Alexei Navalny, the dissident Russian politician, thought he’d become untouchable. He calculated that his worldwide status as the single best-known critic of the psychopathic president Vladimir Putin and his fascist state, was, weirdly, a sort of life insurance policy.
‘As I became more and more famous,’ he said in a television documentary in 2022, ‘I was totally sure that my life became safer because it would be problematic for them just to kill me.’
Boy, was he wrong. Two years later, on February 16, 2024, he lay dead in an indescribably bleak prison colony deep inside the Arctic Circle, where he was held on trumped-up charges, his original sentence cruelly increased for made-up infringements of the rules such as ‘not buttoning his collar’, ‘not cleaning the prison yard properly’ and ‘not addressing a prison official correctly’.
Alexei Navalny speaks via video link from a prison during a court session in Petushki, near Moscow, in 2021
Navalny sits handcuffed in court in Moscow in 2017. He thought he’d become untouchable, writes John Sweeney
The grim penal colony where Alexei Navalny was serving his jail term, north of the Arctic Circle, in the Yamal-Nenets region of Russia
The Russian opposition leader smiles with his wife Yulia, daughter Dasha and son Zakhar outside a polling station during the Moscow city parliament election in 2019
Putin, his arch-enemy, had finally snuffed him out after more than a decade in which Navalny had dared to denounce the dictator for his corruption and outed United Russia — the country’s ruling party — as the ‘party of crooks and thieves’.
Putin viscerally hated the Russian who mocked him like no one else, hated him so much he would never mention him by name. Why? Because Navalny, with the Anti-Corruption Foundation he set up in 2011, had succeeded in getting more people protesting on the streets of Moscow than anyone else since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Because Navalny — tall, blue-eyed and a natural leader — was the tsar of charisma, courage and connecting with people; Putin — with a marked resemblance to Gollum from Lord Of The Rings — the tsar of the knout [a type of whip], the cosh and the hypodermic syringe.
The battle could only ever end with one tsar standing.
When I interviewed him on Zoom in 2016, Navalny blasted Putin as ‘the tsar of corruption’. His words tolled as clear as a bell and you knew that every syllable was a potential death sentence. It isn’t a surprise that the Kremlin had him killed in February 2024; the surprise is that he lived for so long.
But I mourn him and cannot quite believe that this great force of nature has been silenced for good.
How, exactly, did they kill him? That’s not easy to discover. It’s hard to check facts in Russia. And not just because if you do it properly you can end up dead, like journalist Anna Politkovskaya, human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, politician Boris Nemtsov and Navalny, all of whom challenged the Kremlin’s untruths to me in person.
Now, they are no more — in sequence: poisoned, then shot; shot; shot; poisoned, twice, then murdered.
It’s also hard to find the truth because Putin has built the greatest fog machine in history. The word ‘disinformation’ doesn’t begin to properly convey the power of the Kremlin to generate doubt and uncertainty. Not knowing, not understanding, is the natural condition of enemies of the Russian dark state.
Yet snuffed out Navalny most definitely was.
A man normally of extraordinarily good health, he returned to Russia in 2021 from Germany where he had been recovering after being poisoned with the nerve gas Novichok, then suffered two more years of torture in Putin’s prison gulag, including 300 days in isolation and being woken up eight times a night to deprive him of sleep.
His last home was IK-3, the so-called Polar Wolf prison colony. One day this still bouncy and full of fun 47-year-old was filmed on a video link, with his jailers standing next to him laughing at the prisoner’s wit. The next day he was dead.
The dissident arrived at the IK-3, the so-called Polar Wolf prison colony, in December 2023, and spent his final days there
Navalny, even while behind bars, succeeded in getting more people protesting on the streets of Moscow than anyone else since the fall of the Soviet Union
The day the news broke, his grief-stricken wife Yulia, now suddenly his widow, declared: ‘I want Putin and every one around him to know that they will bear responsibility for what they have done to our country, to my family and to my husband. I call on the world community to come together to defeat this evil, defeat this horrible regime that is now in Russia.’
In parts of Russia there was an outpouring of sorrow and anguish as people who believed in his idea of ‘Another Russia’, one that stood for democracy and the rule of law, hit the streets. Thousands defied police to lay flowers and light candles; hundreds were arrested for daring to mark the passing of their hero.
On that same day, Putin was on presidential duties in the Urals. Ordinarily miserable when taking part in official ceremonies, he was full of fun, laughing, teasing and high as a kite. He’d just had the leader of the opposition murdered.
