(Adds details, reaction from the Kremlin)
by Guy Faulconbridge and Felix Light
MOSCOW, February 16 (Reuters) – Alexei Navalny, an opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has died, the prison service in the Russian Arctic region of Yamal-Nenets announced on Friday, where he was transferred in December to serve a long sentence. from prison.
Many Western countries have accused Russian authorities of being responsible for his death, with some leaders going so far as to directly point to Vladimir Putin. Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, denounced the comments as “absolutely unacceptable” and “enraged”.
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Alexeï Navalny, aged 47, made himself known in the early 2010s by denouncing corruption at the highest level of the state on his blog, becoming over the years the main opponent of Vladimir Putin, who is seeking a new presidential term next month.
The former lawyer was the victim in 2020, during a plane trip to Russia, of attempted poisoning with the nerve agent novitchok, for which he was treated in Germany before returning to his country in early 2021 , where he was immediately imprisoned.
Sentenced to 11 years in prison for fraud in particular, then to an additional 19 years last August for “extremism”, he rejected accusations that he believed were fabricated to keep him from the political scene.
In a statement published on its website, the prison administration of the Yamal-Nenets region writes that Alexei Navalny “felt bad” after a walk on Friday in the grounds of the IK-3 penal colony located in Kharp , about 1,900 km northeast of Moscow.
He “almost immediately lost consciousness” and the intervention of doctors was unable to save him, she added.
“All necessary measures to revive him were undertaken, without producing positive results,” the prison administration said, adding that the causes of death were being examined.
The Kremlin said Vladimir Putin, traveling in the Urals, had been informed of the death.
The Russian prosecutor’s office warned against any participation in a rally in the center of Moscow in memory of the opponent.
Alexei Navalny’s lawyer said he was on his way to the IK-3 penal colony.
Present at the Munich security conference, Alexei Navalny’s wife, Yulia, declared that she was not sure of her husband’s death “because Putin and his government (…) keep lying “.
“But if it’s true,” she added, “I want Putin, his entire entourage, his friends, his government to know that they bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family, to my husband.”
“I don’t want to hear condolences. We saw him in prison on February 12, during a meeting. He was alive, healthy and happy,” Alexei Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaïa, wrote on Facebook .
One of the relatives of the anti-corruption activist, Leonid Volkov, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitri Muratov, denounced a “murder”.
“I am convinced that his conditions of detention led to his death,” said Dmitri Muratov, editor-in-chief of the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, banned by Moscow.
INCREASINGLY HARDER CONDITIONS OF DETENTION
The Kremlin has always denied attempting to poison Alexeï Navalny in 2020, and systematically rejected his accusations concerning corruption within the Russian elite.
The Russian authorities presented the opponent, excluded from the liberal opposition Yabloko party in 2007 for his then nationalist opinions, as a puppet in the service of the CIA.
His conditions of detention had gradually become harsher as his sentence lengthened. Alexeï Navalny was transferred last December from the Moscow region to the IK-3 penal colony.
His lawyer said last year that he was showing symptoms suggesting slow poisoning. “We do not exclude that at this very moment, Alexeï Navalny is slowly being poisoned, killed slowly in order to attract less attention,” she wrote on Twitter.
His last message on the Telegram platform was addressed to his wife Ioulia for Valentine’s Day. He appeared Thursday in a videoconference hearing, where he laughed and joked about the “enormous salary” of the federal judge responsible for questioning him. Tried for an altercation with a guard who tried to confiscate his pen, he later wrote that he was sentenced to fifteen days in solitary confinement, a punishment that was frequently inflicted on him.
Many Western countries expressed their sadness at the news of the death of the opponent. The United States said it was waiting for confirmation of the death, which would be a new sign of the “brutality” of Vladimir Putin according to American Vice-President Kamala Harris.
Emmanuel Macron expressed his “anger” and his “indignation”. “In today’s Russia, free spirits are put in the gulag and sentenced to death. Anger and indignation,” declared the French head of state on the X platform.
In a joint statement, the President of the European Commission and the President of the European Council, Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel, pledged that the EU would spare no effort to hold Russian leaders to account.
Alexeï Navalny “was slowly killed by President Putin and his regime”, they said, demanding that all light be shed on the opponent’s death and demanding “the immediate release of all other political prisoners”. (With Reuters offices, French version Tangi Salaün and Jean-Stéphane Brosse)
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