A photo of Alexei Navalny and candles are seen in front of the Russian Consulate in Krakow, Poland, on February 16, 2024.
Jakub Porzycki | Photo only | Getty Images
A spokesman for Putin dissident Alexei Navalny confirmed his death on Saturday after Russian media reported his death on Friday, citing the prison administration of the Yamal-Nenets region where he was detained.
Navalny’s team said at the time that it could not confirm the activist’s death.
On Saturday, his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said in a Google-translated post on the social media platform X that Navalny’s mother had received official notification of his death.
“His death occurred on February 16 at 2:17 p.m. local time, according to the official message to Alexei’s mother. An employee of the colony said that Navalny’s body was now in Salekhard,” Yarmysh said, adding that the body had been collected by the Investigative Committee of Russia for further investigation. On Friday, the IC said in a Google-translated post on Telegram that it was organizing a procedural review of Navalny’s death.
“We demand the immediate handover of Alexei Navalny’s body to his family,” Yarmysh said on Saturday.
Navalny’s death comes less than a month before presidential elections that are widely expected to give President Vladimir Putin another mandate at the country’s helm. Opposition leader Navalny has been serving a 19-year prison sentence in Russia since 2021 on extremism charges after recovering from nerve agent poisoning.
His death triggered a tidal wave of dismay among international leaders and senior figures, some of whom questioned Putin’s role in the incident. Navalny’s death and Moscow’s ongoing all-out invasion of Ukraine, soon to take place for a second time this month, dominated discussions at the Munich Security Conference this weekend.
“Putin kills whoever he wants, be it an opposition leader or anyone he sees as a target,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said at the MSC on Saturday. He accused Putin of holding onto power “through corruption and violence” and said that Putin’s death was sending a clear message to those gathered at the conference.
At the time of writing, more than 200 people were arrested in Russia during rallies in memory of Navalny that took place on Friday and Saturday, a spokesperson for the Russian human rights group OVD-info told CNBC. Of these, more than 27 people came from Moscow and 108 from St. Petersburg.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said on Friday that the West’s reaction to Navalny’s reported death was “self-revealing” as there was no forensic investigation at this time. The Kremlin has previously denied any involvement in Navalny’s poisoning and pledged to investigate his death.
In a second X update translated by Google, Yarmysh said that Navalny’s mother and her lawyer had tried to visit the closed morgue. CNBC could not independently verify the report.
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2024-02-17 11:43:27
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