Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s biggest foes, died Friday while being held in a Russian penal colony in Kharp, a city in northern Russia, the Federal Prison Service said. He was 47.
According to the statement released by the country’s prison agency, Navalny lost consciousness after he felt unwell during a walk. While emergency services attended to him, they did not manage to revive him, they added.
Navalny’s spokesperson Kira Yarmysh said Navalny’s lawyer was travelling to Kharp to find out more, adding that they were not in a position to confirm his death yet.
“As soon as we have some information, we will report on it,” Yarmysh wrote on X.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters Putin was notified of Navalny’s death, adding that the Federal Penitentiary Service is investigating the events.
World leaders have been sharing their reaction to the reports of Navalny’s death, with U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak calling the development “terrible news.”
“As the fiercest advocate for Russian democracy, Alexei Navalny demonstrated incredible courage throughout his life,” Sunak wrote. “My thoughts are with his wife and the people of Russia, for whom this is a huge tragedy.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose country is at war with Russia, told a news conference in Berlin, “Alexey Navalny died in a Russian prison — it is obvious for me that he was killed.”
U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the Biden administration was “actively seeking confirmation” of the news.
“If it’s confirmed, it is a terrible tragedy, and given the Russian government’s long and sordid history of doing harm to its opponents, it raises real and obvious questions about what happened here,” Sullivan told NPR.
Navalny was serving a 19-year sentence on extremism charges after he was convicted for the fifth time in August over his foundation’s activities and statements by his associates. He decried the charges as politically motivated.
In December, he was transferred to a penal colony in the Yamalo-Nenets region near the Arctic Circle in December after his allies had previously reported losing contact with him for three weeks. Navalny’s supporters said his transfer there was yet another effort by Putin to suppress him.
Navalny’s death comes ahead of Russia’s presidential election scheduled for next month. Putin is all but certain to win reelection.
Last year, Navalny had been reportedly suffering from stomach pains. Yarmysh said in April that she feared the illness could have been caused by a slow-acting poison.
“His health is not a good condition,” Yarmysh told Reuters at the time. “We can’t rule out the idea that he is being poisoned, not in a huge dosage as before, but in small ones so that he doesn’t die immediately but for him to suffer and to ruin his health.”
Navalny had been unable to eat the prison food because it was worsening his symptoms, Yarmysh said, and he’d been forbidden from accessing alternative food. The Kremlin referred Reuters’ questions about the situation to the penitentiary service, which did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
At the end of April, more than 100 public figures, including various journalists, actors, musicians and filmmakers, released a letter calling for Putin to release Navalny.
“Visits from relatives and phone calls are forbidden, his attorney-client privileges have been canceled,” the letter read. “Despite running a fever, he is required to stand all day.”
Navalny, leader of the Russia of the Future party, was Putin’s most prominent critic. He was evacuated to Germany in August 2020 after being poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent ― the same type of chemical weapon used to poison former Russian military official Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in 2018.
Navalny fell ill while on a flight from the Russian city of Tomsk to Moscow, his spokesperson said at the time. Navalny could be heard loudly moaning in pain in a video recorded by a passenger on the plane.
A joint investigation by news outlets Bellingcat, CNN, The Insider and Der Spiegel, published in December 2020, implicated Russia’s Federal Security Service in Navalny’s poisoning. The U.S., the U.K. and other countries imposed sanctions against top Russian officials in response.
In January 2021, after receiving medical treatment abroad, Navalny was detained by Russian law enforcement agents at a Moscow airport upon his return.
The official reason for the arrest was Navalny’s failure to appear at a parole hearing, but many of his supporters said his detainment was politically motivated. He was sentenced to two-and-a-half years.
Navalny went on a three-week hunger strike in March and April 2021 to protest prison officials’ refusal to allow him to see a private doctor. He ended the strike on the advice of his doctors and after his demands were partly met, he said.
In March 2022, Navalny was sentenced to nine years at a maximum security facility on charges of fraud and contempt.
Putin has a long history of silencing dissidents, including journalists and other political opponents. It’s widely believed that the Kremlin was behind the poisonings of Skripal and his daughter, who both survived. Russia denied responsibility for the attack against them, despite ample evidence to the contrary.
The Russian government is also believed to have been involved in the deaths of Nikolai Andrushchenko, an anti-Putin journalist, in 2017, and Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy Russian prime minister, who was gunned down on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015.
Navalny’s imprisonment sparked the biggest confrontation in years between Russian authorities and critics of the Kremlin. Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched across Russia to protest his arrest, and more protests followed his hunger strike and his court sentences.
Alexei Navalny was born June 4, 1976. His role as a leading Kremlin critic began about a decade ago when, while working as a lawyer, he began publishing investigations into the finances of state-run companies on his blog. He founded the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which releases articles and films documenting Russian dirty-money trails, and rose to political prominence after helping orchestrate major protests across the country beginning in 2011.
Navalny was subject to numerous threats against his safety over the years. In 2019, he was imprisoned for 30 days for protesting election officials’ decision to bar some opposition candidates from running for Moscow City Council. While in prison, he suffered an “allergic reaction” that was widely believed to be the result of poisoning. He lost partial vision in one eye after an acid attack in 2017.
In 2013, Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison for embezzlement, despite an absence of evidence pointing to any wrongdoing. He was released shortly after in an equally confounding set of circumstances, allowing him to run in Moscow’s mayoral election. He came in second place among six candidates.
Navalny was placed under house arrest in 2014. He defied orders and left the house so often that authorities eventually stopped following him. Instead, they brought in his employees for interrogations. Several of them left Russia to live in exile across Europe. Navalny was retried in 2017 and again found guilty of embezzlement.
Around 2010, Navalny was involved with right-wing nationalist groups, an association for which he was later criticized by other opposition activists. In an interview with NPR in 2018, Navalny declined to apply a Western political label to his ideology.
With the help of his Anti-Corruption Foundation and personal staff, Navalny continued his attacks on Putin via social media while he was imprisoned.
Navalny is survived by his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and their two children, Daria and Zakhar.
Nora Biette-Timmons and Willa Frej contributed to this report.