Russia's most significant opposition leader for the past decade, Alexei Navalny, has died in prison inside the Arctic Circle, the prison service has said.
Seen as President Vladimir Putin's most vociferous critic, Navalny was serving a 19-year jail term on charges widely considered politically motivated.
He was moved to an Arctic penal colony, said to be one of Russia's toughest jails, late last year.
The prison service in the Yamalo-Nenets district said Navalny had "felt unwell" after a walk on Friday.
He had "almost immediately lost consciousness", it said in a statement, adding that an emergency medical team had immediately been called and tried to resuscitate him but without success.
"The emergency doctors declared the prisoner dead. Cause of death is being established."
...his close aide Leonid Volkov wrote on X: "Russian authorities publish a confession that they killed Alexei Navalny in prison. We do not have any way to confirm it or to prove this isn't true."
Within minutes of Navalny's death being announced by the prison service, the international community hailed the courage of Vladimir Putin's biggest domestic adversary.
France said he had paid with his life for resisting Russian "oppression" while Norway's foreign minister said Russian authorities bore a great responsibility for his death.
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Most of the Russian president's critics have fled Russia, but Alexei Navalny returned in January 2021, after months of medical treatment. In August 2020 he was poisoned at the end of a trip to Siberia with a Novichok nerve agent.
His team succeeded in flying him out to Germany for specialist treatment and on his return to Moscow he was immediately taken into custody. He would never leave jail again in the next 37 months.
Navalny had long sought to challenge Vladimir Putin at the ballot box, but he was barred from running in the 2018 presidential election. Next month, Russia's leader will stand unchallenged by any meaningful opposition.
For the undersigned this loss is personal. I am a lawyer, Alexei was a lawyer; I am a blogger, Alexei was a blogger; I was a gadfly as Alexei was a gadfly. At a time when I got my writing banned in China, and got myself banned by my employer in the States, Alexei was an inspiration. I identified with him viscerally. But Alexei was Russian to the depths of his soul and didn't want the support of foreigners, even insignificant American bloggers, so as not to give Putin that attack angle. He would not emigrate. He was Russian.
He had an un-Russian ironic sense of humor about his country, his plight, and Putin. He impersonated a Russian apparatchik in a phone call to one of his 2020 would-be assassins and got the buffoon, whose instincts perhaps were weakened by COVID, to buy his impersonation and confess that the nearly successful assassination was accomplished by lacing his underwear with poison.
We are defined as much by the enemies we make as the company we keep. Good guys finish last, and Alexei Navalny was the best of guys.
