Floral tributes to Alexei Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe who died Friday in a Russian penal colony, were removed overnight by groups of unidentified people while police watched, videos on Russian social media show.
More than 100 people were detained in eight cities across Russia after they came to lay flowers in memory of Navalny, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors political repression in Russia. On Saturday, 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, OVD-Info said.
Video shared on social media from Novosibirsk showed people sticking 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, a video showed. But by morning more flowers had appeared.
The news of Navalny’s death comes less than a month before an election that will give Putin another six years in power.
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 and senior fellow for Russia & Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
The circumstances of Navalny’s death are still largely unclear.
A portrait of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, flowers and candles are laid on a ground as people gather to pay their last respect to Alexei Navalny at the Memorial to Victims of Political Repression in St. Petersburg, Russia on Friday, Feb. 16, 2024. Russian authorities say that Alexei Navalny, the fiercest foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin who crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests, died in prison. He was 47. Credit: AP/Dmitri Lovetsky
Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service…
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