Oh my goodness.
Russia's most significant opposition leader for the past decade, Alexei Navalny, has died in prison inside the Arctic Circle, the prison service has said.
Seen as President Vladimir Putin's most vociferous critic, Navalny was serving a 19-year jail term on charges widely considered politically motivated.
Yeah, so Navalny tried to run against Putin in 2018 and was barred from doing so. He lived as a literal exile for years. In 2020, he was poisoned with a nerve agent in an assassination attempt while visiting Siberia but was saved by an emergency flight to a German hospital.
In 2021, Navalny decided to return to Russia as a statement of courage and was swiftly arrested after his flight from Berlin landed. He was then brought before a kangaroo court and sentenced to two decades in jail before he was moved to a penal colony in the Arctic (where Russians send people to die).
He was moved to an Arctic penal colony, said to be one of Russia's toughest jails, late last year.
The prison service in the Yamalo-Nenets district said Navalny had "'elt unwell' after a walk on Friday.
He had 'almost immediately lost consciousness,' it said in a statement, adding that an emergency medical team had immediately been called and tried to resuscitate him but without success.
'The emergency doctors declared the prisoner dead. Cause of death is being established.'
We all know what happened, more or less.
Navalny's lawyer Leonid Solovyov told Russian media he would not be commenting yet, although his close aide Leonid Volkov wrote on X: 'Russian authorities publish a confession that they killed Alexei Navalny in prison. We do not have any way to confirm it or to prove this isn't true.'
A spokesman for Putin said the Russian dictator had been informed of Navalny's death. I'm sure Putin is torn up. 😑
This was Navalny's last social post through his team:
How the White House will respond remains to be seen.
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