Ilya Navalny is one of the victims who lost their lives during the Russian occupation of Bucha near Kyiv.

He has emerged as a distant relative of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, whose family is partly Ukrainian.

Neighbors found the body of Ilya Navalny on March 12. He had been shot in the head and his passport was lying next to him, demonstratively open.

This was first reported by the German newspaper "Bild", which neighbors said they assumed that Ilya Navalny was killed as the Russian politician's namesake.

Frederick Smith

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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A great cousin of the Russian anti-corruption fighter, Pavlo Navalny, head of the village of Nove Zalissja near Bucha, has now confirmed to the BBC's Ukrainian service that Ilya, born in 1961, and Alexei Navalny, born in 1976, have a great-grandfather in common.

The opposition activist, who was arrested in Pokrov, a hundred kilometers east of Moscow, commented on Ilya Navalny's death on social media, which he can comment on through his lawyers.

"All circumstances indicate that he was killed because of his surname," wrote Navalnyj to a photo of the dead man's passport.

"Putin's executioners (how else to call them? But not 'Russian soldiers') killed a completely innocent man because he has the same name as me."

The most important opponent of the Russian President, President Vladimir Putin, himself narrowly survived an attack with the warfare agent Novichok in 2020, was treated in Germany and has been detained since his return to Russia at the beginning of last year after trials for which the European Court of Human Rights condemned Russia.

He was recently sentenced to a further nine years in prison.

The politician now wrote - apparently unaware of the BBC report - that he did not know whether Ilja Navalnyj was his relative, but that the dead man came from the same village as his father, where there were "many Navalnyjs".

In addition to Pavlo Navalny, the BBC's Ukrainian service visited other relatives of the Moscow politician in Nove Zalissya last year.

The village emerged from a kolkhoz settlement, into which residents of the village of Salissja were resettled in 1986 after the Chernobyl reactor catastrophe, which was now in the exclusion zone.

Alexei Navalnyj now wrote further that there will be another memorial for war dead in Ukraine, and Ilya Navalnyj's name will be on it.

The war against Ukraine "was unleashed by a crazed madman obsessed with fantasies about geopolitics, history and world order," Navalny wrote.

It is everyone's duty to do their part to stop the war and oust Putin from power.