The first images supposedly showing Alexei Navalny’s prison cell in the Arctic have surfaced, with his wife suggesting there’s new proof he was poisoned before his death.

The unsettling photos, which were posted by Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, reveal the cramped cell in the ‘special regime’ penal colony known as ‘Polar Wolf’, situated above the Arctic Circle, where Navalny passed away at 47 on February 16 last year.

In these disturbing pictures, which Navalnaya asserts were taken right after his body was removed, a puddle of vomit is visible on one side of the room. She stated that prison staff testified that he had experienced convulsions on the floor.

‘He was on the floor here, vomiting and yelling out in agony. The guards, instead of assisting him, left him there, locked the bars and the door,’ explained Russian journalist Maria Pevchikh on social media.

Inside the tight, freezing Arctic cell was also a small table, a mug, a notebook, a Bible, a dictionary, a pair of mittens, and a scarf – a grim representation of the solitary end to Navalny’s life.

A second set of images showed the prison’s shabby ‘exercise yard’ which was ultimately a narrow concrete room with a single bench.

‘This is where Alexei spent several years. Thirty minutes – in this concrete space with a grate as a ceiling, where you can reach from one wall to the other with your hands,’ Pevchikh continued.

The politician, who campaigned against official corruption and led major anti-Kremlin protests, was serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism.

The charismatic campaigner had rallied hundreds of thousands across Russia in protests as he exposed the alleged ill-gotten gains of Putin’s inner circle.

Russia has never fully explained his death, stating merely that Navalny had felt unwell after a walk in the prison yard on February 16, 2024, and lost consciousness.

An ambulance arrived to try to save him to no avail, the Federal Prison Service said in a statement at the time. 

But his wife Yulia Navalnaya said Wednesday that new laboratory analysis of smuggled biological samples found he was killed by poisoning while incarcerated in the hellhole Arctic prison in February 2024.

Before Navalny was buried, his wife said his allies managed to ‘obtain and securely transfer biological samples  of Alexei abroad’.     

‘Laboratories in two countries came to the conclusion that Alexei was killed. Specifically: poisoned,’ she said in a video posted on social media.

She did not divulge details of what samples were obtained nor the results of the analysis, but she urged the labs to independently release their results and to specify which poison they believe was used.  

Navalny was previously poisoned with a nerve agent of the Novichok type in 2020 while campaigning in Siberia and flown to Germany on an emergency evacuation flight, where he spent months recovering.

Jailed upon his return to Russia in January 2021, he was convicted on a series of charges, including ‘extremism’.

From behind bars, he continued to campaign against Putin and spoke out against the invasion of Ukraine until his tragic sudden death.

In his memoir, Navalny shared how he believed he would ‘spend the rest of his life in prison and die here’ by March 2022, and expressed the difficulty he had in urging his wife to accept the possibility.

He described her first extended visit to see him in prison, whispering into her ear that ‘there’s a high probability I’ll never get out of here’.

Navalny described his relief at her acceptance, telling him ‘I was thinking that myself’.

‘Let’s just decide for ourselves that this is most likely what’s going to happen. Let’s accept it as the base scenario and arrange our lives on that basis,’ he told her.

In other entries, Navalny described the gruelling conditions of his imprisonment and the steps he took to find his ‘prison Zen’.

In 2024, having been moved to the brutal colony in Kharp, he said he went for a walk around the Arctic camp after being moved out of ‘the Shizo’ – an isolation cell deemed Russia’s most severe legal form of punishment.

Navalny said he ‘promised’ himself that he would take walks ‘no matter what the weather is’ around his exercise yard, which he said measured just 11 steps from one wall and three to the other.

He wrote that he was reminded of Leonardo DiCaprio and his horse in The Revenant, battling against the elements to survive.

‘I don’t think it would work here,’ he joked. ‘A dead horse would freeze in about fifteen minutes.’

In other entries, Navalny talked through his prison routine, waking up at 6am, eating at 6.20am and starting work at 6.40am.

‘At work, you sit for seven hours at the sewing machine on a stool below knee height,’ he wrote.

‘After work, you continue to sit for a few hours on a wooden bench under a portrait of Putin. This is called ‘disciplinary activity.’

The book also contains harrowing observations on the normalcy of prison rape. Navalny does not say that he was raped in the book.

He described the prison service as being run by ‘perverts’.

‘Everything in their system has a sick twist: the infamous mop rapes, sticking things up people’s anuses, and so on.’

‘Everything you read about the horrors and fascist crimes of our prison system is true,’ he adds. ‘There’s just one correction needed: the reality is even worse.’

Navalny also talked about how he found some acceptance of his situation by repeatedly trying to ‘imagine the worst thing that can happen, and accept it’.

At ‘Lights out’, he said he would sit in bed and try to imagine the worst case scenario.

Through acceptance, he said he could find some peace.

The Putin critic also describeed how religion helped him through difficult points.

‘Faith makes life simpler.’

‘It’s impossible to read Navalny’s prison diary without being outraged by the tragedy of his suffering, and by his death,’ wrote New Yorker editor David Remnick.

Following Navalny’s death, officials refused for days to release his body to his relatives, raising suspicions among his followers.

Navalnaya has maintained that her husband was killed on Putin’s orders, an accusation she repeated Wednesday.

‘Vladimir Putin is guilty of the murder of my husband, Alexei Navalny,’ she said.

The Kremlin denies the charges.

It escalated a crackdown against his allies and opponents even after his death, adding Navalnaya to a ‘terrorists and extremists’ blacklist and sentencing his lawyers and journalists who followed his court cases to years in prison.

Most of his family and key allies have long lived abroad.

The Russian opposition, plagued by infighting, has struggled for relevance in exile following Navalny’s death.

Public displays of opposition to Putin inside Russia have become exceptionally rare since he invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

The Kremlin introduced military censorship, ramped up its targeting of dissenters and critics and effectively outlawed criticism both of the Kremlin and the invasion.