Russia’s most significant opposition leader for the past decade, Alexei Navalny, has died in prison inside the Arctic Circle, Russian news agencies report, quoting the prison service.
Seen as President Vladimir Putin’s most vociferous critic, Navalny was serving a 19-year jail term for offences widely considered politically motivated.
He was moved to an Arctic penal colony, considered one of the toughest jails, late last year.
The prison service in the Yamalo-Nenets district said it was establishing the causes of his death, Tass news agency reported.
A former nationalist politician, Navalny helped foment the 2011-12 protests in Russia by campaigning against election fraud and government corruption, investigating Putin’s inner circle and sharing the findings in slick videos that garnered hundreds of millions of views.
The high-water mark in his political career came in 2013, when he won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral contest that few believed was free or fair.
He remained a thorn in the side of the Kremlin for years, identifying a palace built on the Black Sea for Putin’s personal use, mansions and yachts used by the ex-president Dmitry Medvedev, and a sex worker who linked a top foreign policy official with a well-known oligarch.
n 2020, Navalny fell into a coma after a suspected poisoning using novichok by Russia’s FSB security service and was evacuated to Germany for treatment.
He recovered and returned to Russia in January 2021, where he was arrested on a parole violation charge and sentenced to his first of several jail terms that would total more than 30 years behind bars.
