Killed by bullets, poisoned… These opponents of Putin, who, like Navalny, are dead

He was an enemy of the Kremlin. Alexei Navalny, 47, died in prison on Friday, the Russian prison service said. Over the years, several opponents of Vladimir Putin and his policies have died under unclear or even unclear circumstances.

Last August, two months after he led a rebellion against the Russian General Staff, militia boss Wagner and former ally Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin was declared dead along with his top lieutenants in a plane crash. A death that has been added to the list of suspicious deaths that have occurred since the start of the war in Ukraine. Heart attack, drowning, fall… A total of fourteen oligarchs were found dead under dubious circumstances.

In 2015, the war in Ukraine was already at the center of murder. On February 27, Boris Nemtsov, the former vice president appointed by Boris Yeltsin and turned opposition figure, was shot four times just meters from the Kremlin. He condemned Moscow’s military support for pro-Russian separatists and the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Poisoning attempts

Ten years ago, in 2006, the death of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB and FSB agent, left its mark. Exiled to the United Kingdom after revelations about the work of the Russian intelligence services, he died twenty days after being poisoned with polonium 210. In a letter published posthumously, he accused Putin of responsibility, something the Russian president has always denied.

Attempts at poisoning are not uncommon. Former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter survived Novichok in 2018 while in England. Democratic movement activist Vladimir Kara-Murza was poisoned twice, in 2015 and 2017. Evacuated to the US and then returned to Russia, he was jailed in 2022 for condemning Moscow’s offensive on Kyiv.

Journalists and lawyers have been harassed

Journalists and human rights activists were also persecuted. In 2006, journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who had spent years documenting Russian army abuses in Chechnya for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was murdered in the lobby of her Moscow home. A lawyer and human rights activist who defended Stanislav Markelov several times was killed three years later, along with Anastasia Baburova, a trainee journalist at Novaya Gazeta.

Another Russian journalist and environmental activist, Mikhail Beketov, was beaten by unknown assailants in November 2008 for writing about a controversial highway construction site between Moscow and St. Petersburg. After suffering serious injury from the attack, he finally died in 2013. Like Navalny, lawyer Sergei Magnitsky also died in prison after uncovering a corruption case.