It was widely feared that Alexei Navalny was risking his life by positioning himself as Putin’s most vocal critic in an increasingly repressive Russia, even challenging him for the presidency in 2018.

Navalny narrowly survived being poisoned with novichok – a group of nerve agents developed by the Soviet Union – in 2020 and spent months recuperating in Germany. He earned admiration from Russia’s disparate opposition for voluntarily returning to Russia the following year.

His death comes just a day before the official launch of campaigning ahead of a new round of presidential elections set for March 15-17.

Putin oversaw changes to the constitution in 2021 that will allow him to run for two more six-year terms, meaning he could stay in power until 2036. Putin is already the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, who died in 1953.

On December 8 Putin announced his candidature for re-election and is widely expected to win, given the lack of political alternatives and the Kremlin’s iron grip on the state apparatus.

Those who have been brave enough to defy Putin ahead of the vote have been stymied by legal challenges.

Former legislator Yekaterina Duntsova was barred in December from challenging Putin when the Central Election Commission said it was refusing to accept her nomination, citing errors in submitted documents that included misspelled names. Duntsova said she would appeal the decision at the Supreme Court and appealed to the Yabloko (Apple) party to nominate her as a candidate after the party’s founder and leader, Grigory Yavlinsky, said he would not be challenging Putin for the presidency.

Duntsova has said she wants to see a more “humane” Russia that is “peaceful, friendly and ready to cooperate with everyone on the principle of respect”.

Another anti-war candidate, Boris Nadezhdin, was also disqualified from the vote. Russia’s Supreme Court on Thursday rejected legal challenges to the ruling but Nadezhdin said he would appeal and file a further claim against the electoral commission’s refusal to register him as a candidate.

“I don’t give up and I won’t give up,” he said.

An Arctic prison

Navalny was Putin’s most vocal critic and the one who garnered the most international recognition, winning the EU’s Sakharov Prize for human rights in 2021.

Unsurprisingly, the Kremlin found a way to remove him from the running. Navalny was sentenced to 19 more years in prison in August last year for extremism. He was already serving a nine-year term for embezzlement and other charges that he maintained were politically motivated.

Navalny briefly disappeared in December from the IK-6 prison colony in the Vladimir region, some 250 kilometres east of Moscow, where he had spent most of his detention. His disappearance provoked widespread international alarm, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken releasing a statement on X shortly before Christmas to say he was “deeply concerned about the whereabouts of Aleksey Navalny”.

After sending hundreds of requests to detention centres across Russia, Navalny’s allies managed to locate him. In a series of sardonic messages published on X shortly thereafter, Navalny said he was “fine” and “relieved” that he had arrived at his new – and much more remote – Arctic prison.

A BBC reporter said Navalny “looked to be fine” when he appeared via video link at a court hearing the day before his death.

A decimated opposition

Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, 48, was an investigative reporter at top independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and a fierce critic of the war in Chechnya. She was shot dead in 2006 at the entrance to her Moscow apartment block. Five men were sentenced and imprisoned over her death in 2014; one of them, a former policeman, was pardoned and released last year after fighting in Ukraine.

Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent turned Putin critic, died after drinking green tea laced with the radioactive isotope polonium-210 at a London hotel in November 2006, six years to the day after he fled Russia for Britain. In a 326-page report on his death, a UK judge said the killing was “probably approved” by Putin.

Opposition politician and former deputy PM Boris Nemtsov was shot dead near Red Square in Moscow in 2015. At the time of his death, the 55-year-old Nemtsov was working on a report that he believed proved the Kremlin’s direct involvement in the pro-Russian separatist rebellion that had erupted in eastern Ukraine the year prior.

The leader of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, led a brief but dramatic march on Moscow last June after becoming an increasingly vocal critic of Putin’s handling of the war in Ukraine. After hours of uncertainty the rebellion fizzled, and Prigozhin reportedly agreed to go into exile in Belarus.

He died in a private plane crash two months after launching his aborted challenge. Grenade fragments were found in the bodies of victims at the crash site, according to the Kremlin.

Others have found themselves behind bars, serving lengthy prison sentences. Amid the war in Ukraine, a law criminalising “discrediting the Russian armed forces” was adopted on March 4, 2022; in the three days that followed, more than 60 cases were opened against those accused of violating the new law, “the vast majority” of them peaceful anti-war protesters, according to Human Rights Watch.

Russian political activist and former journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, 42, was sentenced last April to 25 years in prison for publicly condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He was convicted of treason and spreading “false” information about the Russian military, among other charges.

Kara-Murza, a member of the rapidly shrinking group of opposition figures who remain in Russia, said he was determined to be a voice against both Putin and the invasion of Ukraine.

State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel condemned the sentencing. “Mr. Kara-Murza is yet another target of the Russian government’s escalating campaign of repression.  We renew our call for Mr. Kara-Murza’s release, as well as the release of the more than 400 political prisoners in Russia,” Patel said at the time.

The death of Navalny further weakens a Russian opposition already decimated by death and imprisonment, with others having fled into exile over fears for their safety.

There are almost “no options for expressing criticism” in Russia, where repression has reached a scale “unequalled since the end of World War II”, Russia expert Cécile Vaissié of Rennes-II University told FRANCE 24 shortly after Kara-Murza was sentenced.

But she said a few voices do remain, and their presence in Russia carries “symbolic weight” – even if they are prevented from wielding any real power.

(AFP, AP and Reuters)