2024-02-16 11:34:00
Alexei Navalny (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin/File)
The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died suddenly this Friday in the Arctic prison where he had been since last December, according to the prison service of the Yamalo-Nenets region, where he was serving his sentence.
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“The necessary resuscitation procedures were performed, which did not give any results. Emergency doctors confirmed the death of the condemned man. The causes of death are being established,” said the official statement on the death of Navalny, 47 years old; while adding: “On February 16, 2024, in penitentiary center No. 3, prisoner Navalny AA felt ill following a walk.”
The opponent was serving a 19-year prison sentence for “extremism.”
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Meanwhile, the Kremlin said it has no information regarding the causes of Navalny’s death. This was announced by the spokesman for the Russian Presidency, Dmitri Peskov, minutes following hearing the news.
“The doctors have to clarify it,” said the spokesperson, quoted by the TASS agency, following the prison services confirmed the death of the politician. He also maintained that the president, Vladimir Putin, has already “been informed.”
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For her part, Navalny’s spokesperson, Kira Yarmish, assured that the opponent’s co-religionists do not yet have confirmation of the death and that his lawyer will leave shortly for Yamalo-Nenets.
Last December, Navalny was transferred from a prison in the Vladimir region, less than 200 kilometers from Moscow, to a prison in the Arctic Circle, near the Ural mountain range. The town of Jarp, which has regarding 6,000 inhabitants, is located almost 2,000 kilometers from Moscow or regarding 45 hours by train from the Russian capital.
Alexei Navalny in prison (REUTERS/Evgenia Novozhenina/File)
Jarp is less than 50 kilometers from Salekhard, the administrative capital of this territory that has an area larger than that of France, but is populated by only half a million inhabitants.
According to one of his collaborators in exile, Ivan Zhdanov, the prison is named following “Polar Wolf” and is considered one of the most distant prisons from civilization in all of Russia.
Main opponent of Vladimir Putin and a fierce fighter once morest the corruption of the Russian elites, Navalny was determined to continue confronting the Kremlin following having survived a poisoning. This lawyer decided to return to Moscow in January 2021, where he was detained as soon as he arrived at the airport.
That return to Russia seemed almost impossible in August 2020, when the charismatic opponent arrived in Berlin aboard 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 the main Russian opponent was the victim of a neurotoxic substance from the Novichok group, created in the Soviet era for military purposes.
After surviving this alleged assassination attempt, Navalny was quick to counterattack. In mid-December 2020, he released a telephone conversation in which he unmasked one of the agents of the Russian security services (FSB) so that he admitted that they wanted to poison him.
For the opponent, the poisoning was orchestrated under the direct order of President Vladimir Putin, his sworn enemy, who never uttered his name. The president rejected all the accusations.
Alexei Navalny (REUTERS/Mikhail Voskresensky/Archive)
In 2019, the lawyer had already been transferred to a hospital from the prison where he was serving a sentence following an administrative arrest, for what his team said was a suspected poisoning, suffering 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.
Previously, in 2017, he was attacked by several men who threw an antiseptic in his face, causing damage to his eye.
The European Court of Human Rights has declared 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.
He also went to prison on several occasions for violations of the legislation on demonstrations.
He has always rejected his judicial sentences and assured that nothing might undermine his motivation, not even threats once morest his safety and that of his family.
“I have been involved in politics for a long time, I often get arrested, it is part of life. I do the job I prefer, people support me, I have many supporters. What can make a man happier? ”She indicated on different occasions.
Both the United States and the European Union had expressed concern regarding the fate of Navalny, the Kremlin’s number one enemy. On December 7, the opponent asked from prison to vote once morest Putin in the March 17, 2024 elections.
Navalny also announced the launch of a website (neputin.org) that called on Russians to support any candidate for the presidency, except Putin.
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