Russian activist and Putin critic Alexei Navalny dies in prison

The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in jail, the country’s prison service has said, in what is likely to be seen as a political assassination attributable to Vladimir Putin.

Navalny, 47, one of Putin’s most visible and persistent critics, was being held in a jail about 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle where he had been sentenced to 19 years under a “special regime”. In a video from the prison in January, he had appeared gaunt with his head shaved.

In a statement, the federal penitentiary service for the region where Navalny was incarcerated said that he had “felt unwell after a walk and almost immediately lost consciousness”.

“All necessary resuscitation measures were carried out but did not yield positive results,” the statement read. “The paramedics confirmed the death of the convict.”

The cause of death had not been established, the penitentiary service said. Navalny had previously been treated in hospital after complaining of malnourishment and other ailments due to mistreatment in the prison.

A lawyer for Navalny did not immediately confirm reports of his death, telling the Novaya Gazeta newspaper that Navalny’s family had requested him not to comment on the reports.

“Alexei had a lawyer at his place on Wednesday,” Leonid Solovyev, his laywer, told Novaya Gazeta. “Everything was normal then.”

A close aide also did not confirm the reports of Navalny’s death.

The Kremlin said it had no information on the cause of death. Putin had been informed of Navalny’s death, his spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said.

In early December Navalny had disappeared from a prison in the Vladimir region, where he was serving a 30-year sentence on extremism and fraud charges that he had called political retribution for leading the anti-Kremlin opposition of the 2010s. He did not expect to be released during Putin’s lifetime.

A former nationalist politician, Navalny helped foment the 2011-12 protests in Russia by campaigning against election fraud and government corruption, investigating Putin’s inner circle and sharing the findings in slick videos that garnered hundreds of millions of views.

The high-water mark in his political career came in 2013, when he won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral contest that few believed was free or fair. He remained a thorn in the side of the Kremlin for years, identifying a palace built on the Black Sea for Putin’s personal use, mansions and yachts used by the ex-president Dmitry Medvedev, and a sex worker who linked a top foreign policy official with a well-known oligarch.

In 2020, Navalny fell into a coma after a suspected poisoning using novichok by Russia’s FSB security service and was evacuated to Germany for treatment. He recovered and returned to Russia in January 2021, where he was arrested on a parole violation charge and sentenced to his first of several jail terms that would total more than 30 years behind bars.

Putin has recently launched a presidential campaign for his fifth term in office. He is already the longest-serving Russian leader since Joseph Stalin and could surpass him if he runs again for office in 2030, a possibility since he had the constitutional rules on term limits rewritten in 2020.

theguardian.com