The goons who surround Putin were quick to deny the accusation. They still do. But the truth is there in Navalny’s last days, reconstructed here as best I can.
The penal colony IK-3 is the cruellest gulag in the whole of Putin’s archipelago. It lies north of the Arctic Circle, in the Yamal peninsula about 1,200 miles north-east of Moscow, and is one of the grimmest places to exist on earth, a barren emptiness, snow-covered for much of the year, populated by half a million reindeer and very, very few people.
When he arrived there in December 2023, Navalny described the climate of his new home in his trademark sardonic way. ‘It has not been colder than –32C yet,’ he posted in a blog that somehow he managed to transmit to the outside world. ‘Nothing quite invigorates you like a walk here at 6.30 in the morning. You can walk for more than half an hour only if you manage to grow a new nose, new ears and new fingers.’
He referenced a scene in The Revenant, the 2015 film in which Leonardo DiCaprio shelters from the extreme cold of the Dakotas inside the carcass of a horse. ‘I don’t think that would have worked here. We need an elephant, a hot elephant, a fried one.’
The whole point of sending him to Yamal was to break his spirit and yet here he was cracking jokes. No wonder Putin hated him so.
On Valentine’s Day he sent a message to his wife Yulia: ‘I feel that you are with me every second.’ It was his last communication. Two days later was the announcement of his death.
The official version was that he had suffered some kind of natural death. ‘On Feb 16, 2024,’ according to a statement issued by the Federal Penitentiary Service of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, ‘in penal colony number 3, convict Navalny A.A. felt unwell after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness.
‘The medical staff of the institution arrived immediately, and an ambulance team was called. All necessary resuscitation measures were carried out, which did not give positive results. Doctors of the ambulance stated the death of the convict. The causes of death are being established.’
The death notice was given to Navalny’s 69-year-old mother, Lyudmila, who was living in Moscow. When she and Alexei’s lawyer arrived at the colony, they were told the cause of his death was sudden death syndrome, that something had gone wrong with his heart, though no one knew exactly what.
Then a source — not identified, of course — told the Kremlin-controlled RT, the Russia Today television channel, that Navalny had died from a blood clot. One of the most common ways a clot can kill is when it moves up from the leg to block the blood vessels servicing the lungs or the heart.
The independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta (which many Russia-watchers nevertheless think can be a little too accommodating of the Kremlin, simply in order to survive) reported that the body showed signs of bruising consistent with some sort of seizure as well as traces of heart massage attempts. It said it was unclear why his heart had stopped.
Thus within hours of Navalny’s death there were three competing, unsourced theories of how he had come to die naturally: some kind of heart attack; a blood clot; a seizure. This is classic Kremlin tactics to muddy the waters. Confusion is sown; the world moves on.
Intriguingly, reporters from Novaya Gazeta were able to track down an unidentified prisoner in the Polar Wolf colony who told them that a ‘strange commotion’ had erupted in the prison on the evening of February 15, before the official time of death. He said the guards had accelerated their evening checks of the prisoners and strengthened security.
In the morning of the 16th there was a ‘total shake-down’ of the prison, with guards confiscating mobile phones and other items from prisoners. Soon after, a committee from the central office of the Federal Penitentiary Service arrived. Word spread throughout the prison that Navalny was dead at 10am, more than four hours before the official time of death.
The gossip among the prisoners was that Navalny had died on the evening of February 15 and that his death had caught the prison authorities by surprise. Curiouser and curiouser.
In a democracy, the family would be given the body and they would have the right to do a thorough autopsy, to establish the cause of death. But Russia isn’t like that. Instead, the regime started a game of hide the body, compounding the agony of Navalny’s grieving family.
When his mother asked for his body, the authorities fired back by launching a new criminal investigation into Navalny’s younger brother, who had already served three and a half years in jail, also on trumped-up charges. The message was clear enough: shut up or you won’t see your son’s body, or even maybe your other son, again, ever.
It seems his body was taken to the city of Salekhard, the provincial capital, whose morgue Navalny’s mother and his lawyers visited on February 19 to try to gain access to it. They were told to go away. Officers from the Investigative Committee, Russia’s FBI, detectives wholly under the thumb of the Kremlin, told them his remains had been sent for a ‘chemical examination’ and would not be returned to the family for another 14 days.
