Navalny, imprisoned by Russia since January 2021, was moved to a penal colony, known as “Polar Wolf”, near the Arctic Circle in December last year.He died after falling unconscious on a walk and medics were unable to revive him, according to the prison’s statement.
Navalny’s team said a lawyer is travelling to the city to find out more, and that they had not been able to independently confirm his death yet.'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.' The former lawyer was convicted for the fifth time in the summer over activities blamed on his organisation, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, and statements by his associates.Advertisement: “His death in a Russian prison and the fixation and fear of one man only underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built. Russia is responsible for this.”The Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski said Navalny was a “victim of Russian fascism”.
In 2013, he was sentenced to a five years imprisonment over embezzlement, despite absence of evidence pointing to any wrongdoing. He was later released, and came second in Moscow’s mayoral election. After he recovered, Navalny chose to return to Moscow in January 2021 – and was quickly detained by law enforcement agents, allegedly for failing to appear at a parole hearing. He was sentenced to two and a half years.
Radosław Sikorski:"Alexei Navalny is the victim of Russian fascism. He will probably be remembered as the best president of Russia that Russia will never have..."Poland’s foreign minister Sikorski said: “He did nothing wrong, he was imprisoned on fake charges, and even if nobody pulled the trigger, we know it was the conditions that were created for him that killed him, and those conditions were the responsibility of president Vladimir Putin.