US to impose over 500 new sanctions on Russia after Navalny, main opposition leader to Putin, died after being imprisoned by Kremlin
Joe Biden met with Alexei Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, and the activist’s daughter, Dasha Navalnaya, in California on Thursday.
Navalny, the main opposition leader to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, died in an Arctic penal colony last Friday after being imprisoned by the Kremlin.
Continue reading...Lyudmila Navalnaya says she was told to agree to secret burial as Kremlin appears to fear funeral turning into political action
Alexei Navalny’s mother has said she has been shown the body of her son but that the authorities were “blackmailing” her into burying him in a secret ceremony without mourners.
In a video message on Thursday, Lyudmila Navalnaya said she was driven to a morgue on Wednesday evening where authorities showed her the body.
Continue reading...Tino Chrupalla says it is ‘unbearable’ the extent to which Putin has been blamed, with similar comments from Italian deputy PM Matteo Salvini
The Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a key ally of Donald Trump, has been added to a list of “terrorists and extremists” kept by Russia’s state financial monitoring agency.
Tass, the state-run news agency, first reported the move by Rosfinmonitoring, which allows authorities to freeze Russian bank accounts, though in Graham’s case is likely to be chiefly symbolic.
Continue reading...Ilya Yashin says Vladimir Putin ordered murder of Alexei Navalny, as Russian state opens new criminal case against latter’s brother
A jailed member of Russia’s opposition has said he fears for his life after the death of Alexei Navalny, as the Putin critic’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, demanded the Kremlin release his body so he can be “buried with dignity”.
Yet as the appeals came, the Russian state opened a new criminal case on Tuesday against Navalny’s brother, Oleg, signalling it would continue the pressure on his family and supporters as they seek to mourn the late opposition leader.
Continue reading...Widow of Alexei Navalny says she wants to ‘build a free Russia’ and says she will reveal why ‘Putin killed him’
Yulia Navalnaya has published a video address in which she vowed to continue her late husband’s political work and called on Russians to rally around her as Alexei Navalny’s family were told they would not get access to his body for another two weeks.
“I will continue Alexei Navalny’s work … I want to live in a free Russia, I want to build a free Russia,” Navalnaya said in a powerful nine-minute video published on social media.
Continue reading...Foreign Office says it will not trade Putin opponent for spies in jail in Britain, despite fears for his life after Navalny’s death
A Foreign Office minister has ruled out a prisoner swap for the imprisoned Russian opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza, a British citizen, who MPs have expressed concern about after the death of Alexei Navalny.
Kara-Murza’s wife was now adamant that she wanted everything to be done to get her her husband out of Russia, said the Conservative backbencher Bob Seely, who urged the government to countenance swapping imprisoned spies for the pro-democracy activist who was now the most high-profile Russian political prisoner.
Continue reading...Ex-president links Russian opposition leader’s death to his own political grievances after criticism from Haley
Donald Trump has offered a belated acknowledgement of the purportedly sudden death of Alexei Navalny, three days after the Russian opposition leader collapsed in one of Russia’s penal colonies. But Trump failed to join with – or acknowledge – international outrage at Navalny’s political nemesis, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” Trump posted on his Truth Social network. The former US president and presumptive Republican White House nominee added: “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction.”
Continue reading...Outrage over jailed opposition leader’s death grows with detention of over 350 people in Russia who attended vigils
Alexei Navalny’s allies have accused the Kremlin of “covering their tracks” as, two days after the imprisoned opposition leader’s death in custody, uncertainty continued to surround the whereabouts of his body and what it may reveal about how he died.
Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, and his lawyer travelled over the weekend to the notorious “Polar Wolf” IK-3 penal colony in Russia’s Arctic north, where Navalny had been held since last year, to track down his body, but received contradicting information from various institutions over its location and left without recovering or seeing her son.
Continue reading...With Ukraine retreating and western sanctions having little impact, the Russian president is growing bolder and may embark on more reckless moves
Vladimir Putin smiled and looked unusually festive on Friday as he praised factory workers and joked with state reporters at an industrial plant in the Ural city of Chelyabinsk.
Putin’s confidence was unmistakable – a sign of his full belief that he would get away with the death that day of his biggest critic in jail while outlasting Ukraine on the battlefield.
Continue reading...In Russia, the battle to eradicate the opposition leader and his legacy will continue long after his death
In Russia, it is not enough to kill an opposition leader. His ageing mother must travel to the Arctic Circle to search a prison colony and a morgue for his body. Russians with the temerity to lay carnations in his memory must be detained.
