Alexei Navalny
The 47-year-old opposition leader was being held in prison about 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle
Fri February 16, 2024 11.30 GMT
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in prison, according to the country's prison authorities, in what could likely be viewed as a political assassination attempt attributed to Vladimir Putin.
Navalny, 47, one of Putin's most visible and persistent critics, was being held in a prison about 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle, where he had been sentenced to 19 years under a “special regime.” In a video from prison in January, he appeared gaunt and with a shaved head.
The Kremlin said there was no information on the cause of death.
He disappeared in early December from a prison in the Vladimir region where he was serving a 30-year sentence on extremism and fraud charges that he said was political retaliation for leading the anti-Kremlin opposition in the 2010s. He did not expect to be released during Putin's lifetime.
A former nationalist politician, Navalny helped fuel Russia's 2011-2012 protests by campaigning against election fraud and government corruption, investigating Putin's inner circle and sharing the results in sophisticated videos that have been viewed hundreds of millions of times.
The peak of his political career came in 2013, when he won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral race that few believed was free or fair. He remained a thorn in the Kremlin's side for years, identifying a Black Sea palace built for Putin's personal use, villas and yachts used by former President Dmitry Medvedev and a sex worker who married a senior foreign policy official with him a well-known oligarch brought this into connection.
In 2020, Navalny fell into a coma after a suspected Novichok poisoning by the Russian secret service FSB and was evacuated to Germany for treatment. He recovered and returned to Russia in January 2021, where he was arrested for violating his probation and sentenced to his first of several prison terms that would total more than 30 years behind bars.
Putin recently launched a presidential campaign for his fifth term. He is already the longest-serving Russian leader since Joseph Stalin and could surpass him if he runs for office again in 2030, which is entirely possible since he had the constitutional provisions on term limits rewritten in 2020.
More details coming soon…
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