Alexei Navalny’s spokesperson confirmed Saturday that the Russian opposition leader had died at a remote Arctic penal colony and said he was “murdered,” but it is unclear where his body is.
Navalny’s death at age 47 has deprived the Russian opposition of its most well-known politician less than a month before an election that will 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 hopes on Putin’s seemingly indefatigable foe.
It also prompted questions about what killed him.
An official note handed to Navalny’s mother stated that he died at 2:17 p.m. local time Friday, according to Navalny spokesperson Kira Yarmysh. Prison officials told his mother when she arrived at his former penal colony Saturday that her son had perished due to “sudden death syndrome,” Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Russian opposition leader and vocal Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny died in prison, according to Russian officials. About That producer Lauren Bird examines the moments that made him a famous anti-corruption activist and political adversary of Vladimir Putin.
A prison colony employee said that Navalny’s body was taken to the nearby city of Salekhard as part of a post-mortem investigation, Yarmysh said.
When Navalny’s mother and one of the late politician’s lawyers visited the morgue in Salekhard, it was closed, Navalny’s team said in a post on its Telegram channel. The lawyer called the morgue and was told that Navalny’s body was not there, his team said.
Another of Navalny’s lawyers went to Salekhard’s Investigative Committee and was told that the cause of Navalny’s death has not yet been established and that new investigations are being done with the results to be released next week, Yarmysh said.
Russia’s Investigative Committee informed Navalny’s team that the body would not be handed over to his relatives until those investigations were completed, she said.
“It’s obvious that they are lying and doing everything they can to avoid handing over the body,” Yarmysh wrote on X, adding that his team “demand that Alexei Navalny’s body be handed over to his family immediately.”
Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service reported that Navalny felt sick after a walk and became unconscious at the penal colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,900 kilometres northeast of Moscow. An ambulance arrived, but he couldn’t be revived. The cause of death is still “being established,” it said.
‘He spoke the truth’
Maria Pevchikh, head of the board of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said that 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.
Memorial items laid Friday were removed overnight, but people continued trickling in with flowers on Saturday.
In central Moscow, policemen looked on as 36-year-old Vladimir Nikitin laid a carnation at the Solovetsky Stone, a monument to the victims of Soviet repression that sits in the shadow of the former KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square.
When asked for an interview by Reuters, Nikitin asked to speak in the underpass that threads beneath Lubyanka Square, citing the fear of detention.
“Navalny’s death is terrible. Hopes have been smashed,” Nikitin said.
“Navalny was a very serious man, a brave man and now he is no longer with us. He spoke the truth — and that was very dangerous because some people didn’t like the truth.”
In Daniel Roher’s documentary, Alexei Navalny told his supporters his death would be a sign of the opposition’s strength. The Canadian director told The National’s Ian Hanomansing Navalny would want his supporters not to mourn his death, but fight Russian President Vladimir Putin.
At the Wall of Sorrow memorial on the avenue named after Soviet physicist and dissent Andrei Sakharov, some Russians laid flowers beside pictures of Navalny. One message read: “We will not forget, nor shall we forgive.”
“I came because I have grief,” said Arkady, who declined to give his second name. “He was a man who I respected. I had hopes that he was someone who could do something in the future.”
More than 10 people were detained at a memorial in St. Petersburg, including a priest who came to conduct a service for Navalny.
In other cities across the country, police cordoned off some of the memorials and officers took pictures and recorded the personal data of those who visited them.
U.K. weighing ‘action’ against those responsible
Leaders from around the world also expressed their outrage and concern about Navalny’s death.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking Saturday at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, called out Russian President Vladimir Putin in Navalny’s death.
“After the murder of Alexei Navalny, it’s absurd to perceive Putin as the supposedly legitimate head of the Russian state. He is a thug who maintains power through corruption and violence,” Zelenskyy said.
“Just yesterday he tried to send us all a clear message — as the Munich Security Conference opened, Putin murdered another opposition leader,” he said.
U.K. Foreign Secretary David Cameron said Saturday that Britain “will be taking action” against the Russians responsible for the death of Navalny.
Speaking to broadcasters in Munich, Cameron said “there should be consequences” for “appalling human rights outrages like this.” He said Britain would “look at whether there are individual people that are responsible and whether there are individual measures and actions we can take.”
Cameron did not say whether the response would consist of financial sanctions or other measures.
U.S. President Joe Biden Friday said Washington doesn’t know exactly what happened, “but there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something Putin and his thugs did.”
Kremlin rejects accusations
The Kremlin bristled Friday at the outpouring of anger from world leaders, with Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, saying the statements are “unacceptable” and “outrageous,” and noting that medics haven’t issued their verdict on the cause of Navalny’s death.
Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow to face certain arrest after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin. He was later convicted three times, saying each case was politically motivated, and received a sentence of 19 years for extremism.
After the last verdict, Navalny said he understood he was “serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime.”
Exiled Belarusian leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya was with Alexei Navalny’s wife when she heard the first reports of his death. Tsikhanouskaya spoke to The National’s Ian Hanomansing about the impact of Navalny’s death for the family and the opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The news of Navalny’s death comes less than a month before an election that will give Putin another six years in power.
It shows “that the sentence in Russia now for opposition is not merely imprisonment, but death,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, a former British ambassador to Belarus and senior fellow for Russia & Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
Hours after Navalny’s death was reported, his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, made a dramatic appearance at the Munich conference.
She said she was unsure if she could believe the news from official Russian sources, “but if this is true, I want Putin and everyone around Putin, Putin’s friends, his government to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family and to my husband.”