John Sweeney (17:00 BST)

In 2024 the news that the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was dead sent shockwaves around the world.

Murder in the Gulag is a warts-and-all biography of one of the most fearless and inspiring figures of our time. Award-winning journalist John Sweeney, who knew Alexei Navalny personally, also reveals what really happened to the Russian opposition leader in the freezing Polar Wolf penal colony in a remote part of Siberia.

Patriot is Navalny’s own mind-blowing memoir, his final letter to the world ending with his prison diaries written from the cell where he died in 2024, aged 47.

Sweeney asks: ‘If the West fails to stand up more forcefully to Putin, are we in danger not just of betraying Ukraine but our own security too?’ and, ‘Did Russia's democratic opposition and its dream of change, of the “wonderful Russia of the future”, die in an Arctic prison yard along with Alexei Navalny?’

The larger-than-life journalist, based in London and Kyiv, is the author of 15 books and in his many years at the BBC he challenged dictators, despots, cult leaders and crooked businessmen.

In conversation with Allan Little

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