Enemy No. 1: Alexei Navalny, President Putin’s worst critic, dies in Russian jail
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Prominent Russian leader Alexei Navalny, who was in jail since January 2021 because of his trenchant opposition to President Vladimir Putin, died on Friday, the media reported.
His death came a month before the 71-year-old President Putin’s “election” for the fifth term. Russia is scheduled to go to the polls from March 15 to 17.
He was thrown behind bars when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. Before his arrest, he campaigned against official corruption and organized major anti-Kremlin protests.
Navalny, 47, had since received three prison terms and spent months in isolation in Penal Colony No. 6 for alleged minor infractions. He rejected all charges against him as politically motivated.
On Friday, he was declared dead by the prison service of the Yamalo-Nenets region, where he had been serving his sentence.
In a statement published on its website, the Federal Penitentiary Service of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District said that Navalny “felt unwell” after a walk on Friday, and “almost immediately lost consciousness.”
The medical staff were unable to resuscitate him, it said, adding the reason for death was being ascertained.
The Kremlin claimed that it had no information on the cause of Navalny’s death, and added that the prison service was checking facts. Russia had launched a procedural probe into the death.
Russian journalist and Nobel Peace Prize awardee Dmitry Muratov claimed Navalny was “murdered”, and said that he believed prison conditions had led to his demise.
Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader and the worst Putin critic in the country, was sentenced to 19 more years in prison by a Russian court in August last year on extremism charges.
The prison colony, where he was serving his sentence, is notorious for severe conditions in the Yamalo-Nenets region, about 1,900 km northeast of Moscow.
