The United Kingdom announced sanctions on Wednesday against six officials at the penal colony in the Russian Arctic where opponent Alexei Navalny died, calling for the “immediate” return of his remains to his family and the conduct of a “transparent” investigation.
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The director of Colony No. 3 in the town of Kharp, Vadim Kalinin, and five deputies are subject to travel bans in the United Kingdom and all assets on British soil will be frozen, the Foreign Ministry said in a press release.
“Those responsible for the brutal treatment of Navalny should have no illusions: we will hold them to account,” chief diplomat David Cameron said in the press release.
“Russian authorities clearly saw Navalny as a threat and repeatedly tried to silence him,” he added.
“No one should doubt the repressive nature of the Russian system,” stressed Mr Cameron, who wants to use his presence at a G20 meeting in Brazil to “directly” denounce “Russian aggression” in Ukraine to his counterpart, the Russian Sergei to denounce Lavrov.
The United Kingdom, which summoned a senior Russian diplomat on Friday, called for the “immediate handover of Mr. Navalny's body to his family” and the opening of “a full and transparent investigation” into the death of the opponent in the Kremlin.
According to the Russian prison administration, Mr. Navalny died on February 16 in Penal Colony No. 3 in the town of Charp, a high-security prison where he had been imprisoned since late 2023, serving a 19-year sentence for “extremism.”
According to the deceased's team, Russian investigators said on Monday that they would return his remains for at least 14 days to conduct an “expertise.”
After miraculously surviving a poisoning in August 2020 and subsequently being treated in Germany, Alexei Navalny, who became popular through his investigations into the corruption of Russian power, decided to return to Russia in January 2021.
He was immediately arrested and gradually sentenced to increasingly harsh sentences in increasingly difficult prison conditions, often locked in the cold of an isolation cell.