RIGA, Latvia — Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the defiant anti-corruption crusader and democracy champion who was President Vladimir Putin’s despised nemesis, died suddenly in an Arctic Russian prison colony Friday, penitentiary officials said, removing the most prominent figure inside Russia willing to challenge the Kremlin’s rule.
His death — foretold as almost inevitable, including by Navalny himself — sent shock waves across Russia and was quickly condemned by global leaders, some of whom joined Russian opposition figures in calling it a state-sponsored murder. Navalny, 47, had appeared in a court hearing by video link the day before, seemingly in good health and with his trademark humor intact.
Navalny’s family and his team, who continued to run his political operation in exile, had warned that his life was in danger since his arrest in January 2021, when he returned to Russia after recovering in Germany from being poisoned with a banned nerve agent. An investigation led by Navalny and Bellingcat, an investigative journalism organization, had identified a team of Russian federal security agents as responsible for the assassination attempt, and his supporters noted that in prison, he was in the clutches of the very government that had already tried to kill him several times.
In a dramatic appearance Friday at the Munich Security Conference, Navalny’s wife said she did not know whether to believe the reports from Russian authorities of his death because “they always lie.”
“But if this is true, I want Putin and everyone around him to know that they will be held accountable for everything they did to our country, to my family. And this day will happen very soon,” Yulia Navalnaya said. “I want to call on the international community and all people to unite and defeat this evil.”
The couple have two children — a daughter, 23-year-old Darya, and a teenage son, Zakhar.
Obituary: Alexei Navalny, imprisoned Russian opposition leader, is dead at 47
Navalny had long resisted being called a “dissident,” a description he associated with hopeless opposition. Instead he sought to be viewed as a politician with aspirations of challenging Putin in a free and fair election. But last summer, after Russia’s politicized judicial system added 19 years for extremism to previous sentences totaling more than 11 years, Navalny wrote a long post on social media comparing himself to former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky and accepting his fate as a political prisoner.
Navalny’s death comes as Putin is campaigning for near-certain reelection next month with no serious opposition. A candidate who sought to run on an antiwar platform, Boris Nadezhdin, was disqualified by Russian election authorities because of alleged irregularities with signatures required to win a place on the ballot.
The loss of Navalny’s strong, fearless voice — which continued to resonate on social media even from the brutal prison colonies where he was often held in solitary-punishment cells — is a devastating blow to Russia’s opposition and the liberal antiwar activists still resisting Putin, mainly from outside the country.
Since ordering the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Putin has accelerated his shift from an authoritarian “managed democracy” to a more totalitarian regime, with escalating repression of his political opponents. Many, such as Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, longtime associates of Navalny, are in prison, while others fled the country.
In a column this week, Kara-Murza, a Washington Post contributor, nonetheless struck an optimistic note and said Nadezhdin’s upstart campaign “has exposed the lie behind the Kremlin claims of solid public support for Putin and for his war … This doesn’t mean that change will happen tomorrow or next month. But a society that feels more empowered and more confident about itself is suddenly a force to be reckoned with. And that is bad news for any dictator.”
Whatever official cause of death might be cited, few observers doubted that Navalny’s death was caused directly or indirectly by the Russian authorities, coming after the poisoning attempt in August 2020 and three years of ill treatment since his return.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose country remains under attack by Russian forces that now occupy one-fifth of its territory, said the Russian leader was to blame.
“Obviously, he was killed by Putin, like thousands of others tortured and tormented by this creature alone,” Zelensky said at a news conference in Berlin with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. “Putin doesn’t care who dies as long as he maintains his position.”
“I’m literally both not surprised and outraged by the news-reported death of Navalny,” President Biden said. “But make no mistake … Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death. Putin is responsible.”
Analysts warned that Putin, increasingly isolated and hostile to the West, no longer cares about the condemnations of global leaders. Some noted that Putin has never faced real accountability for a string of deaths of other opponents who are believed to have been assassinated by Russian agents or proxies for the state, including Anna Politkovskaya, a crusading journalist who was shot in the foyer of her apartment building in Moscow in 2006; and Boris Nemtsov, a close associate of Navalny, who was shot on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015.
Some of the sharpest reactions came from leaders of neighboring countries that were once part of the Soviet Union.
Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs was one of the first leaders to declare Navalny’s death to be a murder. Navalny “was just brutally murdered by the Kremlin,” he posted on X, formerly Twitter. “That’s a fact, and that is something one should know about the true nature of Russia’s current regime.”
Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, whose mother and grandmother were deported to Siberia in Soviet times, posted: “Navalny’s death is yet another dark reminder of the rogue regime we’re dealing with — and why Russia and all those responsible must be held accountable for each of their crimes.”
The Kremlin denied any involvement in Navalny’s death, calling statements to the contrary by leaders across the world “unacceptable.”
“There is no statement from medics, no information from forensic experts, no final information from the FSIN [Federal Penitentiary Service], no information about the cause of death,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “And such statements are coming.”
Putin for years almost always refused to utter Navalny’s name, often referring to him by awkward euphemisms such as “the Berlin clinic patient,” as he was being treated in Germany following the poisoning. Putin did not mention his death when he met Friday with students and workers in Chelyabinsk in southwestern Russia. According to a reporter in the Kremlin pool from the state RIA Novosti news agency, Putin’s meeting took place after he was informed of Navalny’s death.
After antagonizing so many of Russia’s most powerful people with his anti-corruption activism and his relentless crusades against election fraud and other government malfeasance, Navalny was so often asked why he was still alive that he said he grew bored of the question.
“If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong,” he said in an Oscar-winning 2022 documentary about his life. “We need to utilize this power to not give up, to remember we are a huge power that is being oppressed by these bad dudes.”
In December 2020, four months after Navalny was poisoned while on a campaign trip to Siberia, Putin brushed off a question at his annual news conference about evidence that government agents were behind the attack. He chillingly insisted that if the Russian authorities wanted to kill him, Navalny would already be dead.
“Who needs him?” Putin asked the hall full of journalists, chuckling. “If they really wanted to, they probably would have finished it.”
But Navalny and a team including Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev tracked down the members of the Federal Security Service team that had tailed Navalny repeatedly before his death, and Navalny even managed to coax a taped confession by phone from one of the agents who had been sent to clean up the poison smeared on Navalny’s underpants.
Russia’s elites, many of them deeply uneasy over Putin’s war on Ukraine and his moves to sever Western ties, were stunned and shocked by Navalny’s death. Some said it sent a chilling message to all Russians, marking a new chapter in Putin’s efforts to re-create a closed, deeply repressive Soviet-style regime, with no dissent tolerated.
“This is terrible for everyone. This will be used to frighten people even more,” said one Russian businessman, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “It is a new page in the history of this regime.”
The Russian authorities “will frighten people by saying you will end like Navalny,” the businessman added. “They don’t need to put 100 people in jail. It is enough to have the death in jail of just one.” The risk of opposing the Putin regime previously “was that you might sit in jail for a few years and then be set free. But now it seems they are not afraid to kill you in jail.”
A Russian official said it was impossible to say how Navalny could have died so suddenly after appearing to be in good spirits in a court appearance via video a day earlier.
“From the worst, most macabre causes, anything is possible. They already tried to poison him once,” the official said. “For now, there is nothing to say, apart from to express horror.”
Andrei Kolesnikov, a Russia-based analyst with the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, said that by repeatedly punishing Navalny and sending him to harsh isolation cells, the prison authorities had gradually killed him.
“You have to understand they did this on purpose,” he said.
According to Navalny’s press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, Navalny was sent into isolation cells 27 times, often for trivial matters, most recently Wednesday for 15 days. In all, he spent around 300 days in solitary confinement.
Ivan Zhdanov, director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said on Telegram that: “This is not an accidental death in any way. This is a targeted political assassination,” he said, saying Putin was responsible.
Amid a heavy police presence, Navalny supporters in Moscow laid flowers at the Solovetsky Stone on Friday, a memorial to the victims of political repression. There were similar spontaneous memorials in other Russian and foreign cities.
Navalny often sketched a vision of a Russia not only free, but also happy, where officials acted according to their consciences, not their material interests.
He called it the “beautiful Russia of the future.”
Herszenhorn reported from Brussels and Belton from London. Mary Ilyushina in Berlin, Francesca Ebel in London and Natalia Abbakumova in Riga contributed to this report.