Navalny’s death: A familiar story of Putin’s foes

In August 2020, Navalny fell critically ill during a flight from Siberia to Moscow. After being hospitalized in Omsk city and recovering in Berlin, he returned to Russia. Tests conducted by laboratories in Germany, France, and Sweden confirmed that Navalny had been poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent called Novichok.

Navalny, a former lawyer, aged 47, had been convicted of promoting extremism amidst other crimes and was serving a 30-year prison sentence. His untimely death occurred after he fell unconscious following a walk at the "Polar Wolf" Arctic penal colony.

Navalny emerged as a prominent opposition figure over a decade ago, speaking publicly about the widespread corruption within Putin's Russia, international media Reuters reported.

Assassination attempts against Putin’s critics have been distressingly frequent during his nearly quarter-century tenure. From poisoning by polonium-laced tea to fatal shootings, the victims and few survivors of these incidents have often blamed Russian authorities, despite Kremlin denials.

Unresolved deaths

Opposition deaths in Russia came to global attention following the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. Litvinenko, a former Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) member turned Putin opponent, was killed in London with polonium-210-laced tea. Before his death, he had told journalists the FSB was still operating poison laboratories dating from the Soviet era. A British inquiry into his death implicated Russian agents.

Former head of the Wagner paramilitary, Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a plane crash on August 23, 2023, two months after he led a failed mutiny in Moscow. The rebellion, triggered by disagreements about the war in Ukraine, briefly shook Putin’s authority. His death is viewed as a retaliation and a stark warning to potential challengers. Despite the fiery crash, no official investigation findings were ever disclosed.

“I have known Prigozhin for a long time, since the 1990s. He made some serious mistakes in life, but he also achieved the necessary results for himself but also for the greater good when I asked him,” Putin was quoted by The Guardian when he appeared to eulogise the warlord.

In 2018, Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent, and his daughter Yulia fell victim to poisoning in the UK, believed to involve the same Novichok nerve agent later used against Navalny. Putin later scorned Skripal as a traitor to his homeland.

The assassination of Boris Nemtsov in 2015, a prominent opposition figure and former deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin was tragic. Nemtsov was fatally shot four times just within sight of the Kremlin. A collaborative investigation by BBC and Bellingcat uncovered that he had been shadowed by Russian Federal Security Service agents in the year leading up to his murder. The investigation also revealed that some of the same agents were implicated in the poisonings of other prominent Kremlin critics.

Yuri Shchekochikhin, an investigative journalist, died of a sudden and violent illness in 2003 while probing corruption and the possible involvement of Russian security services in the 1999 apartment house bombings blamed on Chechen insurgents. Anna Politkovskaya, another journalist known for her critical reporting on Putin and Ramzan Kadyrov, a Chechen leader, was shot dead in 2006.

The likes of opposition figure Ilya Yashin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and Igor Girkin have been given respective sentences in prison of eight-and-a-half, twenty-three, and four years.

Navalny’s aides, Liliya Chanysheva, Vadim Ostanin, and Ksenia Fadeyeva have also been sentenced to seven-and-a-half, nine, and nine-and-a-half years in prison respectively. Independent media organizations are now operating from locations such as Latvia, Turkey, and various other parts of the region.