Vladimir Putin's most prominent critic is dead, according to Russia's prison service. The prison service in the Yamalo-Nenets district said Alexei Navalny "felt unwell" during a walk Friday and "almost immediately lost consciousness," the BBC reports. Efforts to resuscitate him proved unsuccessful and emergency doctors "declared the prisoner dead," per the prison service. The Kremlin said it had no information on the cause of death, reports the Guardian.
Last month, the 47-year-old said he was being held in a tiny punishment cell at the Arctic penal colony he was moved to in December. Michael Carpenter, the US ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, tweeted Thursday that "Navalny has been thrown into a punitive isolation cell for an unimaginable 27th time. Navalny faces a 15-day stint in solitary confinement."
Navalny had another 19 years tacked on to his prison sentence in July, when he was already serving a long sentence on charges he said were politically motivated. Before the move to the remote Arctic prison was confirmed, lawyers said he had suffered "a serious health-related incident" and they were unable to find him. The US expressed its "deep concern" at the time. Navalny, who led large anti-Kremlin protests, went to Germany for treatment after he was poisoned with a nerve agent in 2020. He was arrested when he returned to Russia in 2021. (More Alexei Navalny stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
