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.

Russian opposition leader’s death described as political assassination attributable to president

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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”.

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.

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.