Charismatic anti-corruption activist and number one enemy of Vladimir Putin, Alexeï Navalny, 47, is dead, the Russian prison administration announced on Friday February 16. The opponent’s lawyer is going there, announced Kira Yarmysh, his spokesperson, who emphasizes that she “does not yet have confirmation”.
He was serving a nineteen-year prison sentence for extremism. He was arrested in January 2021 upon his return to Russia after convalescing in Germany for a poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin.
“On February 16, 2024, in penitentiary center number 3, prisoner A. A. Navalny felt unwell after a walk and almost immediately lost consciousness. Medical personnel from the facility arrived immediately and an emergency rescue team was called. All necessary resuscitation measures were taken, without results. Emergency workers noted the death of the convict, the causes of death are being established,” the Federal Service for the Execution of Sentences (FSIN) of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District said in a statement. the Great Russian North. Vladimir Putin, the President of the Russian Federation, was informed of this, according to his spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov.
The 47-year-old activist disappeared in early December from the penal colony in Vladimir Oblast, 250 kilometers east of Moscow, where he had been held until then. His relatives had not heard from him for several days, before the administration revealed his transfer to a remote penal colony in the far north of Russia. He was serving his sentence in very difficult conditions.
The last news of him had been given by the members of his team in exile, during the past week. Alexeï Navalny was released from prison on February 11, where he was sent for the twenty-sixth time of his detention, and returned to solitary confinement three days later, on February 14, without the reasons for this new punishment being given .
During various hearings in trials in which he participated by videoconference in recent months, this tall blond with piercing blue eyes appeared thin and aged. He suffered health problems linked to a hunger strike and the poisoning he suffered in 2020, which he miraculously survived. His multiple trials had been widely denounced as political and a way of punishing him for his opposition to Vladimir Putin.
