1 of 2 Navalny with his wife before returning to Russia and being arrested after recovering from Novichok poisoning Photo: GETTY IMAGES via BBC Navalny with his wife before returning to Russia and being arrested, after recovering from Novichok poisoning Photo: GETTY IMAGES via BBC
According to the activist team, the mother of Vladimir Putin opponent Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison, was unable to recover her son's body.
His adviser Kira Yarmysch said the activist's mother, Lyudmila, had been told that the body would only be released after an autopsy.
Allies accuse the Russian government of hiding Navalny's body to “cover up traces” of a murder and are calling for the body's immediate release.
Navalny's team believes that the anticorruption activist was murdered on the orders of President Vladimir Putin. Around 300 people were arrested in Russia for paying tribute to the activist, according to a human rights group.
Governments of some countries not allied with Russia say the blame for the 47yearold's sudden death lies with the Russian government. International relations ministers from the G7 group of rich countries called on Russia to “urgently clarify” the circumstances of the death.
Putin has made no public comments since Russia's prison service announced Friday that Navalny fell ill and died in the remote IK3 prison in the Arctic Circle.
Immediately afterwards, the Kremlin said it was aware of this and that the president had been informed.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said it rejected “biased and unrealistic” assessments of the cause of death at a meeting with British officials on Saturday.
According to Russian reports, Alexei Navalny took a short walk in the prison where he was serving his sentence in Siberia and said he felt unwell, fainted and never regained consciousness.
On Saturday, Navalny's family confirmed that the political activist died on Friday, February 16, at 2:17 p.m. local time (6:17 a.m. Brazil time). The cause of death has not yet been confirmed.
Navalny was 47 years old. His health deteriorated during his three years in prison, during which he complained of denial of medical treatment and spent nearly 300 days in solitary confinement.
At the time of his arrest in January 2021, he had been recovering for months from an attack with Novichok, a dangerous chemical weapon that attacks the nervous system.
Still, he appeared to be in relatively good spirits and health in a court video the day before his death.
The weight of international opinion does not seem to agree with the Russian version of what happened to him in IK3, or “Polar Wolf” one of Russia’s northernmost and harshest prisons.
French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné said that Navalny had paid “with his life” for his “resistance to Russian oppression,” adding that his death was a reminder of “the reality of Vladimir Putin's regime.”
American President Joe Biden said that “Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death.”
Navalny's mother Lyudmila said in a Facebook post quoted by Novaya Gazeta newspaper that her son was “alive, healthy and happy” when she last saw him on February 12.
His wife Julia said simply: “We can’t really believe Putin and his government.”
What Russian reports say about his death
Russian news agency Interfax reported that doctors spent half an hour trying to revive him.
According to prison authorities, doctors were there within two minutes and an ambulance was available within six minutes.
The staterun RT network banned in many Western countries raised the possibility that he died of a blood clot. Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, said: “Doctors have to find out somehow.”
According to a statement from Navalny's spokesman released on Saturday, his body is with official investigators.
His family demanded that the body be returned.
VIDEO: Who was Alexei Navalny, Putin's main opponent, who died in prison?
Who was Alexei Navalny, Putin's main opponent, who died in prison?
There had been assassination attempts against Navalny before, and he was aware that there were people who wanted him dead.
In December 2020, Navalny accused agents of the Russian secret service FSB of poisoning him.
He became seriously ill and collapsed on a plane leaving Tomsk, Siberia, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing in Omsk while the crew sought medical attention.
European laboratories later confirmed that Novichok, the Russianmade nerve agent that was also used to poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, Britain, was found in his body.
In an extraordinary phone call that Navalny recorded, he got an FSB agent to admit that Navalny had been injected with the chemical weapon into his underwear at a hotel in Tomsk.
Agent Konstantin Kudryavtsev claimed that Navalny would have died if the plane had not made an emergency landing.
After receiving treatment in Germany, Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021 and was immediately arrested.
2 of 2 Photo: GETTY IMAGES via BBC Photo: GETTY IMAGES via BBC
Navalny's health deteriorated in prison
In the months following Navalny's arrest on “extremism” and “corruption” charges, several warnings were issued by his allies and lawyers suggesting that his condition was deteriorating, that he was seriously ill or that his whereabouts were unknown.
He complained of severe back pain, fever and numbness in his legs. He spoke of sleep deprivation due to hourly “checks” by guards who shone flashlights in his eyes, and that he had not yet recovered from the severe effects of the nerve agent attack.
Deaths of Putin opponents
Navalny's history of activism made him a major threat to Putin's power.
For more than a decade he exposed corruption within the regime and his video investigations have been viewed hundreds of millions of times online.
In 2021, his campaign team produced a viral video to expose Putin's construction of a $1 billion palace on the Black Sea, financed by “the largest bribe in history.”
Navalny claimed it was evidence of Vladimir Putin's “feudal” regime based on favoritism and theft from the Russian people. The video was viewed almost 130 million times in three years.
Navalny was already in custody when the video was released. And now he's dead.
He is the latest name in a long list of people who have suffered from what some commentators have described as “sudden Russian death syndrome.”
This includes not only outspoken critics of Putin, but also alliesturnedthreats like mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and those who have simply insulted the Kremlin.
They include Pavel Antov, 65, a “sausage magnate” and member of Putin's United Russia party, who fell from a hotel window in India in 2022, shortly after denying he was the source of a warcritical WhatsApp message in Ukraine.
A friend on the same trip, Vladimir Budanov, also died in his hotel.
Months earlier, in September, the head of Russian oil giant Lukoil, Ravil Maganov, apparently fell from a hospital window in Moscow. He also criticized the war in Ukraine. Just three years earlier, he had received a lifetime achievement award from the Russian president.
Boris Nemtsov, a charismatic opposition leader and deputy prime minister in the 1990s, was shot four times in the back in front of the Kremlin in 2015.
Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who wrote books about the Russian police state under Vladimir Putin, was murdered by hired assassins in 2006. According to a judge during their trial, they were paid by “an unknown person.”
One of her murderers later fought in Ukraine and has now been forgiven.
Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent and Putin critic, died in London in 2006, three weeks after drinking a cup of tea that contained the deadly radioactive element polonium210.
A British investigation found that Litvinenko was poisoned by FSB agents Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, who were acting on orders “probably” approved by Putin.
The Kremlin does not comment on these deaths or deny involvement.
U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan called Navalny's death on Friday a “terrible tragedy” and the latest example of the Russian government's “long and sordid history of harming its opponents.”
“It raises real and obvious questions about what happened here.”
His death, regardless of the cause, occurred while Navalny was detained in state custody.
And it deprives those who oppose Vladimir Putin's government of an internationally recognized alternative and is perhaps the biggest warning to those seeking to challenge the Kremlin.
VIDEO: Protesters arrested in Russia after Navalny's death
Protesters arrested in Russia after Navalny's death