Aleksei A. Navalny, an anticorruption activist who for greater than a decade led the political opposition in President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia whereas enduring arrests, assaults and a near-fatal poisoning, died Friday in a Russian jail, in line with Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service. He was 47.
The jail authorities mentioned that Mr. Navalny misplaced consciousness on Friday after taking a stroll within the Arctic penal colony the place he was moved late final yr. He was final seen on Thursday, when he had appeared in a court docket listening to through video hyperlink, smiling behind the bars of a cell and making jokes.
Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s press secretary, mentioned in a reside broadcast Friday that Navalny’s advisers weren’t but capable of problem an official affirmation of his dying however believed that he had perished. And whereas acknowledging that the US didn’t know the main points of what occurred, President Biden at a White Home information convention mentioned, “Make no mistake: Putin is answerable for Navalny’s dying.”
Mr. Navalny had been serving a number of sentences that will almost definitely have saved him in jail till no less than 2031 on expenses that his supporters say have been largely fabricated in an effort to muzzle him. Regardless of more and more harsh situations, together with repeated stints in solitary confinement, he maintained a presence on social media, whereas members of his group continued to publish investigations into Russia’s corrupt elite from exile.
Mr. Navalny was given a three-and-a-half-year jail sentence in February 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany, the place he had been recovering from being poisoned the earlier August. In March 2022, he acquired a nine-year sentence for embezzlement and fraud in a trial that international observers denounced as “politically motivated” and a “sham.” And in August 2023, he was sentenced to 19 years in jail for “extremism.”
