Putin critic smiles in final footage just one day before dying on prison 'walk'

16 February 2024 , 17:14

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Putin critic smiles in final footage just one day before dying on prison 'walk'

Alexei Navalny was last seen only one day before his death, looking well and laughing during a court hearing via video link.

President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent opponent and a fierce critic of the bloody war in Ukraine "fell ill after a walk in the prison’s yard and "lost consciousness almost immediately", the Russian prison service said today. World leaders and Russian opposition activists wasted no time Friday in blaming the reported death of the imprisoned opposition leader on President Vladimir Putin and his government.

A courtroom video from 15 February 2024 shows the 47-year-old making a remote appearance from his prison in the Arctic Circle to a court in Kovrov. "Yesterday Navalny looked to be fine during a court hearing where he spoke via video link from his penal colony," Francis Scarr of BBC Monitoring wrote on X, formerly Twitter, sharing a video of Navalny. Anton Gerashchenko, a former adviser to Ukraine's Ministry of Internal Affairs, also shared the video and said: "Yesterday, Aleksey Navalny spoke in court via video link. He seemed to be in good health and even joked." Ned Davies of BBC responded to the video, saying: "Here's Navalny showing what makes him unique in this video after his final prison transfer. He kept injecting humour and positivity into those around him even in the bleakest of situations."

Alexei Navalny during his last court appearance

News of Navalny's death flooded across Russian Telegram news channels and was later confirmed in a curt announcement by prison authorities, prompting the United Nations Human Rights Office to call for an independent investigation. But Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, cautioned that she did not know whether to believe the "terrible" news as it has only come from state sources in Russia and added Putin and his government are "always lying".

But, if it is true, she "would like Putin and all his coterie, Putin's friends, his government" to know that they will be accountable for what they've done to "our country, to my family, and to my husband. They will be liable for that. That day will come very soon." Navalny had been behind bars since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow to face certain arrest after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. Since then, he has been convicted three times and rejected each case as politically motivated.

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Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny (AP)

After the last verdict, Navalny said he understood that he was “serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime.” Whenever Putin spoke about Navalny, he made it a point to never mention the activist by name, referring to him as “that person” or similar wording, in an apparent effort to diminish his importance.

Rachel Hagan