Before his death, the opposition leader laid out a strategy to challenge the Russian president.

Just 15 days before he was declared dead in a Russian prison, Alexei Navalny launched his last salvo against Vladimir Putin.

The Russian opposition leader had spent the final weeks of his life imprisoned in a penal colony north of the Arctic Circle, a notoriously cold, dangerous and uncomfortable place with conditions so extreme they are tantamount to torture.

For more than a decade, Navalny had been the Russian president’s most prominent opponent and biggest political threat. Over the years, he had been put under state surveillance, physically attacked and jailed. And yet, in January 2021, after recovering in Germany from being nearly killed by the Novichok nerve agent, he had opted to return to Russia, knowing he would likely be detained on arrival.