More than 100 people were detained in various Russian cities the day before when they came to lay flowers in memory of Navalny at memorials to victims of Soviet-era purges, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors political repression in Russia.
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The tribute was removed overnight, but people continued to pour in with flowers Saturday, and arrests continued.
Police arrested more than a dozen people at a memorial in central Moscow, and later closed the area. More than 10 people were detained at a memorial in St. Petersburg, including a priest who came to perform a Mass for Navalny there.
In other cities across the country, police cordoned off some memorials and officers took photos of those who came and wrote down their personal details in an apparent attempt at intimidation.
Navalny has been imprisoned since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow to face certain arrest after recovering in Germany from a nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. He was later convicted three times, saying each case was politically motivated, and was sentenced to 19 years in prison on extremism charges.
After the final ruling, Navalny said that he understood that he was “serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of the life of this regime.”
News of Navalny's death comes less than a month before elections that will give President Vladimir Putin another six years in power.
Nigel Gould-Davies, a former British ambassador to Belarus and senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said it showed “that in Russia now the sentence for dissent is not just imprisonment, but death.”
Hours after Navalny's death was announced, his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, made a dramatic appearance at a security conference in Germany, where many world leaders gathered.
She said she wasn't sure if she could believe the news from official Russian sources, “but if it's true, I want Putin and everyone around Putin, Putin's friends, and his government to know that they will be held accountable for what they did to our country.” “For my family and my husband.”
US President Joe Biden said that Washington does not know exactly what happened, “but there is no doubt that Navalny's death was the result of something that Putin and his thugs did.”
The Kremlin expressed outrage at the outpouring of anger from world leaders, calling Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov “unacceptable and outrageous,” noting that doctors had not yet issued their verdict on Navalny's cause of death.
AP