Even a preliminary cause of death, “sudden death syndrome”, was misleading, as though his death behind bars was not years in the making.
Continue reading...Retreat from Avdiivka deals military blow and hands initiative to Putin as war’s second anniversary looms
Volodymyr Zelenskiy issued a desperate plea for fresh arms on Saturday as his army commanders announced that Ukrainian troops were pulling out of the key eastern city of Avdiivka, handing Moscow its first major military victory since last May, just days before the second anniversary of the Russian invasion.
Ukraine’s leader told the Munich Security Conference that the slowing of weapons supplies was having a direct impact on the frontline and was forcing Ukraine to cede territory.
Continue reading...Russian opposition leader’s death occurred on Friday, say supporters, but official cause remains disputed
The death of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, has been confirmed by his representatives, who are calling for the return of his body amid confusion over the cause of the death of Putin’s once most significant political challenger.
Navalny, 47, died in jail on 16 February at 2.17pm local time, said his official spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, citing a message from Navalny’s mother and challenging Russia’s official explanation that Navalny died after a fall at the Arctic penal colony where he was being held.
Continue reading...Sanctions already imposed on Russia over Ukraine have not deterred the Kremlin. Will unconventional approaches work?
When Joe Biden met Vladimir Putin in 2021, the leaders staring at each other across the library of a Geneva lakeside villa, the US president warned there would be “devastating consequences” for Moscow if Alexei Navalny died in Russian custody.
Biden was reminded of those words on Friday following Navalny’s sudden, mysterious death in a Russian penal colony, and his response was to point out that the warning had been delivered three years ago and that, in the intervening time, Putin had “faced a hell of a lot of consequences”.
Continue reading...Views on what the future might hold at a pivotal moment for the country’s fractured pro-democracy movement
Western leaders have held Vladimir Putin responsible for Alexei Navalny’s death in prison, where he had been sentenced to 19 years under a “special regime”.
Navalny’s death – a pivotal moment for the country’s fractured pro-democracy movement – sent waves of anger and despair through the ranks of his supporters in Russia and abroad.
Continue reading...Demonstrators from Berlin to Vilnius, London to Rome chant slogans against Russian president and demand accountability over death
Hundreds of protesters, many of them Russian émigrés, gathered in cities across Europe and beyond on Friday to express their outrage over the death of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
Often gathering outside Russian embassies, they chanted slogans critical of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, whom many blame for the activist’s death, holding up signs calling him a “killer” and demanding accountability.
Continue reading...Peter Dutton says Russian president a ‘murderous dictator’ while foreign affairs minister Penny Wong says Navalny an inspiring figure
The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has joined western governments across the globe in holding Vladimir Putin responsible for the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Navalny, 47, died while being held in a jail about 65km north of the Arctic Circle, where he had been sentenced to 19 years under a “special regime”.
Continue reading...Russian opposition leader’s death described as political assassination attributable to president
Western leaders have held Vladimir Putin directly responsible for the death of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, as the US president, Joe Biden, called it “yet more proof of Putin’s brutality”.
Navalny, 47, died while being held in a jail about 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle, where he had been sentenced to 19 years under a “special regime”.
Continue reading...Wife of Alexei Navalny addresses hushed crowd of politicians and vows Putin will be brought to justice
A geopolitical conference turned deeply personal on Friday as senior officials from around the globe heard first-hand from Alexei Navalny’s wife hours after news broke of his reported death.
Yulia Navalnaya was in Germany for the Munich security conference, which brings together national leaders, foreign ministers and experts, when Russia’s prison service announced that Navalny had died in jail.
Continue reading...Perhaps he might have been able to coordinate from abroad a powerful anti-war movement. Instead he is silenced for ever
For years, Alexei Navalny remained clear on a key message: he was a Russian opposition politician and he was determined to stay in Russia. Exile, he believed, would lead to political irrelevance, and calling on Russians to oppose Vladimir Putin from the safety of the west would mark him as a hypocrite.
Navalny stuck to this belief as the political climate in Russia deteriorated and the space for dissent narrowed ever further, and even after he was poisoned with novichok in 2020, leading to his ill-fated decision to return early the next year.
Continue reading...Those who tried to visit or write to the journalist, who is serving a 25-year sentence, were unsuccessful
The prominent Russian opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is serving a 25-year sentence for treason, has disappeared from the Siberian prison where he was behind bars, according to his supporters.
Kara-Murza, 42, was being held in a prison in the Omsk region, but a letter sent to him by the activist and journalist Alexander Podrabinek was returned with the notation that the inmate was no longer there, Podrabinek said on Facebook.
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