He was the enemy of the Kremlin.
Alexeï Navalny, 47, died in prison on Friday, the Russian prison service announced.
Over the years, several opponents of Vladimir Putin and his policies have died in unclear or even unclear circumstances.
Last August, two months after leading a rebellion against the Russian General Staff, the boss of the Wagner militia and former ally of Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin was declared dead along with his main lieutenants in an air crash.
A death which is added to the list of suspicious deaths that have occurred since the start of the war in Ukraine.
Heart attack, drowning, falls… In total, fourteen oligarchs were found dead in questionable circumstances.
In 2015, the war in Ukraine was already at the center of an assassination.
On February 27, Boris Nemtsov, former vice-president appointed by Boris Yeltsin, who had become an opposition figure, was shot four times a few meters from the Kremlin.
He denounced Moscow's military support for pro-Russian separatists and the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Poisoning attempts
Ten years earlier, in 2006, the death of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB and FSB agent, had left its mark.
Exiled to the United Kingdom after revelations about the functioning of the Russian secret services, he died twenty days after being poisoned with polonium 210. In a letter published posthumously, he accused Putin of being responsible, which the Russian president always denied.
Also read Death of Alexeï Navalny: “The chapter of the Russian political opposition is closed”
Poisoning attempts are not uncommon.
Former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter survived Novichok in 2018 while in England.
Pro-democracy activist Vladimir Kara-Mourza was poisoned twice, in 2015 and 2017. Evacuated to the United States then returned to Russia, he was imprisoned in 2022 for having denounced Moscow's offensive on kyiv.
Journalists and lawyers targeted
Journalists and human rights activists have also been targeted.
In 2006, journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who had been documenting the abuses of the Russian army in Chechnya for years for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was killed in her building lobby in Moscow.
The lawyer, human rights defender, who had defended Stanislav Markelov several times, was assassinated three years later, alongside Anastasia Baburova, a trainee journalist at Novaya Gazeta.
Another Russian journalist and environmental activist, Mikhail Beketov, was beaten by unknown assailants in November 2008 for writing about a controversial highway construction site between Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Seriously disabled by the attack, he finally died in 2013. Like Navalny, lawyer Sergei Magnitsky also died in prison after revealing a corruption affair.