Alexei Navalny is a Russian lawyer and politician (archive).
New Delhi:
Imprisoned Russian political leader Alexei Navalny, a fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin, has been found dead in Russia’s Yamaliya federal prison, where he was serving a sentence.
The prison said: “Navalny felt very bad after the walk and almost immediately lost consciousness. Medical staff arrived immediately and the ambulance team was called. Resuscitation was carried out, but no positive results were obtained. Paramedics confirmed death. The cause is being determined .”
Mr Navalny is serving a 19-year sentence in an Arctic prison colony, plus five other sentences for a total of nearly 12 years. The latest was delivered last August on charges of extremism.
Navalny, who rose to prominence more than a decade ago by accusing Putin of corruption, said the charges against him were trumped up to put him in jail and away from active politics.
Much remains unknown about the 47-year-old lawyer’s court case and detention, prompting criticism in the West that the Russian government is cracking down on critics.
Alexei Navalny has been in jail since February 2021, recovering from an assassination attempt the previous year. In August 2020, he was poisoned by a nerve agent on a flight to Moscow.
He had to be transferred from a Russian hospital to a hospital in Berlin for treatment.
After recovering five months later, Navalny returned to Russia and was immediately arrested.
He was jailed for two and a half years. A Russian court said he violated the terms of his 2014 suspended sentence; authorities accused him of failing to report regularly to them in 2020.
His legal team noted that the claim was ridiculous because Navalny spent a year in Germany recovering from an attempt on his life. He was also in a coma during this time.
The 2014 verdict stemmed from allegations of corruption at the Russian subsidiary of a French cosmetics company. The ruling was criticized by the European Court of Human Rights, which said the Russian government must pay compensation, but Russia’s Supreme Court upheld the verdict.
He was sent to a penal colony in the Vladimir region of central Russia, 230 kilometers east of Moscow.
In March 2022, his sentence was increased by nine years and he was transferred to a new prison.
Last August, he was sentenced to 19 years in prison for forming and financing extremist organizations and activities. That was months before Putin began his re-election campaign.
In fact, last December, he was reported to have “disappeared” from prison.
Days later, he showed up at the Arctic prison nicknamed “The Polar Wolf,” where he eventually died.
The prison changes – as secretive as is often the case in Russia – came after a court ruled that he should be transferred to a harsher facility, which typically houses particularly dangerous prisoners.
