The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Navalny’s mother searches for activist’s body
Spokesperson says the Russian opposition leader was ‘murdered.’
Alexei Navalny’s spokesperson confirmed Saturday that the Russian opposition leader had died at a remote Arctic penal colony, saying he was “murdered,” but it was unclear where his body was as his family and friends searched for answers.
Navalny’s death at age 47 has deprived the Russian opposition of its most well-known and inspiring politician less than a month before an election that would give President Vladimir Putin another six years in power.
Although neither the imprisoned anti-corruption crusader nor other Kremlin critics were in position to challenge Putin for the presidency, the loss of Navalny was a crushing blow to Russians who had pinned their future on Putin’s seemingly indefatigable foe. It also prompted questions about what killed him.
Prison officials told his mother when she arrived at the penal colony Saturday that her son had perished from “sudden death syndrome,” Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
A prison employee said the body was taken to nearby Salekhard for a postmortem, Navalny spokesperson Kira Yarmysh said. The morgue denied via phone Saturday that the body was there.
Salekhard’s Investigative Committee told a lawyer that the cause of Navalny’s death had not been established, saying the body would not be released until investigations were complete, with results released next week, Yarmysh said.
“It’s obvious that they are lying and doing everything they can to avoid handing over the body,” Yarmysh wrote on X.
Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service reported that Navalny felt sick after a walk Friday and fell unconscious at the penal colony in Kharp, about 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow. An ambulance arrived, but he couldn’t be revived, the service said.
Maria Pevchikh, head of the board of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said the opposition leader would “live on forever in millions of hearts.”
“Navalny was murdered. We still don’t know how we’ll keep on living, but together, we’ll think of something,” she wrote on X.
Meanwhile, arrests continued Saturday as Russians came to lay flowers in memory of Navalny at memorials to the victims of Soviet-era purges. OVD-Info, a group that monitors political repression in Russia, said Saturday that more than 273 people had been detained at memorial events since Navalny’s death.
Across the country, police cordoned off some memorials, and officers were taking pictures of those who came and writing down their personal data.
“After the murder of Alexei Navalny, it’s absurd to perceive Putin as the supposedly legitimate head of the Russian state,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Saturday. “He is a thug who maintains power through corruption and violence.”
President Joe Biden said Friday “there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something Putin and his thugs did.”
Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin. He was convicted three times and received a sentence of 19 years for extremism.