Russia Flash Report for 16 FEB 2024 13:30 PST - Alexei Navalny, Dead at 47

Alexei Navalny, 47, died at the IK-3 "Polar Wolf" Penal Colony in Kharp, Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Russia, where he was incarcerated. Navalny was a political prisoner serving a 30.5-year prison sentence and was considered a rival of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the 2010s.

The Federal Penitentiary Service claimed that after going on a walk, Navalny reported he felt unwell, collapsed, and died.

Navalny was born in 1976 near Moscow and was a graduate of the Peoples' Friendship University in 1998, where he received his law degree. He received a second degree in finance - securities and exchanges in 2001 and was a Yale Fellow in 2010.

Navalny entered politics in 2000, when the State Duma took its first steps of many to reverse the brief period of relaxed government control after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the late 2000s, Navalny aligned himself with the anti-immigration movement in Russia.

He was arrested in 2011 for being one of the organizers of protests in Moscow after claims of election irregularities were made. He was arrested again in 2012 after leading a protest of up to 20,000 people against the reelection of President Putin. That same year, his political allies created the People's Alliance Party. He tried to file documents twice to have the party recognized, once in 2013 and again in 2014, and both efforts were rejected.

In 2013 he ran for mayor of the city of Moscow. During his campaign, a court found him guilty of fraud and sentenced him to 5 years in prison. He announced he was withdrawing from the race, but on appeal of the conviction, the court suspended the conviction. He came in second with 27% of the vote, outperforming the polls, and refused to recognize the results. The criminal case against him was dismissed after an appeals court decided Navalny's rights had been violated.

In 2016, Navalny announced he would run for President in the 2018 elections. Less than two months later, another court reinstated the 2013 conviction for fraud, resentencing him to five years in prison, which would negate his ability to run for office.

Navalny continued to run on an anti-corruption platform and, in April 2017, was attacked twice. The second assault left him blind in his right eye. Shortly after, he was arrested for participating in protests against President Putin and was jailed for 25 days. Navalny was arrested again in September 2017 and sentenced to 20 days for organizing protests.

In December, the Central Election Commission of Russia revoked Navalny's candid status, citing his earlier fraud and corruption conviction. In 2018, Navalny was arrested twice. In January, he called to boycott the elections, and in May, he organized protests against President Putin's inauguration. In both incidents, hundreds more were arrested. 

He was arrested again in July 2019 and sentenced to 10 days in jail and then another 30 days. While incarcerated, he was hospitalized for what prison officials called an allergic reaction. His supporters and wife believe he was poisoned.

On August 20, 2020, while on a flight to Moscow, Navalny became critically ill, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing. Initially, hospital officials said he had been poisoned but later recanted their diagnosis. A German charity arranged for his evacuation from Omsk. Doctors concluded he was poisoned by the Russian nerve agent Novichok. A joint investigation determined that Navalny had been poisoned by the FSB, likely from a hotel room water bottle. 

In January 2021, Navalny traveled back to Russia and was immediately arrested for "violating the terms of his probation," which forbade him from leaving the country. Mass protests erupted on January 23 after an investigation led by Navalny exposed President Putin had diverted $1 billion to build a private palace near Sochi, Russia, using government funds.

Less than two weeks later, a Moscow court reinstated his suspended sentence from 2013 and ordered him sent to a labor penal colony for 2.5 years. A series of protests ensued, and when Navalny's earlier anti-immigration nationalist stances resurfaced, Amnesty International removed his "prisoner of conscience" status.

Navalny was poisoned again in April 2021 after accusing the Federal Penitentiary Service of torture. Ten days later, a Moscow court labeled him an "extremist," as well as most of the political organizations he was affiliated with or founded. 

In February 2022, he was charged with fraud and faced another 10 to 15 years in prison. On March 22, he was sentenced to nine years in a maximum security penal colony. He was repeatedly placed in solitary confinement and likely suffered a COVID-19 infection in January 2023. Over 400 doctors signed an open letter to President Putin calling for Navalny to receive treatment and to end his systemic abuse. The Federal Penitentiary Service responded by sending him to a maximum security solitary confinement cell for six months.

On August 4, 2023, Navalny was sentenced to another 19 years in prison for "publicly inciting extremist activity" and "rehabilitating Nazi ideology" under Russia's so-called "don't say war laws," which were passed in March 2022, and amended in September 2022 - while Navalny was already imprisoned. Russia has since arrested three of Navalny's defense lawyers, charging them with extremism, and issued warrants for two more who have since fled the country.

He disappeared in December and, on Christmas Day, reappeared in Kharp at the Polar Wolf strict regime penal colony, located above the Arctic Circle, 1,950 kilometers from Moscow on the east slope of the Ural Mountains. In 2000, Rockhound Richard W. Hughes described Kharp as "a monochrome mixture of rust and concrete, a gray gulag of a town, whose major industries are cement and prisons."

His February 16 death seemed more of an inevitability than a surprise. And Putin's Purge continues.