A punch to the heart after being exposed to freezing conditions for a long time: this is how, according to a source cited by the Times, Alexei Navalny was killed, after in recent days his widow Yulia Navalnaya had instead directly accused President Vladimir Putin of having poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok.
Meanwhile, after the appeal launched by his mother Lyudmila directly to Putin to get her son's body back "immediately", a court in the far Russian north has agreed to examine a complaint formally presented by Navalny's team for the failure to hand over the body.
But he set the hearing for March 4.
Already beyond, therefore, the 14-day period that Russian investigators had announced to conduct unspecified "chemical tests" before handing over the body to the family.
Lyudmila, who arrived in the Arctic region on Saturday, the day after the news of his death, has so far tried in vain to see her son, turning to those in charge of the IK-3 penal colony, where he was locked up, and to the hospital in the city of Salekhard, having received unofficially the communication that was in the morgue of this hospital.
The hearing will take place in Salekhard, behind closed doors.
Instead, the new hypothesis on the causes of Navalny's death, with a punch to the heart, was put forward by Vladimir Osechkin, founder of the human rights group Gulagu.net, who spoke about it to the British newspaper.
According to Osechkin, who cited a source working in the IK-3 prison, the bruises found on the opponent's body are compatible with the "single punch" technique already used by Soviet KGB hitmen;
and before his death Navalny, 47, was forced to spend more than two and a half hours outdoors, where the temperature could drop to -27 degrees.
An ambulance service operator at Salekhard hospital had instead said that the bruises on Navalny's body were compatible with a containment action due to convulsions, and the one on his chest with a cardiac massage.
Rishi Sunak's British government announced for its part that it had imposed sanctions on six Russian officials alleged to be responsible for the death.
According to what the Foreign Office has specified, they are prison guard colonel Vadim Kalinin and five of his deputies.
London, and beyond, also calls for "a transparent investigation".
However, Putin remains silent and today went to Kazan, the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, to attend the opening ceremony of the Games of the Future, an international event that combines competitions in traditional sports with those in the digital field.
The Russian president also visited an aircraft factory, where he sat at the controls of a nuclear bomber, the Tu-160M.
Meanwhile, while the EU has reached an agreement in principle on the 13th package of sanctions on Russia, former US president Donald Trump has once again compared himself to Navalny, denouncing persecution against him in the United States.
As for the death of the Russian opponent, he said that it would have been "much better" if he had not returned to his country in 2021, "because people thought it could happen and so it happened, and it's a horrible thing ".
American President Joe Biden responded by deeming it "scandalous" that his Republican rival spoke about Navalny without condemning Putin.
In the meantime, Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, the one serving the heaviest sentence of 25 years, also made his voice heard to accuse the Russian president of being "personally responsible for Navalny's death", because he "was his personal prisoner, and only on his personal order could the poisoners act."
An organization of Russian lawyers, Perviy Otdel, has finally identified the Russian-American citizen arrested in Russia on charges of high treason, for which she risks a sentence of up to 20 years in prison: she would be Ksenia Karelina Khavana, 32 years, according to the New York Times.
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