Putin critic dies in prison
Alexei Navalny’s wife blames his death to the president.
MOSCOW, Russia (AFP) — Alexei Navalny, the most prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, died on Friday in an Arctic prison, Kremlin officials said.
The 47-year-old’s death was announced by Russia’s federal penitentiary service, which said Navalny “felt bad after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness.”
Russian news agencies reported that medics from a local hospital arrived within minutes and spent more than “half an hour” trying to resuscitate him.
Navalny’s wife, Yulia, said she held Putin personally responsible for her husband’s death and called on the international community to “unite and defeat this evil, terrifying regime.”
Navalny was Russia’s most prominent opposition leader and won a huge following as he campaigned against corruption under Putin.
“Alexei Navalny was tortured and tormented for three years... Murder was added to Alexei Navalny’s sentence,” Russian Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov was quoted as saying by the independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper.
Navalny, who led street protests for more than a decade, became a household name through his exposes of official corruption on his YouTube channel. The posts racked up millions of views and brought tens of thousands of Russians to the streets, despite harsh anti-protest laws.
He was jailed in early 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany, where he was recuperating from a near-fatal poisoning attack with Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent.
In a string of cases, he was sentenced to 19 years in prison on charges widely condemned by independent rights groups and in the West as retribution for his opposition to the Kremlin.
From behind bars he was a staunch opponent of Moscow’s full-scale military offensive against Ukraine, and watched on, helplessly, as the Kremlin dismantled his organization and locked up his allies.