“They will answer for what they did to our country and to my husband” — Yulia Navalnaya on news of Alexei Navalny’s death

Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug reported Alexei Navalny’s death in the afternoon of February 16. Immediately after the news became public, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reported that the information had been relayed to Vladimir Putin. The 112 Telegram channel and the propagandist television network RT claim that the ambulance crew that was called on to attend to the opposition leader spent half an hour trying to resuscitate Navalny before declaring him dead due to a detached blood clot.

Meanwhile, Alexander Polupan, a practicing emergency room doctor who was part of the team that resuscitated Navalny after he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok by a group of FSB agents, points out that diagnosing pulmonary embolism (the medical term for Navalny’s pronounced cause of death) on the spot would have been impossible. He noted that the fact of this diagnosis appearing so quickly and being circulated by propaganda outlets so eagerly “raises questions.”