Jailed Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny has died in prison today, according to the prison service in the Yamalo-Nenets region of Siberia where he was being held.
Officials at the “Polar Wolf” prison colony said that Navalny, 47, felt ill and lost consciousness after going for a walk Friday afternoon, and was pronounced dead at 2:00 p.m. local time. “All the necessary resuscitation measures were carried out, but they failed to achieve a positive result,” prison officials claimed. Navalny leaves behind a wife and two children.
Popular in the West as an opposition figure to Russian President Vladimir Putin who called out corruption in the Russian government, Navalny, a former lawyer, was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison for corruption and extremism. He fled to Germany after an alleged poisoning attempt, but returned to Russia in 2021 and was subsequently jailed.
Navalny’s widow, Yulia, is skeptical of claims of her husband’s death, but says that if he is dead, she blames Putin and his government.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed a common Western sentiment when he said at the Munich Security Conference, currently underway, “His death in a Russian prison and the fixation and fear of one man only underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built. Russia is responsible for this.”
