Russia’s famous opposition figure Alexey Navalny died on Friday after going for a walk at the “Polar Wolf” Arctic penal colony where he had been serving a lengthy sentence, according to the Russian prison service, as reported Russian News Agency TASS on Friday.
At penal colony No. 3, convict A. A. Navalny started to feel ill after a walk, and fainted shortly thereafter. “The facility’s medical staff arrived immediately, and an ambulance was called,” reported the agency in a statement.
Navalny felt unwell after taking a trip around the IK-3 correctional colony in Kharp, which is approximately 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow and near the Arctic Circle.
“All necessary resuscitation procedures have been carried out without any positive results. The ambulance crew pronounced the convict dead. The cause of death is being established,” concluded the statement.
Navalny, a 47-year-old former lawyer, rose to popularity more than a decade ago with blogs about widespread corruption and opulence among Russia’s elite, whom he described as “crooks and thieves.”
Navalny, who earned two suspended sentences in the Yves Rocher case, was proclaimed “wanted” for multiple breaches of these sentencing guidelines.
On February 2, 2021, Moscow’s Simonovsky District Court commuted Alexey Navalny’s deferred sentence to jail. In March, 2022, he was found guilty of contempt of court and fraud related to campaign financing, and in August 2023, of organizing an extremist community.