Investigation of the death of Sergei Navalny in Kharp, Russia, on Saturday after he was arrested and pronounced unconscious at a penal colony
Navalny fell unconscious on Friday at the penal colony in the town of Kharp, northeast of Moscow, because he felt sick after a walk. The cause of death is still being established and an ambulance was dispatched but he couldn’t be revived.
Yarmysh said his team demanded that Navalny’s body be handed over to his family immediately due to the fact that they were lying.
The news reverberated across the globe, and hundreds of people in dozens of Russian cities streamed to ad-hoc memorials and monuments to victims of political repressions with flowers and candles on Friday and Saturday to pay a tribute to the politician. In over a dozen cities, police detained 401 people by Saturday night, according to the OVD-Info rights group that tracks political arrests and provides legal aid. More than 200 arrests were made in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, the group said. The priest of the Apostolic Orthodox Church, who announced on his social media that he was holding a memorial service for Navalny, was arrested outside of his home on Saturday morning. He was charged with organizing a rally and placed in a holding cell in a police precinct, but was later hospitalised with a stroke, OVD-Info reported. Court officials said late Saturday that 42 people were ordered to serve one to six days in jail because of their actions on Friday. In Moscow, at least six people were ordered to serve 15 days in jail, according to OVD-Info. One person was also jailed in the southern city of Krasnodar and two more in the city of Bryansk, the group said. The news of Navalny’s death came a month before a presidential election in Russia that is widely expected to give President Vladimir Putin another six years in power. Questions about the cause of death lingered on Sunday, and it remained unclear when the authorities would release his body to his family. Navalny’s team said Saturday that the politician was “murdered” and accused the authorities of deliberately stalling the release of the body, with Navalny’s mother and lawyers getting contradicting information from various institutions where they went in their quest to retrieve the body. Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said that they were driving in circles and covering their tracks. “Everything there is covered with cameras in the colony. Every step he took was filmed from all angles all these years. Each employee has a video recorder. There has not been any video leaked or published in the past two days. There’s no room for uncertainty here, that’s what Navalny’s closest ally and strategist said Sunday. A note stated that Navalny died on Friday, according to Yarmysh. Prison officials told his mother when she arrived at the penal colony Saturday that her son had perished from “sudden death syndrome,” Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Memorial items were removed Friday night and people continued to bring flowers on Saturday. In Moscow, a large group of people chanted “shame” as police dragged a screaming woman from the crowd, video shared on social media showed.
Some of the memorial sites were closed down by police and officers were taking pictures of people who showed up with their data in hand.
Alexei Navalny and his “thugs” have a lot to do, so what will they tell us next?” the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Saturday
“After the murder of Alexei Navalny, it’s absurd to perceive Putin as the supposedly legitimate head of the Russian state,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at the Munich Security Conference in Germany Saturday. “He is a thug who maintains power through corruption and violence.”
“There should be consequences for those who are appalled at human rights outrages of this magnitude,” said the British Prime Minister. He said Britain would “look at whether there are individual people that are responsible and whether there are individual measures and actions we can take.” The response would not include financial sanctions or other measures.
U.S. President Joe Biden said on Friday that Washington doesn’t know exactly what happened, “but there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something Putin and his thugs did.”
The Kremlin bristled Friday at the outpouring of anger from world leaders, with Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, calling the statements — issued before medics have released the cause of Navalny’s death — “unacceptable” and “outrageous.”
The Federal Penitentiary Service reported that Navalny became unconscious after walking in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region approximately 1,200 miles from Moscow. The cause of death is still being established, as the ambulance arrived but he couldn’t be revived. “Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin. He was imprisoned on three occasions after his arrest, on a number of charges he has rejected as politically motivated. The last verdict that sentenced Navalny to 19- years was the last one, and he said he understood he would serve a life sentence. “Hours after Navalny’s death was reported, his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, made a dramatic appearance at the Munich Security Conference. She didn’t know if she could believe it but she wanted Putin, his friends and the government to know that they will take responsibility for what they did to my family.
After the last verdict, Navalny said he understood he was “serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime.”
According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the loss of Navalny shows that the sentence for opposition in Russia is not imprisonment but death.
She said she was unsure if she could believe the news from official Russian sources, “but if this is true, I want Putin and everyone around Putin, Putin’s friends, his government to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family and to my husband.”