Ben Pawlowski
ALEXEI Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and fearless critic of President Putin, has died in what Western officials are labeling as a brutal political assassination.
The Federal Penitentiary Service in Yamalo-Nenets said Navalny, 47, died after feeling “unwell” following a walk on Friday.
A statement said: “The medical staff at the institution arrived immediately, and an ambulance team was called”.
“All necessary resuscitation measures were carried out, which did not yield positive results”.
Navalny had been incarcerated since 2021 after receiving fraud and extremism charges totalling more than 30 years imprisonment that he says were conjured up by the Kremlin to stifle his political voice.
The most visible critic of Putin’s despotic regime, Navalny was being held in a jail 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle where temperatures regularly plunge to below -30C.
The former leader of Russia of the Future appeared healthy on a video link from court on Thursday, one day before his death.
In 2020, Navalny fell into a coma after a suspected poisoning by the Russian secret service with Novichok, the same nerve agent used in the 2018 Salisbury poisoning of Sergei Skripal.
Western officials suspect that Navalny’s death was an assassination on behalf of Putin against his greatest rival.
Spain’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Jose Manuel Albares, said on X: “We demand clarification of the circumstances of his death, which occurred during his unjust imprisonment for political reasons”.
President Pedro Sanchez, said: “Shocked by the news of the death in prison of Alexei Navalny, unjustly imprisoned by the Putin regime for his defense of human rights and democracy”.
Edgars Rinkevics, Latvia’s president, said that Navalny was “brutally murdered by the Kremlin”, whilst Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, said it was “obvious” that Putin was behind his death.
Navalny encouraged wide-scale protests in Russia in 2011 by campaigning against election fraud and government corruption.
In 2013, he won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral contest that was deemed to not be free or fair.
Vladimir Putin, alongside the war in Ukraine, is currently launching a campaign for his fifth presidential term.
Navalny is survived by his wife, Yulia, and their two children.
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