Vladimir Putin’s main opponent died in prison
Vladimir Putin’s main opponent died in prison, and the spotlight is once again on the Russian regime.
The Vladimir Putin’s main opponent, Alexei Navalny, died suddenly on Friday, 16 February, in the Arctic prison where he had been held since last December.
This was reported by the prison service of the Yamalo-Nenets region, where he was serving his sentence.
According to the official report, the Vladimir Putin’s main opponent underwent the necessary resuscitation procedures, but to no avail.
Emergency doctors pronounced him dead. The cause of death is being established. This is part of the official statement on the death of 47-year-old Navalny.
The death certificate says that the prisoner Navalny A.A. died on February 16, 2024, in the penitentiary centre No. 3 and felt unwell after a walk.
The Vladimir Putin’s main opponent was serving a 19-year prison sentence for “extremism”.
Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said minutes after the news broke that the cause of death was unknown.
Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmish, said that his supporters had not yet received confirmation of his death and that his lawyer would be leaving shortly for Yamalo-Nenets.
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Vladimir Putin’s main opponent: fierce adversary to the Russian president
But who was Alexei Navalny, the main opponent of Vladimir Putin, who challenged the Russian president?
Conjectures emerge that he was poisoned, imprisoned and died in prison.
Last December, Navalny was transferred from a prison in the Vladimir region, less than 200 kilometres from Moscow, to a prison in the Arctic Circle near the Ural mountain range.
The town of Jarp, which has a population of about 6,000, is almost 2,000 kilometres from Moscow, or about 45 hours by train from the Russian capital.
Jarp is less than 50 kilometres from Salekhard, the administrative capital of the territory, which is larger than France, but is home to only half a million inhabitants.
According to one of his collaborators in exile, Ivan Zhdanov, the prison is named after the “Polar Wolf” and is considered one of the prisons furthest from civilisation in all of Russia.
Vladimir Putin’s main opponent was a tough guy, a fighter against the corruption of Russian elites, Navalny was determined to continue confronting the Kremlin after surviving a poisoning.
Return despite the risks
The lawyer decided to return to Moscow in January 2021, where he was detained as soon as he arrived at the airport.
His return to Russia seemed almost impossible in August 2020, when the charismatic opposition activist arrived in Berlin on board a medical plane.
A few days earlier, he had suddenly fallen ill on a plane in Siberia and was admitted to a Russian hospital for 48 hours.
After three weeks in a coma, three European laboratories concluded that Russia’s main opposition leader was the victim of a neurotoxic substance from the Novichok group, created in the Soviet era for military purposes.
In mid-December 2020, Vladimir Putin’s main opponent released a telephone conversation in which he unmasked one of the agents of the Russian security services (FSB) so that he would admit that they wanted to poison him.
According to the opposition leader, the poisoning was orchestrated on the direct orders of President Vladimir Putin, his sworn enemy, who never spoke his name. The president rejected all the accusations.
A lot of rumors.
In 2019, the lawyer had already been transferred to a hospital from the prison where he was serving a sentence after an administrative arrest, for what his team said was a suspected poisoning, suffering from a strange swelling of the eyelids and multiple abscesses in the neck, back, torso and elbows.
Doctors then noted that he suffered a severe allergic reaction and released him to return to prison the next day.
Earlier, in 2017, he was attacked by several men who threw antiseptic in his face, causing damage to one eye.
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Russia’s arrests and detention of Navalny in 2012 and 2014 were politically motivated and violated his human rights, a ruling Moscow called questionable.
Last December 7, the oppositionist called from jail to vote against Putin in the March 17, 2024 elections.
Vladimir Putin’s main opponent also announced the launch of a website (neputin.org) calling on Russians to support any presidential candidate except Putin.