The reason for this disgusting charade was that the longer the authorities stalled handing over the corpse, the harder it would be for pathologists, for anyone, to find out how he had died.
On YouTube, Navalny’s mother posted a message to the Kremlin. ‘For a fifth day they aren’t giving me his body and don’t even tell me where he is. I appeal to you, Vladimir Putin. You alone can resolve this. Let me see my son. I demand that Alexei’s body be released immediately so that I can bury him.’
Two days later, she gave up fighting the Kremlin and signed a death certificate that stated that her son had died of natural causes. That is the official lie.
So how did they murder him?
One hypothesis tallies with the prison authority press release that Navalny died after returning from a walk. In a temperature of minus 25 they made him stomp around in the freezing cold inside the prison compound in jeans and a T-shirt so that his blood thickened and returned to the body’s core.
As an investigative journalist and documentary maker, I once stripped off in a frozen pea warehouse in North London in minus 25 to illustrate a torture technique used by Putin’s lapdog in Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko. After three minutes I was shaking uncontrollably.
Navalny could have been made to walk around in the extreme cold until he was barely alive, then beaten up, causing heart failure or a lethal blood clot, the injuries to his body passed off as caused by the paramedics trying to save his life.
For his widow Yulia, there is a very different cause of death — poison. She strongly suspected Novichok, the weapons grade nerve agent the Kremlin’s goon squad had tried to kill Navalny with once already.
Back in August 2020, he was on a plane from Siberia to Moscow when he fell seriously ill, howling in pain and slipping into a coma, and the pilot diverted to the nearest airport, where medics gave him a shot of atropine, an antidote. This time, in the Polar Wolf penal colony, there was no one to jab him with atropine and save him from certain death.
A different version of the poison thesis had already been advanced by none other than Navalny himself to his lawyer, Olga Mikhailova, a feisty blonde who took no nonsense from the Kremlin’s apparatchiks. After his murder, she said that Navalny feared he was being slowly and surreptitiously poisoned.
In April 2023, she had met him in IK-6, the corrective colony he had been held in before his transfer to Polar Wolf. There he was confined to a tiny dog kennel-sized isolation cell with an iron bunk that was fastened to the wall. Each day at 5am it was raised and the mattress and pillow taken away, until 9pm at night. Cameras in the ceiling monitored his every move.
There he told her: ‘I don’t want to sound paranoid, but it seems that they’re poisoning me here.’
Putin hated the opposition leader so much that he would never mention Navalny by name
Mikhailova posted the allegation on Twitter, questioning the ‘unknown illness’ he was said to be suffering from that had required an ambulance and caused him to lose 17lbs in two weeks.
His lawyers said at the time that the ‘strange situation’ surrounding his health was causing a deterioration that hadn’t come about suddenly but ‘steadily’ and ‘gradually’.
But the Novichok theory is disputed by another opponent of Putin, exiled Russian human rights defender Vladimir Osechkin, because poisoning him would have left traces in the body and led directly back to Putin, given he had tried it once before on Navalny. He favours the ‘KGB punch’ theory, which is the ultimate technique in invisible killing.
He thinks they first destroyed his body by keeping him out in the cold for a long time and slowing the blood circulation down to a minimum. ‘It then becomes very easy to kill someone, within seconds, with one punch in the heart, in the centre of the body. It is an old method of the KGB’s special forces divisions. It was a hallmark of the KGB.’
The bruising found on Navalny’s body fits the KGB punch theory, according to Osechkin.
But Roman Borisovich, one of the original sponsors of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, suspects a simpler cause of death. ‘It’s possible that after years of harsh treatment, of torture, of bad food and so little of it, he lost so much weight, of hardly any sunlight so his face turned grey, that he died some kind of natural death. But only in the sense that they didn’t actually kill him directly.
‘The Kremlin turned an extraordinarily healthy man into a very sick man, old before his time. They killed him slowly, over time.’
That said, the suddenness of his death, the fact that he was laughing with his jailers one day and dead the next, makes me suspect that he was killed deliberately according to a plan.
But whose plan? Who, exactly, gave the order to have Navalny killed?
Not long after his death, the story emerged that the West had been trying to trade Navalny, swapping him for Putin’s number one prisoner in the West, Vadim Krasikov, a hit man for the FSB [successor to the KGB] who had assassinated a Chechen dissident in Berlin in 2019.
Putin is always keen on getting his killers out of Western jails should they end up in one because it sends a message to the others: ‘Don’t worry if something goes wrong. We will have your back. We will get you out.’
