U.S. President Joe Biden joined other Western leaders in condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying he is "responsible" for the reported death of jailed opposition leader Aleksei Navalny.
Biden told reporters at the White House that the United States was seeking more information about reports of Navalny's death at a Russian penal colony north of the Arctic Circle.
SEE ALSO: The List Is Long: Russians Who Have Died After Running Afoul Of The Kremlin“Reports of his death, if they are true -- and I have no reason to believe that they are not -- Russian authorities are going to tell their own story," Biden said. "Make no mistake...Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death.”
The local department of the Federal Penitentiary Service issued a statement on February 16 saying Navalny, 47, had died. But there was no immediate confirmation of Navalny’s death from his team, nor from his wife.
According to Russian law, family must be notified within 24 hours if a prisoner dies.
Biden declined to say that Navalny had been assassinated because the White House does not yet know exactly what happened. He added that his administration was looking at a “whole number of options” on how it will respond but declined to specify what is being discussed.
The U.S. president praised Navalny as someone who “bravely stood up to the corruption, the violence, and all the bad things the Putin government was doing.”
He described Navalny as a politician who “was so many things that Putin is not” -- brave and principled and “dedicated to building a Russia where the rule of law existed and applied to everybody. Navalny believed in that Russia.”
Navalny knew this was a cause worth fighting for and “obviously, worth dying for,” Biden said, recalling Navalny's near-death from a poisoning in 2020 and his return to the country in 2021, only to be arrested and jailed.
Biden also said the tragedy is a reminder of the stakes in Ukraine and urged members of the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a bill containing $61 billion in aid to the war-torn country.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who was in Berlin, said Putin “doesn’t care” who dies and only wants to hold on to power.
“This is why he must hold onto nothing. Putin must lose everything and be held responsible for his deeds,” Zelenskiy said, speaking alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who said Navalny’s death makes clear “what kind of regime this is” in Russia.
Navalny “has probably now paid for this courage with his life,” Scholz said.
Belarusian opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya posted a video on X in which said the Putin regime, like the one in her country overseen by authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka, gets rid of opponents by any means.
“I have no doubt that [Navalny] was purposely killed by the Putin regime,” she said, noting that in Belarus dozens of political prisoners are held incommunicado by a regime that is allied with Putin and has provided him with logistical support during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Navalny's death showed that “Putin fears nothing more than dissent from his own people,” calling it “a grim reminder of what Putin and his regime are all about.”
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NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Navalny “was in jail, a prisoner, and that makes it extremely important that Russia now answer all the questions that it will be asked about the cause of death.”
British Foreign Secretary David Cameron also blamed Putin, saying his regime “imprisoned him, trumped up charges against him, poisoned him, sent him to an Arctic penal colony and now he has tragically died.”
The world should hold Putin accountable, he added.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Navalny was a fighter for democracy, freedoms, and the Russian people.
“There is no question that Aleksei Navalny is dead because he stood up to Putin, he stood up to the Kremlin," Trudeau said.
Bulgarian Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov said Navalny for years "has been a symbol of the fight against the dictatorship in Russia, of the fight for free speech, of the fact that a person cannot be imprisoned for a different opinion.”
European Parliament President Roberta Metsola said Russia took away Navalny’s freedom and his life but his struggle for democracy lives on.
Paying tribute to Navalny on X, Metsola said the "world has lost a fighter whose courage will echo through generations."