Alexei Navalny was serving a 19-year sentence in the Polar Wolf colony in Kharp, in Russia’s Far North, when the regional prison service announced on 16 February 2024 that he had died. He was 47. The official explanation was an episode of high blood pressure brought on by a chronic heart arrhythmia. His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, disputed it.
The prison service said he lost consciousness after a walk and that medical workers and an emergency team were called. Russian state news agencies, citing a Labytnangi hospital, reported that an ambulance arrived in under seven minutes and that resuscitation lasted more than half an hour. His spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, confirmed the death the next day and demanded the body be handed to the family.
Conflicting accounts
A day earlier Navalny had appeared at a court hearing by video link, joking and apparently in good health. He had been transferred to the colony in December from a penal colony east of Moscow. At the time of his death he was in solitary confinement for the 27th time, with about 300 days in isolation over his sentence.
An inmate at the colony told a different story. He described unusual activity on the evening of 15 February and said prisoners were told of Navalny’s death at 10:00 the next morning, well before the public announcement. The group Gulagu.net said several cameras at the colony were switched off on 16 February.
Then the body went missing. The colony said it had been sent to a morgue in Salekhard, but it was not found there. On 19 February Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, and his lawyers were refused entry to the morgue where it was believed to be. Investigators said it had gone for a “chemical examination” and would not be released for 14 more days. Yulia Navalnaya said she believed the authorities were waiting for traces of Novichok to fade. The remains reached his mother on 24 February, after investigators, she said, had pressed her to agree to a secret burial.
Official findings and later claims
On 26 July 2024 Russia’s Investigative Committee concluded that the death “does not have a criminal nature” and came from a “combined disease”. The Insider reported that an early draft of the committee’s report listed abdominal pain, vomiting and convulsions, and that those entries were gone from the final version. In February 2026, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands said in a joint statement that tests on samples from his body “conclusively” showed epibatidine, a toxin found in poison dart frogs. US intelligence agencies later concluded that Putin likely did not order the killing. His funeral took place in Moscow on 1 March 2024.
The politician
DW described Navalny as a new kind of opposition leader, one who reached a generation of younger Russians through social media. Born near Moscow in 1976, he studied law and became a lawyer and businessman before joining the Yabloko party in his mid-20s. Yabloko expelled him in 2007 over his nationalist tendencies. DW noted that his remarks in that period cost him the sympathy of many in the opposition, and that his apologies, including one for calling Georgians “rodents”, were not wholly convincing.
His Anti-Corruption Foundation, founded in 2011, produced documentaries on the Russian elite. “Putin’s Palace,” about a vast Black Sea residence, passed 100 million views within two weeks of going online in early 2021. In 2013 he came second in Moscow’s mayoral election, with almost a third of the vote. He was barred from the 2018 presidential race. His protests drew tens of thousands onto the streets.
After the 2020 Novichok poisoning and treatment in Germany, he went home and was arrested on arrival. DW also recorded the criticism he drew: self-promotion, and arrogance toward journalists, according to the outlet. His following of well-educated urban voters, it said, left him unable to reach many older Russians who believed state propaganda calling him a criminal and a puppet of the West.
Sources
- Death and funeral of Alexei Navalny – Wikipedia
- Alexei Navalny dies in Russian prison aged 47 — authorities
- Alexei Navalny
