From Navalny to Prigozhin - how Vladimir Putin’s critics and rivals have met with mysterious ends

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Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has died in an Arctic penal colony after years of harsh treatment in the Russian prison system.

But his death is only the most recent of a long line of Vladimir Putin’s critics who have been jailed, silenced or met brutal ends over the years. From poisonings, mysterious falls from windows and plane crashes, many of the Russian president’s foes appear to have been targeted.

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While no cause of death for Navalny has been revealed, friends of the opposition leader are already accusing Mr Putin of “murder”. The Kremlin claims it has “no information” about what happened to him.

Below, we look at some of the high-profile deaths and mysterious incidents involving those who have defied the Russian leader over the years.

“You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world, Mr. Putin, will reverberate in your ears for the rest of your life,” were among the last words said by former Russian spy turned Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko before his death in November 2006.

Three weeks earlier, Litvinenko had drunk a cup of tea in an upmarket London hotel where he had met another former Russian agent.

After falling ill and spending the entire night vomiting, it emerged he had been poisoned with polonium-210, a poisonous radioactive isotope sourced from a nuclear reactor in Russia’s Ural mountains.

He had fled Moscow in 2000 and resettled in Britain, where he attracted the ire of Mr Putin, becoming a writer journalist and MI6 agent tasked with providing expertise on Russian organised crime.

In 2021, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Russia was responsible for the 2006 murder by radiation poisoning. The Kremlin rejected the ruling as “groundless”.

As Mr Putin’s personal chef turned Wagner warlord, Yevgeny Prigozhin led a failed mutiny against Russia’s ministry of defence over a disagreement with the direction of Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

He led a dramatic “march for justice” where armed Wagner mercenaries were seen speeding towards the Russian capital in June 2023.

As Mr Putin remained silent, the mutiny was suddenly aborted as Prigozhin ordered his troops to lay down their arms, before they were relocated to Belarus under a deal brokered by Alexander Lukashenko.

Two months later, Prigozhin plummeted from the sky while on board a business jet flying from Moscow to St Petersburg.

The Kremlin has denied any involvement in the downing of the aircraft and claimed hand grenades could have been let off by drunk passengers.

Formerly a colonel with Russian military intelligence before leaving in 1999, Sergei Skripal went on to work at the country’s foreign ministry until 2003.

He was arrested in Moscow a year later and confessed to having been recruited by British intelligence in 1995. He said he had given information to British intelligence about Russian agents in Europe in return for around £79,300.

Mr Skripal was jailed but later released in a spy swap and moved to the UK.

In 2018, along with his daughter, he was poisoned with the nerve agent novichok but the pair survived the attack after a botched assassination attempt nearby Salisbury Cathedral.

The Kremlin denied that Russia was in any way involved in the poisoning, describing British accusations that an attack had been approved by senior Russian officials as “unacceptable”.

Ravil Maganov, the chairman of the board of Russia’s second largest oil producer Lukoil, met a tragic end six months after he openly criticised the war in Ukraine.

In a statement in March 2022, the board called for the “soonest termination of the armed conflict” and expressed “sincere empathy for all victims”.

It added: “We strongly support a lasting ceasefire and a settlement of problems through serious negotiations and diplomacy.”

In September that year, 67-year-old Mr Maganov died after apparently falling from a sixth-floor window at the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow.

Russian state news agency Tass claimed his death was a suicide.

The former governor of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast and deputy prime minister under Russia’s first President Boris Yeltsin was gunned down on 27 February 2015 on a bridge close to the Kremlin in Moscow beside his Ukrainian partner Anna Durytska. He was shot four times in the back.

Mr Nemtsov, who was killed at the age of 55, was a critic of Mr Putin from the get-go – from the turn of the millennium until his death. When he was killed, he was helping to set up a rally against the Russian military incursion in Ukraine, which began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and the support of supposed separatists in the Donbas in eastern Ukraine.

The New York City-born Russian journalist and human rights activist was killed in the elevator of her apartment building on 7 October 2006 at the age of 48. She gained widespread acclaim for her reporting on the Second Chechen War, which lasted between 1999 and 2005.

The killing garnered international attention and it wasn’t until June 2014 that five men were sentenced for the killing, but it remains unclear who ordered the murder.

Mr Putin said after her death that her reporting work was “extremely insignificant for political life in Russia” and that her murder led to “far greater injuries and damage than her publications”.