not have any way to confirm it or to prove this isn’t true.”
Navalny was the subject of a shocking 2022 eponymous doc from HBO Max and CNN Films that won an Oscar for Best Documentary. It told of events relating the poisoning of the opposition leader with a novichok nerve agent, and how Navalny and a Bellingcat journalist were able to reveal details of a plot that indicated the involvement of Putin. The film premiered at Sundance, where it attracted rave reviews.
Born in 1976 to a father who had relocated due to the Chernobyl disaster, Navalny studied as a lawyer before joining the Russian United Democratic Party Yabloko in 2000. In April 2004, he became Chief of staff of the Moscow branch of Yabloko, which he remained until February 2007.
He became virulently anti-Putin from 2011 onwards and appeared in court for the first time for “defying a government official,” for which he was sentenced to 15 days imprisonment. Upon release, he called on Russians to unite against Putin, who Navalny said would try and claim victory in the 2012 presidential election.
He contested several further elections, launched political parties, campaigned against constitutional amendments and was constantly outspoken against Putin, regularly landing himself in trouble and garnering a large following along the way – both inside and outside of the country.
In 2020, he fell ill during a flight from Tomsk to Moscow and he was placed on a ventilator. He believed he had been poisoned and enlisted the help of Bellingcat and other media. In the most shocking part of the Oscar-winning doc, he impersonates a Russian security official and tricks a chemical weapons expert into saying that poison had been placed on his clothing.
Navalny is survived by wife Yulia Abrosimova and two children.
Tributes and speculation as to Navalny’s cause of death immediately started flooding in.
Russian newspaper editor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov told Reuters today the death of the jailed opposition leader was “murder”, and said that he believed prison conditions had led to Navalny’s demise.
Latvian president Edgars Rinkevics said on X that Navalny was “brutally murdered by the Kremlin”.
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