“Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death,” said U.S. President Joe Biden, who professed to be “surprised and outraged” by the announcement that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in prison at the age of 47. Navalny, an active opposition leader for more than two decades and the principle leader of opposition to President Vladimir Putin since 2015, had been imprisoned in Russia’s distinctive penal colony system since February 2021, when he received the first of three prison sentences totaling over 30 years of detention. Since December 2023, Navalny has been held in a facility known as “Polar Wolf,” located in a small settlement in the remote Arctic Yamalo-Nenets region.
While traveling within Russia in August 2020, Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, a Russian-manufactured nerve agent. He received emergency medical treatment in Germany, but after recovering, he nevertheless returned home to continue his opposition activities despite the prospect of immediate arrest and prosecution. Throughout Navalny’s detention, he and his supporters have alleged that he has been denied medical treatment, subjected to sleep deprivation techniques, and held in solitary confinement. He also carried out hunger strikes to protest his conditions. These factors are believed to have caused his health to decline, though spokesmen for his political movement have expressed skepticism that his death in custody was health-related, with some directly alleging that he was killed. Kremlin spokesmen have denied any government responsibility for Navalny’s death.
When Navalny was first sentenced in 2021, Biden warned Russia of “devastating” consequences if Navalny died in prison. Now that he has died while incarcerated, no such consequences were evident in Biden’s statement. When asked, the U.S. president suggested that Russia had already suffered serious consequences as a result of its invasion of Ukraine. Biden also used Navalny’s death to plead for more U.S. funds for the Ukrainian war effort and to attack his likely Republican opponent in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, former president Donald J. Trump, for a perceived lack of commitment to the Atlantic alliance.
The announcement of Navalny’s death also came, perhaps not coincidentally, on the opening day of the Munich Security Conference, an annual meeting of Western foreign policy and national security leaders, to whom his widow addressed remarks lamenting his death, which she blamed on Putin and his government. It also comes one day after Russia deployed an orbital weapon believed to be targeting enemy satellites, possibly with a nuclear weapon, and in the middle of a major conventional offensive with the objective of breaking through Ukrainian lines in the Donetsk region.
Under Vladimir Putin’s regime, almost all political deaths in Russia have afforded his government some degree of plausible deniability, with opposition figures at home and abroad dying in what looked like contract killings or fatal accidents, however suspicious. The means have often been surreptitious, including poisonings of the type that nearly killed Navalny in 2020. His death in prison is a bold step forward. Indeed, only six months ago, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the commander of the paramilitary Wagner Group who led an armed march on Moscow in June 2023, perished in a conveniently timed plane crash that Western intelligence sources believe, but cannot prove, was caused by a bomb planted by Russian security forces at the behest of a high-ranking Putin loyalist.
The only memorable precedent to Navalny’s death in custody was the 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian attorney who represented a financial firm co-founded by the American investor Bill Browder. Charged with dubious tax-related crimes after alleging extensive corruption by the Russian state, Magnitsky was similarly denied medical treatment for conditions caused or exacerbated by his imprisonment. He was later found to have been killed by blunt force trauma just eight days before Russian law required his release from detention without being charged.
Magnitsky’s case became a cause célèbre for Western human rights activists and culminated in a comprehensive sanctions law, the Magnitsky Act, passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by former president Barack Obama in 2012. The law denied those believed to be responsible for Magnitsky’s death entry into the United States, barred them from the use of its financial system, and subjected them to asset freezes. Nearly a dozen other countries and the European Union subsequently adopted similar legislation, which was amplified by the sanctions placed on Russian officials by Trump during his presidency and then by Biden after Russia invaded Ukraine. In 2016, a subsequent law made the provisions globally applicable to public officials of any country implicated in serious human rights violations. Within Russia, Magnitsky’s death led to thorough investigations and the dismissal of nearly two dozen high-ranking police officials, as well as a nominal law prohibiting the incarceration of criminal suspects in tax cases.
While it is virtually certain that no Russian official will face consequences for Navalny’s death, possible international consequences for human rights violations clearly have not deterred Putin, who has become more authoritarian as the war in Ukraine sputters on inconclusively and demonstrates the limits of Russian military power. As a keen, if far from accurate, student of his country’s history, Putin undoubtedly knows that failed wars can cause major political instability and that repression is the likeliest means to ward it off. Whatever—or whoever—caused Navalny’s death, it is a clear signal to the world that Russia’s leader will not tolerate internal opposition and that he neither respects nor fears international opprobrium.
Observers may comfort themselves with the notion that Putin has created a martyr. Navalny, a practicing Russian Orthodox Christian, may well have entertained that possibility when he made the suicidal choice to return to Russia after his poisoning. But despite the brazen circumstances of his death, there is very little likelihood that he will become one. Navalny died in a remote Arctic prison, unwitnessed, completely under government control, and of causes that may never be known with certainty. His wife and children, fortunately, live abroad, and it is highly doubtful that any public memorial service or political demonstration against his fate will be allowed in Russia. Early reports suggest that the police are cracking down on even small gatherings of mourners who have appeared with flowers and photos at monuments to victims of political repression. Those who knew and admired Alexei Navalny will likely always remember him, but Russia’s damaged public conscience will move on, inured to the loss of yet another fighter for freedom against a monstrous regime.
