Russian Opposition Leader, Alexei Navalny , died in prison at the age of 47

Aleksei A. Navalny, an anti-graft activist who led the political opposition in President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia for more than a decade and was repeatedly arrested, attacked, or poisoned by Russian authorities, died on Friday at a Russian prison according to the Russian Federal Police Service. The age for him was 47.

Prison officials reported that Mr. Navalny lost consciousness on Friday after walking in the Arctic penal colony where he was relocated late last year. When he appeared in court on Thursday, via video link, he was seen smiling and making jokes while being held in a cell.

According to Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief of staff for many years, he was not yet prepared to accept the news that Mr. Navalny had died. There is no basis to believe the state’s propaganda,” Volkov wrote on X social platform. In the event that Putin’s death was true, then it is not “Navalny’s” but Putch has killed Navalny. Even a single penny is not my trust in them.

Due to his previous convictions, Mr. Navalny is expected to serve several sentences that could have kept him in prison until at least 2031, as charges that supporters claim were largely invented to silence him were dismissed by them. He remained active on social media while facing increasingly severe conditions, including multiple stints in solitary confinement, and his team continued to publish investigations into Russia’s corrupt Russian elite from exile.

Presented here is what took place today.

According to Russia’s correctional agency, Navalny died at the age of 47 while serving a 19-year sentence at the IK-3 Arctic prison colony. Following a walk, it was reported that he became unwell and almost immediately lost consciousness before passing away.

The Kremlin critic, Daniel Rohr directed the documentary Navalny, which warned that if someone were to kill him, it would be seen as proof that we are still strong. His death occurred weeks before the presidential election on March 15-17.

In detention, US officials openly hold Russia accountable for Navalny’s death.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Russia accuses the US of making “overstate accusations” about who is responsible.

Following the news of the Kremlin’s most prominent critic’s death in prison, the United Nations is expressing its disappointment and calling on Russian authorities to put an end to the persecution.

The decision to assassinate Navalny by Putin, regardless of its brazen and heinous nature, should not come as a surprise. Silencing the Russian president once and for all is a perfectly sensible decision, even though the Kremlin’s spin doctors are trying to make it seem unfalsifiable. After all, Navalny was a master of social media, who had often managed to beat the Kremlin at its own information game, exposing terrible abuses and misdeeds by the regime in Moscow, and broadcasting them to millions of people over YouTube and other platforms—even as the government did everything it could to silence him. In December 2020, he even managed to get a confession out of his own would-be government assassins, who had embarrassingly bungled an effort to poison him on a flight from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow in August 2020.

Even more dangerous was Navalny’s extraordinary, boundary-defying popularity. Unlike any Russian opposition figure since Putin came to power almost a quarter century ago, Navalny was able to build a following that went far beyond Russia’s urban elites. He reached people from every corner of the country, including workers and IT engineers as well as liberals and professionals. His supporters were often equally fervent at home and abroad. And he was especially good at galvanizing younger Russians who might otherwise have turned away from politics altogether.

Navalny’s wife, Yulia, told the Munich Security Conference she could not be sure her husband was dead because “Putin and his government… lie incessantly”.”But if this is true, I want Putin, his entire entourage, Putin’s friends, his government to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family, to my husband,” she said.The Kremlin said Putin had been informed of Navalny’s death. The 71-year-old former KGB spy was shown meeting workers at a factory in Chelyabinsk, in the Ural mountains. He said nothing in public about Navalny.Western leaders paid tribute to Navalny’s courage as a fighter for freedom. Some, without citing evidence, accused the Kremlin of murder and said Putin should be held accountable.Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the reaction of Western leaders to the death was unacceptable and “absolutely rabid”.”We don’t know exactly what happened, but there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did,” Biden said at the White House.”Russian authorities are going to tell their own story,” Biden said. “But make no mistake. Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death.”