Russian activist and Putin critic Alexei Navalny died in prison. The 47-year-old opposition leader was being held in prison about 65 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. Navalny, 47, one of Putin's most visible and persistent critics, was being held in a prison about 19 miles north of the Arctic Circle, where he was sentenced to 40 years under a "special regime." He appeared very emaciated with his head shaved in a video taken from prison in January.
The Kremlin said there was no information about the cause of death.
He went missing in early December from a prison in the Vladimir region, where he was serving a 2010-year sentence on charges of extremism and fraud in what he called political revenge for leading the anti-Kremlin opposition in the 30s. Navalny, a former nationalist politician, helped incite the 2011-12 protests in Russia by campaigning against election fraud and government corruption, investigating Putin's inner circle and sharing his findings in stylish videos that attracted hundreds of millions of views.
The high point in his political career came in 2013, when he won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral contest that few believed was free or fair. He has caused trouble for the Kremlin for years by describing a palace built on the Black Sea for Putin's personal use, mansions and yachts used by former president Dmitry Medvedev, and a sex worker who connected a senior foreign policy official to Russia.
In 2020, Alexei Navalny fell into a coma after Russia's FSB security service suspected poisoning using novichok and went to Germany for treatment. After his recovery, he returned to Russia in January 2021; There he was arrested on parole violation charges and sentenced to the first of several prison terms that would total more than 30 years behind bars.