More than 100 Navalny mourners in Russia arrested by balaclava-clad forces
Around 100 Alexei Navalny mourners in Russia have been arrested by brutal Kremlin forces, just hours after his reported death.
President Vladimir Putin's most vocal critic, who was serving 19 years on extremism charges that were widely seen as politically motivated and bogus, died in an Arctic Circle jail today, according to the prison service. According to the Russian human rights group OVD-info, around 100 detentions have occurred in eight cities, including RusNews reporter, Elina Kozich. People were filmed being grabbed by officers and put in the back of vans in St Petersburg as Dmitry Anisimov, spokesperson for OVD-Info, said it is likely even more people have been detained.
Freelance journalist Alec Luhn posted footage on X, formerly Twitter, showing officers removing flowers from a monument in the city of Yekaterinburg. He later said police cordoned off the Gulag memorial in Kazan and detained several people at a makeshift gathering in memory of Navalny while other onlookers threw snow at the officers. Prosecutors warned Russians not to join any mass protests and several people were detained both in central Moscow and in other cities including St Petersburg, Murmansk and Nizhny-Novgorod.
Alexei Navalny in 2018 (AFP via Getty Images)One of Navalny's closest allies, Anti-Corruption Foundation chief Ivan Zhdanov, said it was "highly likely" Navalny had been killed and that a "murder had actually happened". The prison service in Russia's Yamalo-Nenets district where Navalny was being held said he had "felt unwell" after a walk on Friday. He had "almost immediately lost consciousness", it said in a statement, adding that an emergency medical team had immediately been called and tried to resuscitate him but without success.
Novaya Gazeta said their photographer Alexei Dushutin was detained in the city at the Memorial to Victims of Political Repression. Footage taken by RusNews shows participants and journalists being grabbed and led away by balaclava-clad officers. Other footage showed police in the capital ripping placards away from attendees and dragging attendees violently away.
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Britain has joined other Western countries in condemning the Kremlin and the Foreign Office said on Friday it has "summoned the Russian Embassy to make clear that we hold the Russian authorities fully responsible". It came as a crowd of protesters gathered outside the Russian Embassy in central London in the wake of his death.
Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron, who was at the Munich Security Conference on Friday, told broadcasters: "There should be consequences because there's no doubt in my mind that this man was a brave fighter against corruption, for justice, for democracy, and look what Putin's Russia did to him. They trumped up charges, they imprisoned him, they poisoned him, they sent him to an Arctic penal colony, and he's died, and that is because of the action that Putin's Russia took."
Police officers detain a woman who laid flowers to Alexei Navalny at the Memorial to Victims of Political Repression in St. Petersburg (AP)Fiona Hill, a former official on the US National Security Council, said to the Financial Times: "This is just [Putin] saying: ‘It’s just me, guys. You’d better get used to it." She said the death must "terrify" Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Continuing: "[Putin] is saying: ‘I don’t care who I kill and how many people I kill. I’ll get whatever I want.’"
Putin, who is running for re-election in a month, has been informed of his death, according to the state news agency TASS.
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