Navalny’s widow vows to continue fight vs Kremlin
THE widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny vowed on Monday to continue his fight against the Kremlin, while authorities denied his mother access to a morgue where his body is believed to be held after he died in an Arctic penal colony last week.
With her voice cracking at times in a video posted on social media, Yulia Navalnaya accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of killing her husband in the remote prison and alleged that officials’ refusal to hand over the body to her motherin-law was part of a cover-up.
Russian authorities said the cause of the 47-year-old’s death last Friday was still unknown. The results of any investigation are likely to be questioned abroad, and many Western leaders have already said they hold Putin responsible for the death.
Navalny’s death has deprived the Russian opposition of its most well-known and inspiring politician less than a month before an election that is all but certain to give Putin another six-year term. It dealt a devastating blow to many Russians, who had seen Navalny as a rare hope for political change amid Putin’s unrelenting crackdown on the opposition.
Navalny had been imprisoned since January 2021 when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. He received three prison terms since his arrest, on a number of charges he has rejected as politically motivated.
In the video, Navalnaya said that by “killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul.”
“But I still have the other half, and it tells me that I have no right to give up. I will continue the work of Alexei Navalny,” she declared.
“They are cowardly and meanly hiding his body, refusing to give it to his mother and lying miserably while waiting for the trace of” poison to disappear, Navalnaya said, suggesting her husband might have been killed with a Novichokstyle nerve agent.
She urged Russians to rally behind her “to share not only the grief and endless pain that has enveloped and gripped us, but also my rage.”
“The main thing that we can do for Alexei and ourselves is to keep fighting . ... We all need to get together in one strong fist and strike that mad regime,” she said.
Buying time
On Monday, Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said the opposition leader’s body would not be given to his mother for 14 days while a chemical examination of it takes place, said a Russian investigator.
Navalny spokesman Kira Yarmysh said the Investigative Committee, the country’s top criminal investigation agency, informed Lyudmila Navalnaya that the official probe into the death had been extended.
“They lie, buy time for themselves and do not even hide it,” Yarmysh wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
With authorities offering no more information on the death, many Russians speculated about what might have happened to Navalny. Independent Russian outlets released reports trying to shed light on his death. Some called the official narrative into question, but their reports were not possible to verify.
In Belgium’s capital Brussels on Monday, Navalny’s widow met with European Union foreign ministers and other officials. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the bloc was mulling sanctions against Moscow and he also called for an independent international investigation into the death.
He said responsibility for Navalny’s death lied with “Putin himself, but we can go down to the institutional structure of the penitentiary system in Russia,” to impose asset freezes and travel bans.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov slammed the accusations from Western leaders as “boorish” and “inadmissible.”
“Those statements can’t do any harm to the head of our state, but they certainly aren’t becoming for those who make them,” he said in a call with reporters.
Asked when Navalny’s body could be handed over to his family, Peskov responded that the Kremlin was not involved in those proceedings, adding that the official probe was continuing in line with the law.
Since Navalny’s death, nearly 400 people have been detained by police in Russia as they streamed to ad-hoc memorials and monuments to victims of political repression with flowers and candles to pay tribute to the Kremlin critic, said OVD-Info, a group that monitors political arrests.
Authorities cordoned off some of the memorials across the country and were removing flowers at night, but they kept appearing.