Alexey Navalny

Vladimir Putin has the brain of an elephant. He does not forget injuries. Words of criticism against him or his action are like signing one’s death warrant. Alexey Navalny the mprisoned Russian opposition leader has died, state media reported, citing the prison service of the region where he had been serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism.

According to a report by Al Jazeera, there was no immediate confirmation of the 47-year-old’s death from his team. Navalny spokesperson Kira Yarmysh said his lawyer was travelling to the remote prison colony north of the Arctic Circle.

In a statement on Friday quoted by state media, the federal prison service said Navalny “felt bad” after a walk and lost consciousness “almost immediately”.

ljazeera reports further: “Navalny was in the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region, about 1,900km (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow, where he was transferred in December.

The “special regime” or “Polar Wolf” colony is among the harshest in Russia’s prison system and is located in a place with severe winters. Most inmates have been convicted of grave crimes. Kharp is about 100km (60 miles) from Vorkuta, whose coal mines were part of the Soviet gulag camp system.

“Medical staff arrived immediately, and an ambulance team was called,” the prison service said. “Resuscitation measures were carried out, which did not yield positive results. Paramedics confirmed the death of the convict. The causes of death are being established.”

Navalny aide Leonid Volkov posted 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.”

Lyudmila Navalnaya, Navalny’s mother, was quoted by Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta as saying that her son had been “alive, healthy and happy” when she last saw him on February 12.
“I don’t want to hear any condolences. We saw him in prison on the [February] 12, in a meeting. He was alive, healthy and happy,” she wrote in a Facebook post on Friday.

Navalny’s wife, Yulia, who held a press conference at the Munich Security Summit attended by global leaders and officials, said that Putin and his associated should not go unpunished if the news of her husband’s death was confirmed.

She called on the international community to come together and fight against the “horrific regime” in Moscow.
Many world leaders put out statements saying Navalny “paid for his courage with his life” and that they hold Russia responsible for his imprisonment and death for standing up to Putin.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reacted to the news and said it was “obvious” that Navalny had been killed by Putin.

“Like thousands of others who have been tortured,” he said, adding that this demonstrates why the Russian leader must be made to “lose everything and held accountable for his actions”.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also said that Navalny’s death “only underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built. Russia is responsible for this.”

However, Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry, wrote on her Telegram channel that the West has already arrived at “conclusions” without forensic evidence.

She said the immediate reactions “in the form of direct accusations against Russia are self-revealing”.
Reporting from Moscow, Al Jazeera’s Yulia Shapovalova said that the prison service reported Navalny’s death in colony number 3 which is “a very, very harsh prison”, adding that “his health has been pretty bad lately”.

The official cause of death has not been announced and an investigation is under way, Shapovalova reported.
Navalny, a fierce critic of Putin, has been imprisoned since January 2021 when he returned to Moscow after recovering in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin.

His death less than a month before Russia holds elections that will give Putin another six years in power drew renewed criticism of the leader who has cracked down on all opposition at home.

Before Navalny was arrested, he led campaigns against corruption and organised major anti-Kremlin protests.
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Navalny strongly condemned the war in social media posts from prison and during his court appearances.

Less than a month after the start of the war, he was sentenced to an additional nine-year term for embezzlement and contempt of court in a case he and his supporters rejected as fabricated. The investigators immediately launched a new investigation and in August 2023, Navalny was convicted on charges of extremism and sentenced to 19 years in prison.

After the verdict, Navalny, according to Al Jazeera,  said he understood that he was “serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime”.