Tag: political prisoners

Putin Breaks Silence on Navalny’s Death, Calling It an ‘Unfortunate Incident’

President Vladimir V. Putin described the death of the imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny as an “unfortunate incident” and claimed he had been ready to release him in exchange for Russian prisoners held in the West. Mr. Putin, in a news conference after Russia’s presidential election, said that “some people” had told him before […]

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Navalny’s Heirs Seek a Political Future in Russia

Aleksei A. Navalny built Russia’s largest opposition force in his image, embodying a freer, fairer Russia for millions. His exiled team now faces the daunting task of steering his political movement without him. The movement has found a leader in Mr. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who has presented herself as the new face of the […]

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Iran’s 2022 Protest Crackdown Included Killings, Torture and Rape, U.N. Finds

United Nations investigators say Iranian authorities killed, tortured and raped women, men and children in a brutal repression of mass protests that erupted over the death in police custody of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for allegedly wearing a mandatory hijab incorrectly. A U.N. fact-finding mission reporting to the Human Rights […]

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Hong Kong Pushes Strict New Security Law With Unusual Speed

Under pressure from Beijing, officials in Hong Kong are scrambling to pass a long-shelved national security law that could impose life imprisonment for treason, insurrection and colluding with external forces, stiff penalties aimed at further curbing dissent in the Asian financial center. The law known as Article 23 has long been a source of public […]

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Russians Flock to Navalny’s Grave as They Grapple With His Legacy

Marina, a Moscow lawyer, decided to stay home when the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny was buried last Friday. She had expected a big crowd and widespread arrests at the Borisovsky Cemetery, given Russia’s current climate of repression, and thought it would be better to pay her respects another day. She wasn’t alone in […]

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5 Convicts Familiar With Navalny’s Prison Confirm Hellish Conditions

Locked in an Arctic prison, Aleksei A. Navalny is likely to have spent his final days in some of the most inhumane conditions within Russia’s extensive penitentiary system, according to five men who have served sentences in the same penal colony as the Russian opposition leader. The men described in phone interviews unbearable cold, repulsive […]

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Aleksei Navalny’s Body Was Returned to His Mother, Allies Say

The Russian authorities have transferred the body of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny to his mother, his spokeswoman said on Saturday, ending a grim battle for custody of his remains, but it is unclear whether he will get a funeral that the public can attend. “Aleksei’s body has been handed over to his mother,” […]

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Inside Aleksei Navalny’s Final Months, in His Own Words

Confined to cold, concrete cells and often alone with his books, Aleksei A. Navalny sought solace in letters. To one acquaintance, he wrote in July that no one could understand Russian prison life “without having been here,” adding in his deadpan humor: “But there’s no need to be here.” “If they’re told to feed you […]

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Navalny’s Health Was Imperiled by Prison Conditions

Aleksei A. Navalny portrayed himself as invincible, consistently using his hallmark humor to suggest that President Vladimir V. Putin couldn’t break him, no matter how dire his conditions became in prison. But behind the brave face, the reality was plain to see. Since his incarceration in early 2021, Mr. Navalny, Russia’s most formidable opposition figure, […]

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Hundreds of Navalny Mourners Detained Across Russia

For the second day in a row, mourners walked purposefully along Moscow’s snow-heaped Garden Ring on Saturday carrying bouquets to lay at one of the improvised memorials to Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition figure who perished in a prison colony the day before. The flowers, wrapped in paper to shield them from the icy […]

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Aleksei Navalny’s Allies Confirm His Death

Aleksei A. Navalny’s political allies on Saturday confirmed his death, saying that his mother had received an official notification of it. Kira Yarmysh, Mr. Navalny’s spokeswoman, said in a statement on X that Russian investigators had transferred Mr. Navalny’s body from a penal colony in the Arctic to the nearby town of Salekhard, where it […]

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With Prison Certain and Death Likely, Why Did Navalny Return?

There was one question that Russians repeatedly asked the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, who died in a remote Arctic penal colony on Friday, and he confessed that he found it a little annoying. Why, after surviving a fatal poisoning attempt widely blamed on the Kremlin, had he returned to Russia from his extended convalescence […]

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Aleksei Navalny, Russian Opposition Leader, Dies in Prison at 47

Aleksei A. Navalny, an anticorruption activist who for more than a decade led the political opposition in President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia while enduring arrests, assaults and a near-fatal poisoning, died Friday in a Russian prison, according to Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service. He was 47. The prison authorities said that Mr. Navalny lost consciousness on […]

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Tucker Carlson’s Lesson in the Perils of Giving Airtime to an Autocrat

Tucker Carlson left Moscow more than a week ago, riding high from an interview with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that returned him to the spotlight after his abrupt cancellation by Fox News last spring. But the interview with the wartime autocrat, mocked in various corners of the political-media world for its soft touch, […]

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Biden Condemns ‘Putin and His Thugs’ for Navalny’s Death

President Biden blamed President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia personally on Friday for the reported death of the imprisoned Russian dissident Aleksei A. Navalny, and cited the case in pressing House Republicans to approve military aid to Ukraine in its war with Moscow. But while he once threatened to impose “devastating” consequences on Mr. Putin […]