Navalny’s team was also working on getting their hero out, enlisting the help of Hillary Clinton and President Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser.
The trade was tricky. For Navalny to be swapped for Krasikov required a German sign-off. Then the Americans wanted to add in two more wholly innocent US citizens locked up in Russia, both of whom have been imprisoned on faked evidence of spying.
Was Navalny killed by a Kremlin insider in order to stop the trade? Paul Joyal, a former US intelligence analyst who has been targeted by Kremlin gunmen for criticisms he’d made of Putin, thinks exactly that.
He points the finger at Nikolai Patrushev, head of Russia’s National Security Council and former head of the FSB. ‘Patrushev is close to being a paranoid schizophrenic. For example, he believes the nonsense that the Americans are creating bio-weapons targeting the genome, the genetic make-up, of the Russian people. And he’s a player. He will act on his own, outside the lines.’
Navalny and his business partner Pyotr Ofitserov (left), address supporters from at Moscow’s Yaroslavskiy railway station in 2013
Navalny makes a heart gesture to his wife Yulia from inside a glass cell during a court hearing in Moscow in February 2021
Joyal believes that the trade was on and Patrushev had heard that Navalny was due to be moved to Moscow prior to his release to the West, on the very day he was killed. ‘My working hypothesis is that Patrushev had Navalny killed without getting the OK from Putin.’
Patrushev hated Navalny, who at one stage had personally embarrassed him. He also believed he was the CIA’s creature. He wanted to stop the trade at all costs — so had Navalny murdered.
So, in this version, it was not Putin, but Putin’s number one guard dog, who had Navalny killed. The owner is, of course, responsible for the actions of a killer dog.
THERE is one last hypothesis on who commissioned the killing of Alexei Navalny and how it happened, and this is the one I give the most weight to.
In April this year, the Wall Street Journal published a story headlined: ‘Putin Didn’t Directly Order Alexei Navalny’s February Death, US Spy Agencies Find’. As ever with the CIA, the sourcing was opaque, the paper citing ‘unnamed people familiar with the matter’.
Its key finding — based on classified intelligence, an analysis of public facts (including the timing of Navalny’s death and how it overshadowed Putin’s re-election in March) — was: ‘the assessment doesn’t dispute Putin’s culpability for Navalny’s death, but rather finds he probably didn’t order it at that moment.’
This assessment, the Wall Street Journal wrote, had been ‘broadly accepted within the intelligence community’.
I contacted someone with established, well-placed and reliable sources inside the Russian power structure. Their primary source pointed accusingly to the close relationship between Putin and the boss of the FSB, Aleksandr Bortnikov.
The two were known always to take the highest security precautions when discussing the most secret and sensitive issues, among which Navalny was one. They often meet alone in special secured facilities known as ‘bubbles’ or ‘capsules’. Even then they talk very discreetly, rarely using context-specific words or names.
There has been no actual leak from their meetings but it is nonetheless believed that, back in December 2023, Putin himself gave Bortnikov actual but not minuted ‘approval’ for Navalny to be poisoned using a sophisticated technique.
The Kremlin has its very own Poison Squad with a cohort of scientists and specialist operatives, its existence tracked down and confirmed as an assassination machine on an industrial scale by Christo Grozev, a brilliant investigator with the Bellingcat investigative unit. If there was a diagram of its command structure, Bortnikov would sit directly below Putin.
So commanded, the source says, Bortnikov then designated the FSB team involved and personally managed the murder operation overall. Sources were confident of this, despite the fact that no formal orders had been given. A second source said that other top-level Russian officials did not know in advance about the plan to kill Navalny.
No actual Navalny killing operational plan had ever been officially discussed and/or approved at any state level. But poison him they did and the man behind it was Putin.
Navalny knew the Russian dark state better than anyone. When they met in IK-6 he told his lawyer that he feared they were slowly poisoning him. I buy that. By then he had lost his belief that he was untouchable. Now, with a smile on his lips, he said: ‘They will definitely kill me.’ And so they did.
But the question that haunts the killer in the Kremlin — haunts, too, the future of the largest country on earth — is whether the snuffing out of Navalny’s courage, charisma and honesty will stick in Russia’s craw and bring on Putin’s overthrow. We can but hope that, though Alexei Navalny is dead, what he stood for will be back.
Adapted from Murder In The Gulag: The Life And Death Of Alexei Navalny
