Alexei Navalny died of natural causes: Russian spy chief
MOSCOW/WARSAW: Russia’s spymaster said on Tuesday that opposition leader Alexei Navalny died of natural causes, a statement that appeared to reflect the Kremlin’s efforts to assuage international outrage over the death of President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe.
Sergei Naryshkin, the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, the top spy agency known under its Russian acronym SVR, made the statement in an interview broadcast by Russian state television. He didn’t name the cause of Navalny’s death in a remote Arctic penal colony or give any other details.
“Sooner or later life ends and people die,” he said. “Navalny has died of natural causes.”
Navalny died on February 16 at Penal Colony No. 3 in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,900 kilometres northeast of Moscow where he was serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism.
Russian authorities still haven’t announced the cause of his death at age 47 and many Western leaders blamed it on Putin, an accusation the Kremlin angrily rejected.
Yulia Navalnaya calls for election day protest
The widow of Alexei Navalny called on Wednesday for Russians to stage an election day protest against President Vladimir Putin by forming long queues outside voting stations.
Yulia Navalnaya has pledged to continue her husband’s work and opposition to the Kremlin following Navalny’s death last month in an Arctic prison colony.
In a video on YouTube, Navalnaya backed an initiative to try to overload polling stations in this month’s nationwide poll, in which Putin is set to secure another six-year term as president.
“We need to go to the polling station on one day at one time: 17 March at 12:00. What to do next? You can choose. You can vote for any candidate except Putin. You can spoil your ballot. You can write ‘Navalny’ in big letters,” Yulia Navalnaya said in a video on YouTube.
She called the March 15-17 vote a “sham” and said it was obvious Putin would “draw up any result he wants”.