News

Russian human rights activist Yelena Bonner has died at the age of 88 after a long illness in the US.

She was active in the human rights movement in the USSR in the 1960s, and helped to found the Moscow Helsinki Group, a rights monitoring body.

In 1972 she married the nuclear scientist and fellow human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, who won the Nobel Peace Prize three years later.

She later became a fierce critic of the then Russian President Vladimir Putin.

'Inspiring'

Mrs Bonner died on Saturday in the US, where she had lived in recent years in the Boston area, her daughter Tatiana Yankelevich and son Alexey Semyonov said in a statement.