Extract from ABC News
World leaders were quick to point the finger at Vladimir Putin, after Russia's prison service said the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny had died on Friday, aged 47.
Mr Navalny, one of the most vocal critics of the Russian president, had been behind bars since February 2021 and was late last year moved to a penal colony in the Arctic Circle.
In a statement, the Federal Penitentiary Service of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District said Mr Navalny "felt unwell" after taking a walk on Friday, and had lost consciousness.
It said medical staff had been unable to resuscitate Mr Navalny and that his cause of death would be investigated.
In Russia's autocracy, people who criticise Mr Putin have often ended up poisoned or dying under a cloud.
Mr Navalny's demise has already been decried by critics as a state-sanctioned hit, and came after he survived being poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in 2020.
"Whatever your thoughts about Alexei Navalny as the politician, he was just brutally murdered by the Kremlin," Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics said.
US President Joe Biden said: "Make no mistake. Putin is responsible for Navalny's death."
French Foreign Minister Stephanie Sejourne said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that Mr Navalny had "paid with his life for his resistance to a system of oppression", while German Finance Minister Christian Lindner took to the same platform to claim "Putin tortured [Navalny] to death".
Russian state news agency TASS reported that Mr Putin had been told of Mr Navalny's death.
Mr Navalny's press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, said that she had been unable to confirm his death.
She said his lawyer was travelling to the prison where he was being held.
The reports of his death came as European political leaders and defence experts gathered at the Munich Security Conference.
Those inside the summit held a minute's silence to honour Mr Navalny's life and legacy.
Mr Navalny's wife, Yulia, was there, and said she was unsure if the announcement could be trusted.
"But if this is true, I want Putin, his entire entourage, Putin's friends, his government to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family, to my husband," she said.
Yevgeny Prigozhin
Lengthy sentence seen as politically motivated
Mr Navalny, 47, was first jailed in 2021 for 11-and-a-half years on fraud and other charges he said were bogus.
Last year, he had almost two decades added to that sentence for various offences, including funding extremism, which many observers described as politically motivated.
Mr Navalny established the Russia of the Future party in 2019, with his main policy platform centred on stamping out corruption in the country.
He continued to impact politics even from behind bars, filtering messages to supporters via his YouTube channel, which has more than 6 million subscribers.
Just one day before his death, Mr Navalny had been seen joking and smiling during a court hearing, which he attended via video link.
Before being moved to the Arctic Circle, Mr Navalny had been held at the IK-6 penal colony outside Moscow, where he was on a so-called special regime.
It meant he was held in solitary confinement, unable to have visitors, and could receive only one parcel per year.
He could have only one 90-minute walk, with his hands cuffed behind his back. Russian prisons are also notorious for inmates being tortured.
Supporters raised the alarm last year after he went "missing" for several weeks, but he was eventually found at a prison in Kharp, in Russia's north.
Putin's critics have met similar fates
Navalny joins several other Putin critics who have been poisoned, or died under suspicious circumstances.
Vladimir Kara Murza survived two poisoning attempts. In 2022, he was arrested after conducting an interview on CNN where he described the president's administration as a "regime of murderers".
He's now serving a 25-year prison sentence for various charges, including treason.
In 2015, former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov was shot on a Moscow bridge. He had been due to lead an anti-Kremlin protest in subsequent days.
And last year, Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a plane crash just weeks after leading a mutiny against the Russian government in protest of the defence ministry's approach to the war in Ukraine.
Putin is preparing for a presidential election in March, in which several high-profile candidates have already been barred from running. Many international observers claim the country's votes are rigged.
Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski told the BBC that Mr Navalny would be remembered as "the best president of Russia that Russia never had".
"He did nothing wrong. He was in prison on fake charges — even if nobody pulled the trigger we know it was the conditions that did it to him, and we know those conditions are because of [Russian] President Vladimir Putin," Sikorski said.
"Navalny challenged [Putin]. He was brave not only in facing up to the Russian dictator, but also in telling the Russian people perhaps what they didn't want to hear.
"That the invasion of Ukraine was a mistake, that Russia needs to withdraw to the international border, that Russia — in the future, a democratic Russia — would have to pay reparations to Ukraine."
Other political figures across Europe also paid tributes to the well-known Russian dissident, with many calling out his oppressive treatment by the Kremlin.
"I am deeply saddened and concerned by the reports coming from Russia," NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said from inside the Munich Security Conference.
"Russia has serious questions to answer … Alexei Navalny has been a strong voice for freedom and democracy for many years and NATO allies have called for his release for a long time."
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was also in Munich, said: "His death in a Russian prison and the fixation and fear of one man only underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built."
Rallies were held in major cities around the globe after the news broke, with many outside Russian embassies.
In Moscow and St Petersburg, some people laid flowers at monuments recognising victims of Soviet political repression.
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