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Who Was Navalny? A Timeline of the Putin Critic’s Career

Aleksei A. Navalny, the outspoken activist who Russian authorities said died in prison on Friday, was born on June 4, 1976, according to his website, and grew up outside Moscow to liberal parents who opposed Soviet rule. Starting his political career as an anticorruption blogger who organized street protests, Mr. Navalny mobilized a generation of […]

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In Prison or Out, Navalny Was the Thorn in Putin’s Side

The death of Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, Aleksei A. Navalny, at a remote Arctic prison on Friday ended one of the most audacious political careers of modern times and left wartime Russia without its most charismatic antiwar voice. Mr. Navalny, whose death was reported by Russian authorities, stood as the most outspoken critic of […]

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What Navalny Can Teach Americans About Bravery

Vladimir Putin’s Russia has just become even more bleak and soulless with the reported death in an Arctic prison of Aleksei Navalny, the 47-year-old dissident who showed immense bravery and humor as he tried to bring democracy to his homeland. Navalny’s strength, resilience and courage contrast with the fecklessness of so many Americans dealing with […]

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Aleksei Navalny, Putin Critic, Dies in Prison, Russian Authorities Say

MOSCOW — Aleksei A. Navalny, an anticorruption activist who for more than a decade led the political opposition in President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, died Friday in a prison inside the Arctic Circle, according to Russian authorities. His death was announced by Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service, which said that Mr. Navalny, 47, lost consciousness on […]

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Aleksei Navalny Is Russia’s True Leader

News update: On Friday, Russian state media said that Aleksei Navalny has died in prison. In 2003, four years into President Vladimir Putin’s tenure and with liberal politics at a nadir, I visited the Moscow office of the center-left Yabloko Party. There, among the 50-something inveterate anti-communists who dominated the party, sat a 27-year-old staff […]

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The Detention of Rocío San Miguel Raises Human Rights Concerns

Of all the government critics, few thought that Rocío San Miguel would be the one to disappear. Ms. San Miguel, 57, has long been one of Venezuela’s best known security experts, a woman who dared investigate her country’s authoritarian government even as others fled. She is also a moderate, has international recognition and appeared to […]

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Tucker Carlson Urges Putin to Release American Journalist

In an interview released on Thursday, Tucker Carlson urged President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to release an American reporter for The Wall Street Journal who has been held in a notorious Moscow prison for nearly a year. Mr. Carlson’s appeal on behalf of the reporter, Evan Gershkovich, was only the second time that Mr. […]

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Nevada’s Weird Election Week, and King Charles’s Cancer

The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists […]

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Venezuela Court Bars Opposition Leader From Running for President

Venezuela’s highest court ruled on Friday that a top opposition leader cannot run for president, dealing a crippling blow to prospects for credible elections that the government had agreed to hold this year in exchange for the lifting of crippling U.S. economic sanctions. The court’s decision bars the opposition figure, María Corina Machado, from taking […]

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Taiwan’s Democracy Draws Envy and Tears for Visiting Chinese

At the Taipei train station, a Chinese human rights activist named Cuicui watched with envy as six young Taiwanese politicians campaigned for the city’s legislative seats. A decade ago, they had been involved in parallel democratic protest movements — she in China, and the politicians on the opposite side of the Taiwan Strait. “We came […]

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Nicaragua Frees Jailed Catholic Bishop and Other Clergymen

The Nicaraguan authorities said on Sunday that they had released 19 clergymen who had been jailed and handed them over to the Vatican, the latest development in the autocratic government’s longstanding persecution of the Roman Catholic Church. Among those set free was Bishop Rolando Álvarez, one of the most prominent critics of the government left […]

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They Said ‘I Do’ in a Moscow Prison

Nadezhda Shtovba did not wear a white dress to her wedding. There were no bridesmaids or groomsmen. She and her husband, Yegor, did not exchange wedding bands either — rings are banned in Butyrka prison. That is where Yegor Shtovba has spent the past 15 months in pretrial detention. In September 2022, he had read […]

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Russia Sends Navalny Associate to Prison for ‘Extremism’

A court in Siberia on Friday sentenced an ally of the jailed Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny to nine years in a penal colony for running an “extremist organization,” according to her legal team. The sentence signals the Kremlin’s willingness to continue cracking down on members of Mr. Navalny’s political group years after it […]

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Aleksei Navalny, in Letter, Describes Transfer to Arctic Prison

Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, published a letter on Tuesday describing an arduous transfer to his new penal colony in the Arctic, the first time his supporters had heard from him in three weeks. Mr. Navalny’s comments, posted on his social network accounts and written with a heavy dose of irony and […]

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Russian Opposition Leader Navalny Found in an Arctic Prison

The Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny has been moved to a prison north of the Arctic Circle but “is doing well,” his spokeswoman said on Monday, ending a 20-day mystery over his whereabouts that had many supporters fearing the worst. “We have found Aleksei,” the spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said on social media. “His lawyer […]

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