Imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Putin’s main opponent, dies

The Russian opponent and main adversary of the Kremlin Alexei Navalny He died this Friday in the Arctic prison where he was serving a 19-year sentence, the penitentiary services reported.

“On February 16, 2024, in penitentiary center No. 3, prisoner Navalny AA felt ill after a walk and practically lost consciousness,” iThe prison service of the Yamal Arctic region said in a statement.

“All the necessary resuscitation measures were performed but they did not give a positive result. Emergency doctors confirmed the death of the patient. “The causes of death are being clarified,” the text specified.

The 47-year-old activist had been convicted of “extremism” and was serving a 19-year sentence in a remote Arctic prison colony, in very difficult conditions. His multiple trials were denounced as political and as a strategy to punish him for his opposition to the president. Vladimir Putin.

The Russian president was informed of his death, according to his spokesman Dmitri Peskov.

The opposition’s team assured that it had not been informed of his death.

“We still have no confirmation on this,” Navalny’s spokesperson, Kira Yarmish, declared on social media, adding that “Alexei’s lawyer is currently on his way to Jarp,” the Arctic city where the prison is located. “As soon as we have some information, we will report on it,” she noted.

In the hearings of his trials in which they participated by video in recent months, this corpulent man with blue eyes looked thin and emaciated. He had several health problems related to a hunger strike and the poisoning he suffered in 2020, which he narrowly survived.

Demonstrations

Jail did not undermine his resolve. In the last hearings and in the last messages transmitted on social networks through his lawyers, he did not stop criticizing Putin, whom he described as a “grandfather hiding in a bunker,” since the Russian president barely appears. in public.

In his trial for “extremism,” he criticized “the most stupid and senseless war of the 21st century,” speaking of the Russian offensive in Ukraine.

In his online messages, he joked about the humiliations that the prison services made him suffer.

On February 1, his team sent a message to social networks in which he called for demonstrations in Russia ahead of the presidential elections from March 15 to 17, which will probably endorse Putin in the power.

The victory of the Russian president seems to be a fact, since the opponents, of whom Navalny was the most prominent, they are either imprisoned or in exile. And repression has intensified since the beginning of Moscow’s assault on Ukraine, on February 24, 2022.