Alexei Navalny Death: More Than 400 Detained In Russia as Country Mourns Putin's Fiercest Foe

People lay flowers paying the last respect to Alexei Navalny at the monument, a large boulder from the Solovetsky islands, where the first camp of the Gulag political prison system was established in Moscow on Saturday morning, Feb. 17, 2024. (AP)

More than 400 people were detained in Russia while paying tribute to opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died at a remote Arctic penal colony, a rights group reported. The news of Navalny’s death on Friday reverberated across the globe, and hundreds of people in some Russian cities paid tribute to President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe.

Police reportedly detained 401 people in over a dozen cities, by Saturday night, according to the OVD-Info rights group that tracks political arrests and provides legal aid. More than 200 arrests were made in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, the group said. Among those detained there was Grigory Mikhnov-Voitenko, a priest of the Apostolic Orthodox Church, a religious group independent of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Voitenko was arrested on Saturday morning outside his home. He was charged with organising a rally and placed in a holding cell in a police precinct, but was later hospitalised with a stroke, OVD-Info reported. Courts in St. Petersburg have ordered 42 of those detained on Friday to serve from one to six days in jail, while nine others were fined, court officials said late on Saturday. In Moscow, at least six people were ordered to serve 15 days in jail, according to OVD-Info. One person was also jailed in the southern city of Krasnodar and two more in the city of Bryansk, the group said.

The news of Navalny’s death came a month before a presidential election in Russia. Navalny’s team said Saturday that the politician was “murdered” and accused the authorities of deliberately stalling the release of the body, with Navalny’s mother and lawyers getting contradicting information from various institutions where they went in their quest to retrieve the body. “They’re driving us around in circles and covering their tracks,” Navalny’s spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said on Saturday.

“Everything there is covered with cameras in the colony. Every step he took was filmed from all angles all these years. Each employee has a video recorder. In two days, there has been not a single video leaked or published. There is no room for uncertainty here,” Navalny’s closest ally and strategist Leonid Volkov said Sunday. A note handed to Navalny’s mother stated that he died at 2:17 p.m. Friday, according to Yarmysh.

Prison officials told his mother when she arrived at the penal colony Saturday that her son had perished from “sudden death syndrome,” Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, wrote on X. Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service reported that Navalny felt sick after a walk Friday and became unconscious at the penal colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,900 kilometers northeast of Moscow. An ambulance arrived, but he couldn’t be revived, the service said.

(Witha agency inputs)