Alexei Navalny: Who was Putin critic some Russians hoped could overthrow the president?
Alexei Navalny was convicted of defying government officials, embezzlement, fraud, parole violations and contempt of court. He was sentenced to 19 years in prison in 2023 but died just six months later.
Friday 16 February 2024 15:12, UK
President Vladimir Putin's most high-profile critic has died - but who was the man that fought the Russian state and refused to stay silent?
The country's prison service said Alexei Navalny "felt unwell after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness" on 16 February.
A statement said they tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate the 47-year-old.
The campaigner and politician was sentenced to 19 years in August 2023 after being found guilty of extremism charges relating to his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK).
He was already imprisoned for other charges he said were politically motivated.
Rising to prominence in the early 2000s, Mr Navalny had previously been convicted of defying government officials, embezzlement, fraud, parole violations and contempt of court.
The foundation he set up in 2011 has sought to discredit President Putin and his associates through online documentaries that claim to expose their opulent lifestyles.
His persistent campaigning gained him a network of loyal followers both in and outside Russia.
It also saw him repeatedly jailed, barred from running for political office and most famously poisoned by Soviet-era nerve agent novichok in 2020.
Many liberals in Russia had viewed him as a Mandela-style figure and hoped he would be released to eventually take over as president.
Ukrainian heritage
Alexei Navalny was born to factory owners in a village west of Moscow called Butyn in 1976, but grew up Obninsk, around 60 miles southwest of the Russian capital.
He was Ukrainian on his father's side and spent summers with his Ukrainian grandmother in the town near Chernobyl where his family are from.
Mr Navalny cited the mistreatment of locals after the 1986 nuclear disaster as one of the reasons he first fought against the Moscow regime.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr Navalny graduated with a law degree from Moscow's Peoples' Friendship University in 1998 before gaining a second in economics in 2001.
It was around this time that Mr Putin rose to power supported by a circle of oligarchs that bought up state-owned companies and sponsored his United Russia party.
Anti-corruption foundation
To begin with, Mr Navalny expressed nationalist and anti-immigrant views.
His focus on government corruption largely clouded earlier comments about Muslims in Russia, but in 2021 Amnesty International retracted his "prisoner of conscience" status after he failed to distance himself from them.
He joined the liberal Yabloko opposition party in 2000 but was expelled for "nationalist activities" in 2007.
While working as a lawyer in the early 2000s, Mr Navalny started blogging, with the initial aim of protesting against rampant overdevelopment in Moscow.
As the years went by and Mr Putin's grip on power tightened, his campaigns honed in on corruption of state-run organisations such as gas and oil giants Gazprom and Rosneft.
He bought small shares in the companies along with some state-owned banks so he could ask awkward questions about their funding at AGMs.
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In 2010 he founded RosPil, an anti-corruption project run by lawyers that monitored the spending of state-run organisations and enabled them to bring several cases of suspected violations to court.
A year later he established his main Anti-Corruption Foundation, which now has millions of followers worldwide through its various social media channels.
In December that year, following widespread reports Russia's parliamentary elections had been rigged, thousands gathered in Moscow to contest the result.
Mr Navalny was the first of around 300 people to be arrested. He was jailed for 15 days for "defying a government official".
With Mr Putin re-elected and Mr Navalny gaining notoriety, charges against the opposition leader began to stack up. One of the first in 2012 was for embezzlement of the state-owned timber company Kirovles.
Mayor of Moscow bid
In 2013, he ran to be mayor of Moscow, coming second with 27% of the vote and receiving around 97.3 million rubles (£2.3m) in campaign funding.
In a separate case involving the Russian subsidiary of French cosmetics company Yves Rocher, Mr Navalny was placed under house arrest and banned from using the internet in 2014. His team continued to update his blog for him.
Eventually he was handed a suspended three-and-a-half year prison sentence - but his brother Oleg was jailed.
In late-2015 FBK's first long-form investigation was released.
The YouTube documentary Chaika accused then-Russian prosecutor General Yury Chaika of corruption and ties to a notorious criminal group - and received 26 million views.
A year later Mr Navalny announced his intention to run in the 2018 presidential elections, but was eventually barred from standing over the outcome of the Kirovles embezzlement case, bringing condemnation from the EU and wider international community.
Another YouTube documentary, this time on former prime minister Dmitry Medvedev and his alleged empire of palaces, was released by Mr Navalny and his team in March 2017, racking up seven million views in its first week.
It triggered rallies throughout Russia, subsequent arrests, and Mr Navalny being jailed for organising unauthorised demonstrations.
At one protest, he was attacked with disinfectant by a group of unknown assailants, which damaged his right eye.
Novichok poisoning
It was only four years ago that Mr Navalny's fight against Mr Putin hit headlines beyond Russia.
On 20 August 2020, he was travelling back to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk, where he had been working with local activists, when he fell gravely ill on the plane.
The pilot made an emergency landing in nearby Omsk and Mr Navalny received emergency hospital treatment.
His team immediately accused the Kremlin of poisoning him, which it vehemently denied, and he was flown, still in a coma, to Berlin.
After wide-ranging tests, numerous German medics confirmed he had been poisoned with novichok - the same Soviet-era nerve agent used to poison former KGB agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in 2018.
His recovery took five months, with his wife Yulia, daughter Dasha and son Zakhar, by his bedside.
A 2023 documentary showed him tricking a chemical weapons expert into seemingly confessing to poisoning his underwear with novichok - and ended up winning an Oscar.
Despite the risk of arrest, Mr Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021 and was immediately detained for allegedly violating the terms of his suspended sentence from the Yves Rocher case.
Fresh wave of anti-Putin protests
News of his arrest triggered some of the biggest protests in Russia since Mr Putin's rise to power and resulted in thousands of demonstrators being arrested themselves.
Mr Navalny was sentenced to two-and-a-half years for the parole violation, but his team provided updates through his social media accounts.
Among them was news of a three-week hunger strike, which Mr Navalny said was due to sleep deprivation and being refused medical treatment.
In June 2021 a Moscow court outlawed his foundation and conducted a series of raids aimed at shutting down its network. Some team members were forced to flee Russia.
Following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Mr Navalny used his social media posts and court appearances to protest against the war.
At one hearing he described it as "stupid" and "built on lies".
A month later, at short notice, he was brought back to court and handed another nine years for embezzlement and contempt of court before being transferred to a maximum-security prison in Vladimir, western Russia.
It didn't stop him and his team relaunching the anti-corruption movement and filing lawsuits over his treatment in prison, which he said included being forced to listen to one of Mr Putin's speeches on repeat for 100 days in a row.
Despite his team's concerns about his health and that he might be being poisoned behind bars, Mr Navalny remained defiant and said his death would only further fuel the protest movement.
However, another 19 years were added to his prison term in August 2023 following six separate criminal charges, including inciting and financing extremist activity and creating an extremist organisation.
On 16 February, the Federal Penitentiary Service of Yamalo-Nenets said that "in penal colony No 3, convict AA Navalny felt unwell after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness".
"The facility's medical workers immediately arrived at the scene and an emergency medical team was called in," the statement said.
"All necessary resuscitation measures have been carried out, but they did not yield positive results.
"Emergency medics confirmed the death of the convict."
Among the first to pay tribute to Mr Navalny was EU Council President Charles Michel.
He said he had "fought for the values of freedom and democracy" and "made the ultimate sacrifice".
Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov, editor of Russia's most famous independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, described it as "murder" and said he believed prison conditions led to Mr Navalny's death.