Alexei Navalny: Experts give their verdict after Putin’s biggest opponent dies in prison | World News

World leaders and critics of Vladimir Putin are in uproar after Alexei Navalny’s death.

The 47-year-old lawyer and opposition leader died after falling unwell during a walk at the “Polar Wolf” penal colony on Friday, Russia’s prison service has said.

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Putin blamed for Navalny’s death

He had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recovering in Germany from nerve agent poisoning, which he blamed on the Kremlin.

No cause of death has been confirmed.

But Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said it is “obvious” President Putin was involved, and UK Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron added: “Putin’s Russia imprisoned him, trumped up charges against him, poisoned him, sent him to an Arctic penal colony, and now he’s tragically died.

“We should hold Putin accountable for this. And no one should be in any doubt about the dreadful nature of Putin’s regime in Russia after what has just happened.”

Sky News spoke to experts about what Mr Navalny’s death means for Russia, and how likely it was that he was assassinated.

Here’s what they had to say…

‘Sudden death won’t play well for Putin’

Diana Magnay, Sky News’s Moscow correspondent

“It’s appalling. It’s an absolute tragedy and it’s a stain on the conscience of the Russian state.

“His health has been deteriorating… he has been held in solitary confinement for much of the time since he was imprisoned after his return to Russia in January 2020.

“But it does seem very shocking that his health should have deteriorated to the extent that he’s dead now – given we have seen him in court videos, we have also had a lot of social media presence from him via his lawyers where he is constantly seen upbeat and cheerful.

“Yes, he’s been put through a lot by the prison systems but we have not had an indication that he would die this suddenly, so I just wonder if something specific happened to him.

“It will come as a huge shock to his supporters. He was only recently moved to this prison colony up in the very far north of the country, and it is an absolute tragedy for any notion of a free Russia, a Russian democracy, which was all that Alexei Navalny devoted his life to since he burst onto the scene in 2012.

“He has been a moral voice for Russia from his prison cell, against the war in Ukraine and against the lack of freedoms that he felt for his fellow countrymen. That’s why he returned to Russia after he was poisoned.

“I think a lot of people hoped that one day he would leave prison and that he might be a leader for the Russian people – but the fact that he is now dead, only a few weeks before Russia holds an election… I don’t think will play very well for Vladimir Putin.”

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‘Further blow’ to hopes of unseating Putin

Deborah Haynes, Sky News’s security and defence editor, reporting from the Munich Security Conference

“As you can imagine, it’s really upended events here. This is an annual three-day conference just starting this afternoon.

“You’ve got country leaders and senior ministers from around Western allies meeting here to discuss security here in Europe and across the world. And then suddenly there’s huge news about the most prominent opposition politician in Russia suddenly dying.

“I can maybe sum up the mood among many people here with a tweet from the president of Latvia. He says that ‘whatever your thoughts about Alexei Navalny as the politician, he was brutally murdered by the Kremlin. That’s a fact. And that is something one should know about the true nature of Russia’s current regime’.

“Now, obviously, we do not know the facts about how Alexei Navalny died. But the fact is, the only reason he is in prison is because he was serving decades of a sentence. There were various charges against him about extremism and other issues.

“But fundamentally – and the main allegation that underpins it all – was that he was a prominent challenger to President Putin. And so the fact that he was in jail in the first place is clearly a sign enough that it’s Russia’s culpability in his death, according to the president of Latvia.

“The meetings are just starting to take place here. You can be sure that this is going to absolutely dominate.

“People will be thinking about what it actually means internally for Russia.

“One key focus here originally – and probably still given that President Zelensky of Ukraine is in Germany at the moment – is the war.

“Obviously the hope among Ukrainians is that they would be able to inflict sufficient damage upon Russian soldiers invading their country to create sufficient instability inside Russia that it would unseat the regime.

“You obviously had that mini coup last year from the head of the Wagner private military group that was quickly aborted, but that was the only real sign of any kind of challenge to the president.

“And so now the news that his most promising and prominent opponent had died – yes, someone who was in prison – but it’s a further blow for those who had been hoping for some kind of political change in Russia.”

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Death shows Russia is ‘sinking deeper into totalitarian state’

Dominic Waghorn, Sky News’s international affairs editor

“Particularly for those neighbouring countries around Russia, the death of Navalny is particularly personal and highlights what has been happening to their neighbour for a number of decades now.

“It’s sinking deeper and deeper into a totalitarian state where the government controls the media totally, it controls the opposition completely – and totalitarian states effectively more and more control the minds of their own citizens, who aren’t able to think politically and to think in terms of freedom or democracy.

“And Alexei Navalny was somebody who just wouldn’t accept that fate and campaigned so that Russians wouldn’t have to either.

“In the wake of the fall of communism and throughout the Putin period, Russia has always had this choice on opening up, liberalising, becoming more of a democratic society – more like the direction Ukraine wants to go in – and that would have made it freer, would have made it more liberal and would have made it richer because it would have become a safer place for foreign investment to pour into.

“And there were those who bravely spoke out calling for that – people like Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated outside the walls of the Kremlin; people like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch who was jailed in Siberia for many years for speaking out; and Alexei Navalny, a lawyer and a campaigner who carried on campaigning.

“He was saying that the direction that Russia has chosen instead, under Putin, is to be led by a group of effectively hydrocarbon oligarchical gangsters, a kleptocracy who have taken all the gains that Russia’s natural resource bounty offers for themselves and have made billions and have kept a very tight grip on power.

“But to do so, they’ve had to make this bargain, which is to make the country more and more totalitarian and also to invade Ukraine now to remain in power, arguably.

“Navalny shone a spotlight on what they were doing. He flew drones over the palaces of Putin, of Dmitry Medvedev, and other cronies around Putin.

“These are lavish palaces, which Navalny claimed were built with the stolen billions of rubles that the Putin regime has taken.

“Navalny has either been deliberately assassinated by the regime or effectively he’s been killed slowly.

“First, he was poisoned with Novichok and then he was put into prisons where conditions are not particularly conducive to recovery from a nerve agent, to say the least.

“He’s been slowly dying since and has now passed away.

“I think the assumption has to be made that this was a deliberate act of assassination by the regime simply because it has done that without any compunction whatsoever to so many of its critics and opponents.”