Jailed Putin critic Alexei Navalny says Russian troops killed a Ukrainian man because he shared his last name

• Alexei Navalny said Russian troops killed a man who shared his last name in Bucha last month.
• The jailed Putin critic said he was unsure whether the deceased Ukrainian was a relative.
• The head of a village near Bucha told BBC Ukraine the man was a distant relative of Navalny.

The jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said Russian troops killed a Ukrainian man because he had the same last name as the Putin critic.

In a Tuesday Twitter thread, Navalny shared a picture of a passport with the name Ilya Ivanovich Navalny that he said was left next to the body of a 60-year-old man in the town of Bucha.

“A passport with the surname ‘Navalny’ lies next to the dead body on the ground. This is one of the people killed in the Ukrainian village of Bucha. Ilya Ivanovich Navalny,” the Russian opposition leader tweeted.

“Everything indicates that they killed him because of his last name. That’s why his passport was defiantly thrown nearby,” he said.

Bucha, which is located outside the capital of Kyiv, was under Russian occupation for several weeks before being liberated last month. After Ukraine retook control of the town, authorities found the bodies of hundreds of civilians who appeared to be killed in gruesome fashion.

—Alexey Navalny (@navalny) April 19, 2022

Insider could not independently verify Navalny’s claims of Ilya Navalny’s death.

But the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported on Sunday that neighbors saw Ilya moments before they say he was shot by Russian soldiers on March 12.

One woman, identified as Maria, told Bild am Sonntag: “We entered our block of flats the moment Ilya came down the stairs. I said to him: ‘Don’t go out, there’s shooting going on.’ But he still wanted to go outside to smoke a cigarette. Then I kept hearing shots.”

Maria said she later saw him dead on the floor, adding: “They shot him in the head. His passport with the name Navalny was right next to him.”

Navalny said he did not know if the man was a relative but that he came from the same village as his father. Navalny’s father is from the Ukrainian village of Nove Zalissia, which is located 15 miles from Bucha, the BBC reported.

Since his tweets, Pavlo Navalny, the head of Nove Zalissia, told BBC News Ukraine that Ilya was a distant relative of the Russian opposition leader. 

“Yes, Ilya was a distant relative of Oleksy, he has a common great-grandfather,” Pavlo Navalny said, using the Ukrainian spelling of the name Alexei.

Pavlo told BBC Ukraine that he was himself a second cousin of the Russian opposition leader. Insider was not able to independently verify these claims. 

Navalny was poisoned with Novichok in Siberia in 2020, after which he flew to Germany for medical treatment. He was arrested and detained after returning to Russia last year.

He was sentenced in March 2021 for missing parole hearings while he was recovering from the poisoning, and found guilty in a Russian court of fraud and contempt of court in March 2022.

From prison, Navalny has continued to call on Russians to protest Putin’s rule and the war in Ukraine via social media. He has been able to do so with the help of his lawyers and allies.