Milan Kammermayer/AFP via Getty Images
The death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a penal colony in Russia's northern Arctic was shocking but not at all surprising.
For years, critics and opponents of Russian leader Vladimir Putin have become victims of shootings, poisoning with radioactive or nerve agents, or jumping to their deaths from open windows.
Navalny was just 47 years old, and the day before his death he appeared in court at a penal colony known as “Polar Wolf” to receive a lengthy sentence.
Evgenia Kara-Murza, the wife of another imprisoned opposition leader. said inA previous tweet said: “He looked great and was in good spirits as always.”
Navalny was seen smiling in a video of the court hearing and even sent a Valentine's Day greeting to his wife. Less than 24 hours later, prison officials announced he had died.
Before being sent to a Russian prison in 2021, Navalny survived a poisoning attempt that nearly took his life during a flight from Siberia to Moscow. He received emergency treatment in Berlin, where doctors said he had been poisoned with a nerve agent called Novichok. After recovering, he returned to Russia, despite knowing the risks such a move would entail.
Navalny joins a long list of opposition figures, critics and journalists from London to Moscow who have died under suspicious circumstances or, in some cases, survived poisoning.
Boris Nemtsov
One of the most notable deaths was his predecessor, Boris Nemtsov, the head of the Russian opposition against Putin's 20-year rule.
Nemtsov, who was an outspoken critic of Putin, served as deputy prime minister under Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.
He was shot dead on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015 at the age of 55 while walking home at night with his girlfriend.
Alexander Litvinenko
Perhaps the most notable death was that of former spy Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned with the highly radioactive substance polonium in a central London hotel in 2006. Litvinenko, a former Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agent, fell ill and died after meeting over tea with two Russian agents at a hotel in London. He was 44 years old.
He accused Putin of complicity in the 1999 Russian apartment bombings that killed hundreds of people, and gave Putin a pretext for starting a second Chechen war.
Sergei Skripal
Another high-profile poisoning case is that of retired intelligence colonel Sergei Skripal, 66, who fell ill with his daughter Yulia while visiting the English cathedral city of Salisbury in 2018. Skripal previously served 13 years in a Russian prison. Working with British spy agency MI6 to identify Russian spies in Europe.
Skripal and his daughter survived the poisoning, which British doctors said was caused by Novichok, the same nerve agent used on Navalny.
Anna Politkovskaya
These suspicious incidents date back to the early days of Putin's presidency. In October 2006, journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in the lobby of her apartment. She was 48 years old.
Politkovskaya came into conflict with the Kremlin over her critical reporting on Russia's war in Chechnya. She was threatened by Russian forces in Chechnya, survived poisoning and was mock-executed.
Evgeny Prigogine
And more recently, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was known as 'Putin's chef' before leading the Russian mercenary Wagner Group last summer, died when the plane he was riding exploded in mid-air. He was 62 years old.
The unexplained explosion came two months after Prigozhin's mercenary army marched into Moscow in protest at the Russian military leadership's lack of support for the Wagner group, which has led some of Ukraine's deadliest fighting. Putin and Prigozhin later brokered a deal to end the rebellion in exchange for amnesty and deportation of the rebels to neighboring Belarus.
Ravil Maganov
Just a year ago, Ravil Maganov, head of Lukoil, Russia's second-largest oil producer, apparently fell to his death from a sixth-floor window at a Moscow hospital at the age of 67. In early 2022, President Putin launched Ukraine.
Sergey Magnitsky
And Navalny is far from the first Putin critic to die in a Russian prison. In 2009, Sergei Magnitsky, who had been imprisoned in Russia for tax evasion after accusing Russian officials of large-scale corruption, died in prison at the age of 37.
Human rights groups, including the Kremlin's Human Rights Committee, concluded that he had been beaten and denied medical treatment. The incident became so famous that the U.S. Congress passed the Magnitsky Act in 2012, banning Russian human rights abusers from entering the United States. In return, Russia banned American citizens from adopting Russian orphans.