A woman touches a photo of Alexei Navalny after paying her last respects and laying flowers at the Monument to Victims of Political Repression in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 17, 2024.Dmitri Lavetsky/Associated Press
More than 400 people have been detained in Russia during a vigil for opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony, a prominent rights group reported on Sunday.
Mr. Navalny’s sudden death, 47, was a devastating blow to many Russians who had pinned their hopes for the future on President Vladimir Putin’s deadliest enemy. Even after surviving a nerve agent poisoning and receiving multiple prison sentences, Navalny remained a vocal and unrelenting critic of the Kremlin.
The news resonated around the world, with many world leaders condemning President Vladimir Putin and his government for the death. In an exchange with reporters shortly after a church service on Saturday, President Joe Biden reiterated his position that Putin was ultimately responsible for Navalny’s death. “The reality is that President Putin is responsible. He is responsible for this situation, whether he ordered it or not,” Biden said. “It’s a reflection of who he is. It’s unacceptable.”
Meanwhile, Mr Navalny’s wife Yulia Navalnaya took to social media on Sunday, posting the first photo of the couple on Instagram after her husband’s death. Her caption simply read, “I love you.”
Hundreds of people in dozens of Russian cities rushed to makeshift memorials and monuments on Friday and Saturday with flowers and candles to remember the victims of political repression. Police had detained 401 people in more than a dozen cities by Saturday night, according to OVD-Info, a rights group that tracks political arrests and provides legal aid.
More than 200 people were arrested in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, the group said. Among those detained was Grigory Mikhnov Voytenko, a priest from the Apostolic Orthodox Church, a religious group independent of the Russian Orthodox Church, who announced on social media plans to hold a memorial service for Navalny. He was arrested in front of his home on Saturday morning. . He was charged with organizing the rally and was held in a police cell, but was later hospitalized after suffering a stroke, OVD-Info reported.
A court in St. Petersburg sentenced 42 of those detained on Friday to jail terms ranging from one to six days, and fined nine others, court officials announced late Saturday. According to OVD-Info, in Moscow at least six people were ordered to serve her 15 days in prison. The group said one person was jailed in the southern city of Krasnodar and two more in the city of Bryansk.
News of Navalny’s death came a month before Russia’s presidential election, which is widely expected to give Putin another six years in power.
Questions remain about the cause of death, and it remains unclear when authorities will release Navalny’s body. OVD-Info reported on Sunday that more than 12,000 people had submitted a request to the Russian government asking the politician’s remains to be handed over to his relatives.
Mr Navalny’s team announced on Saturday that he had been “murdered”, saying his mother and lawyers had received conflicting information from various agencies visited to retrieve his body, and that authorities suspected that he had been intentionally killed. accused of delaying the release of the body. “They are running us around and covering their tracks,” Kira Yarmysh, Mr Navalny’s press secretary, said on Saturday.
“Everything in the colony is monitored by cameras. His every step has been filmed from every angle over the years. Each employee has a video recorder. In the last two days, no video has been leaked or made public. There was not a single video. There is no room for uncertainty here,” Navalny’s closest ally and strategist Leonid Volkov said on Sunday.
Yarmysh said a note given to Navalny’s mother stated that he died at 2:17 p.m. Friday. Ivan Zhdanov, chairman of Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation, previously known as Tweet, said prison officials told his mother, who arrived at the penal colony on Saturday, that her son had died of “sudden death syndrome.” I wrote to X when I was there.
Russia’s Federal Prison Service reported that Mr. Navalny felt unwell after a walk on Friday and lost consciousness at the penal colony in the town of Harb in the Yamalo-Nenets region, about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow. An ambulance arrived but they were unable to revive him, police said, adding that the cause of death was still “undetermined.”
Navalny had been imprisoned since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from a nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin. He has received three prison terms since his arrest on a number of charges he has rejected as politically motivated.
After his previous verdict, sentencing him to 19 years, Navalny said he would serve “a life sentence, measured by the length of my life or the longevity of this regime.” “I understand,” he said.
Hours after news of his death was announced, Navalny’s wife made a dramatic appearance at the Munich Security Conference.
She said she was unsure whether to believe the news from official Russian sources. “But if this is true, I want President Putin and the people around him, his friends and his government to know that they will be held accountable for what they have done to our country.” To my family and husband. ”
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was urged to speak directly to the Russian public about his murder while filming a 2022 documentary. The Kremlin’s outspoken critic was arrested in 2021, and Russia reported that Mr Navalny felt unwell after a walk on Friday, lost consciousness in the Harb penal colony and later died.