His team confirms his death
OVD-Info: Searching for the body of a Russian politician who was killed by a rally on Saturday night in St. Petersburg, Russia
Less than a month before an election that will bring President Vladimir Putin another six years in power, Navalny’s death deprived the Russian opposition of its most well-known and inspiring politician.
The cause of Navalny’s death had not been established, and new investigations were being done with the results being announced next week, Yarmysh said. She said the body will not be handed over to his relatives until the investigations are complete.
The news was broadcast around the globe, and hundreds of people in dozens of Russian cities streamed to monuments and memorial sites to honor the politician who was killed. 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. Among those detained there was Grigory Mikhnov-Voitenko, a priest of the Apostolic Orthodox Church — a religious group independent of the Russian Orthodox Church — who announced plans on social media to hold a memorial service for Navalny and was arrested on Saturday morning outside his home. 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. 43 people were arrested on Friday, and ordered to serve one to six days in jail, and nine others were fined. At least six people were sentenced to 15 days in jail in Moscow. 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 mother and lawyers got conflicting information from various institutions where they went in their quest to retrieve the body of the politician who Navalny said was murdered. “They’re driving us around in circles and covering their tracks,” Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said on Saturday. Everything is covered with cameras in the colony. Every step he took was filmed from all angles all these years. Employees have a video recorder. In two days, there has been not a single video leaked or published. Navalny’s closest ally and strategist said there was no room for uncertainty. Yarmysh said that a note had been handed to Navalny’s mother. The director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation said that the prison officials told his mother that her son had died from sudden death syndrome.
The memorial items were taken down on Saturday but people continued to show their respects. In Moscow, a large group of people chanted “shame” as police dragged a screaming woman from the crowd, video shared on social media showed.
Police in other cities shut down some of the memorial and took pictures of those who came to write down their data in a clear attempt to intimidate them.
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“After the murder of Mr. Navalny, it’s ridiculous to think that Putin is the legitimate leader of the Russian state,” Zelenskyy said. “He is a thug who maintains power through corruption and violence.”
Cameron told broadcasters in Germany that “there should be consequences” for abuses of human rights. 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.” Cameron did not say whether the response would consist of 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.”
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. Each case in which he was convicted was politically motivated and he received a 19-year prison sentence for extremism.
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.”
The loss of Navalny shows that the sentence in Russia now for opposition is death, said the former British ambassador to Belarus and senior fellow for Russia & Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
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.”
Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who was sentenced to prison earlier this year, was found dead in his prison cell on Friday. A spokesperson for Navalny’s foundation, Kira Yarmysh, said that a note had been handed to Navalny’s mother. “They’re driving us around in circles and covering their tracks,” Yarmysh added.