Police officers detain a man laying flowers to Alexei Navalny at the Memorial to Victims of Political Repression in St. Petersburg (Picture: AP)
Russian police are detaining people for leaving tributes to Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe Alexei Navalny who died on Friday.
More than 100 people have been detained across eight cities after leaving tributes, according to OVD-Info, a group which monitors political repression in Russia.
Navalny, 47, died in what is likely to be seen as a political assassination by the Kremlin.
Police blocked access to a memorial in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and detained several people there as well as in another Siberian city, Surgut.
In Novosibirsk people stuck red flowers upright in the snow under the watchful eye of police who blocked access to the memorial with ticker tape.
In Moscow, flowers were removed overnight from a memorial near the headquarters of Russia’s Federal Security Service by a large group while police looked on.
This has not deterred people, as by morning more flowers had appeared.
The news of Mr Navalny’s death comes less than a month before an election that will give Mr Putin another six years in power.
Police detain a man as he wanted to lay flowers paying their last respect to Alexei Navalny (Picture: AP)
A woman protesting fis detained by a police officer, in Moscow (Picture: OVD-Info via Reuters)
People flashlight at a spontaneous memorial in memory of the deceased Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny (Picture: Artem Priakhin/SOPA Images/Shutt)
It shows ‘that the sentence in Russia now for opposition is not merely imprisonment, but death’, said Nigel Gould-Davies, a former British ambassador to Belarus.
Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service reported that Mr Navalny felt sick after a walk on Friday and lost consciousness at the penal colony in the town of Kharp.
His cause of death is still ‘being established’, officials have said.
The 47-year-old was one of Vladimir Putin’s most persistent critics and was seen as the person that Russian president feared the most.
He had been sentenced to 19 years behind bars in August after being found guilty of creating an extremist community, financing extremist activities and many other crimes.
Police detain a man as he wanted to lay flowers paying their last respect to Alexei Navalny (Picture: AP)
A police officer watches as a man lays flowers(Picture: AP)
A man holds banners depicting Alexei Navalny with a text reading ‘My people is forced to kill brother’s people, My President has been murdered’ (Picture: EPA)
In December, he was moved from his former prison in the Vladimir region to a ‘special regime’ penal colony – the highest security level of prisons in the country.
The cause of death of the imprisoned politician was initially given as a ‘detached blood clot’.
Hours after Mr Navalny’s death was reported, his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, made a dramatic appearance at a security conference in Germany where many leaders had gathered.
She said she had considered cancelling, ‘but then I thought what Alexei would do in my place. And I’m sure he would be here’, adding that she was unsure if she could believe the news from official Russian sources.
Police officers detain a woman who laid flowers for Alexei Navalny at the Memorial to Victims of Political Repression in St. Petersburg (Picture: AP)
Police officers detain people who came to a spontaneous memorial(Picture: Artem Priakhin/SOPA Images/Shutt)
‘But if this is true, I want Putin and everyone around Putin, Putin’s friends, his government to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family and to my husband. And this day will come very soon,’ Ms Navalnaya said.
US President Joe Biden said Washington does not know exactly what happened, ‘but there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something Putin and his thugs did’.
Mr Navalny ‘could have lived safely in exile’, but returned home despite knowing he could be imprisoned or killed ‘because he believed so deeply in his country, in Russia’.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Mr Putin was told of Mr Navalny’s death.
The opposition leader’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said on X, formerly Twitter, that the team had no confirmation yet.
Foreign Affairs Committee chairwoman Alicia Kearns said that Russian President Vladimir Putin had murdered Alexei Navalny.
‘We all know that this was a murder. Putin has tried to murder Navalny multiple times. And the reason is to silence that dream of freedom that so many Russians have,’ Ms Kearns told BBC Breakfast.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky referenced the death of Alexei Navalny during a speech at the Munich Security Conference, branding Vladimir Putin a ‘thug’.
He told attendees: ‘Putin kills whoever he wants, be it an opposition leader, or anyone else who seems as the target exactly to him.
‘After the murder of Alexei Navalny, it’s absurd to perceive Putin as a supposedly legitimate head of a Russian state and he is a thug who maintains power through corruption and violence.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.