Putin critic Alexei Navalny was telling jokes a day before his death

On the television screen, jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny peered through a closed window, laughing and telling jokes about his dwindling funds and a judge’s salary.

The 47-year-old man looked healthy and happy while testifying via a video link on Thursday. The camera panned to show court officials smiling and enjoying the banter with him.

One day later, Russia’s prison service said he died after a fall And lost consciousness in the penal colony north of the Arctic Circle, where he was serving a long prison sentence.

The man who was until now Russia’s best-known opposition leader rose to prominence more than a decade ago by criticizing the elite class around President Vladimir Putin.

His trademark humor was on display again on Thursday, when he made his final appearance wearing a black prison uniform.

He said, “Your Majesty, I will send you my personal account number so that you can use your huge salary as a federal judge to ‘warm up’ my personal account, because I am running out of money.”

Online news outlet SOTA reported that the court session was called after an “argument” with a prison officer who tried to confiscate Navalny’s pen.

Navalny wrote later Thursday that he had been given 15 days in solitary confinement.

Since first being jailed in January 2021, Navalny had been in and out of solitary confinement, which is often used in the Russian prison system to punish rule breakers.

After the hearing, Navalny took to social media. “Yamal prison decided to break Vladimir’s record of flattering and appeasing Moscow officials. They just gave me 15 days in solitary confinement,” he wrote on X.

“This is the fourth solitary confinement in less than two months that I have been with him,” he said. This was the last such message he wrote.