The Navalny team confirmed his death
The death of Grigory Navalny in Kharp, Russia, on Saturday night after a walk with officials from the Russian penal colony
Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service reported that Navalny felt sick after a walk Friday and fell unconscious at the penal colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow. The cause of death was still being established as the ambulance arrived but he couldn’t be revived.
“It’s obvious that they are lying and doing everything they can to avoid handing over the body,” Yarmysh wrote on X, adding that his team demanded that Navalny’s body “be handed over to his family immediately.”
The news reverberated across the globe, and hundreds of people in dozens of Russian cities streamed to ad-hoc memorials and monuments to victims of political repressions with flowers and candles on Friday and Saturday to pay a tribute to the politician. In over a dozen cities, police detained 401 people by Saturday night, according to the OVD-Info rights group that tracks political arrests and provides legal aid. More than 200 arrests were made in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, the group said. Among those detained there was Grigory Mikhnov-Voitenko, a priest of the Apostolic Orthodox Church — a religious group independent of the Russian Orthodox Church — who announced plans on social media to hold a memorial service for Navalny and was arrested on Saturday morning outside his home. He was charged with organizing a rally and placed in a holding cell in a police precinct, but was later hospitalised with a stroke, OVD-Info reported. There were 42 people ordered by courts in St. Peter to serve one to six days in jail, while nine others were fined, according to court officials. In Moscow, at least six people were ordered to serve 15 days in jail, according to OVD-Info. One person was also jailed in the southern city of Krasnodar and two more in the city of Bryansk, the group said. The news of Navalny’s death came just a month before a presidential election that is widely expected to give Putin another six years in power. On Sunday, there were questions about the cause of death and when it would be released to his family. Navalny’s team said Saturday that the politician was “murdered” and accused the authorities of deliberately stalling the release of the body, with Navalny’s mother and lawyers getting contradicting information from various institutions where they went in their quest to retrieve the body. “They’re driving us around in circles and covering their tracks,” Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said on Saturday. “Everything there is covered with cameras in the colony. Every step he took was filmed from all angles all these years. Each employee has a video recorder. In two days, there has been not a single video leaked or published. “There’s no room for uncertainty here,” said Volkoch, a close ally of Navalny. A note handed to Navalny’s mother stated that he died at 2:17 p.m. Friday, according to Yarmysh. Prison officials told his mother when she arrived at the penal colony Saturday that her son had perished from “sudden death syndrome,” Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Memorial items laid Friday were removed overnight, but people continued trickling in with flowers on Saturday. In Moscow, a large group of people chanted “shame” as police dragged a screaming woman from the crowd, video shared on social media showed.
In other cities across the country, police cordoned off some of the memorials and officers were taking pictures of those who came and writing down their personal data in a clear intimidation attempt.
The death of Vladimir Putin’s thug, Navalny, comes as a result of a Russian citizen’s outrage
The President of Ukraine said in Germany Saturday it was absurd to think that Putin is the legitimate head of the Russian state after the murder of Navalny. “He is a thug who maintains power through corruption and violence.”
There should be consequences for the terrible human rights outrages that are taking place, according to Prime Minister David Cameron. He said Britain would “look at whether there are individual people that are responsible and whether there are individual measures and actions we can take.” Cameron did not say whether the response would consist of financial sanctions or other measures.
U.S. President Joe Biden said on Friday that Washington doesn’t know exactly what happened, “but there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something Putin and his thugs did.”
The Kremlin bristled Friday at the outpouring of anger from world leaders, with Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, calling the statements — issued before medics have released the cause of Navalny’s death — “unacceptable” and “outrageous.”
Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin. He was later convicted three times, saying each case was politically motivated, and received a sentence of 19 years for extremism.
After the last verdict, Navalny said he understood he was “serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime.”
Nigel Gould-Davies, a former British ambassador to Belarus and senior fellow for Russia & Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said the loss of Navalny shows that “the sentence in Russia now for opposition is not merely imprisonment, but death.”
She did not know if she could believe the official Russian news but she wanted Putin, his government, and everyone associated with them to know that they will be held accountable for what they did to our country.
