Yulia Navalnaya vows to continue husband Alexei’s fight and says Putin killed him

Yulia Navalnaya has published a video address in which she vowed to continue her late husband’s political work and called on Russians to rally around her to fight for a free Russia.

“I will continue Alexei Navalny’s work … I want to live in a free Russia, I want to build a free Russia,” Navalnaya said in a powerful nine-minute video published on social media.

“I call on you to stand with me. To share not only grief and endless pain … I ask you to share with me the rage. The fury, anger, hatred for those who dare to kill our future.”

Navalnaya, 47, accused the Russian authorities of murdering her husband, hiding Navalny’s body and waiting for traces of the nerve agent novichok to disappear from his body.

“I shouldn’t have been in this place, I shouldn’t be recording this video. There should have been another person in my place. But that person was killed by Vladimir Putin,” Navalnaya said.

She said she knew “why exactly Putin killed Alexei three days ago”. “And we will tell you that soon,” she added.

Navalnaya said that by “killing Alexei”, Putin had “killed half of me, half of my heart and my soul”.

“But I still have the other half, and it tells me that I have no right to give up,” Navalnaya, who last saw her husband two years ago, continued.

For years, Navalnaya shunned publicity, rarely giving interviews to media. Instead she stood by her husband as he galvanised mass protests in Russia, flew him out of the country as he lay in a coma after a poisoning and defiantly returned to Moscow with him.

“All these years I have been by Alexei’s side,” Navalnaya said on Monday. “But today I want to be by your side, because I know that you have lost as much as I have.”

Navalny’s last message to the outside world was a Valentine’s Day note to his wife: “I feel that you are with me every second.”

Many inside and outside the country will now see Navalnaya as the natural heir of the Russian opposition, at a time when his death has stunned and demoralised Russian dissidents.

Navalnaya is due to meet foreign ministers from the 27 EU member states at the EU Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels on Monday.

Earlier on Monday, Navalny’s aides said Navalny’s mother and his lawyers had not been allowed into the morgue in the Russian town of Salekhard near the prison colony where authorities said he had died.

“One of the lawyers was literally pushed out,” Navalny’s spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, wrote on X, adding that morgue staff would not answer a question about where Navalny’s body was.

Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, and his lawyer had travelled over the weekend to the notorious “Polar Wolf” IK-3 penal colony in Russia’s Arctic north, where Navalny had been held since last year, to track down his body, but received contradicting information from various institutions over its location and left without recovering or seeing her son.

The Kremlin said on Monday it had “nothing to add” to the news on the death of Navalny. It denies involvement in Navalny’s death.