Yulia Navalny, the widow of prominent Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, has pledged to continue his work.
“Three days ago, Vladimir Putin killed my husband Alexei Navalny. Putin killed the father of my children. Putin took away the most important thing I had. The person who was closest to me and whom I loved most,” Yulia said in a video message posted on Alexei’s YouTube channel on Monday.
Urging viewers to “share the fury and hate for those who dared to kill our future,” Yulia accused Russian authorities of hiding her husband’s body. The video was posted hours before she met foreign ministers of the European Union in Brussels.
On February 16, authorities at the Siberian prison camp where Alexei Navalny was serving a 19-year sentence announced that Navalny had collapsed during a walk and died soon after. Later prison authorities said it was a case of “sudden death syndrome.”
Several Western leaders including US President Joe Biden have categorically accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of murdering Navalny.
Claiming that she knew “exactly why Putin killed Alexei three days ago” and would release that information “soon,” she promised to “continue to fight for our country.”
Her voice shaking with emotion, she said that “we need to use every opportunity – to fight against the war, against corruption, against injustice. To fight for fair elections and freedom of speech. To fight to take our country back. Russia – free, peaceful, happy – the beautiful Russia of the future, of which my husband dreamed so much.”
While Russian authorities have refused to release Navalny’s body until their investigation was over, Yulia said the real reason was that they were waiting for traces of Novichok, a deadly nerve agent, to disappear from her husband’s body.
In Brussels, after offering his condolences to Yulia, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said he believed her husband “was slowly murdered in a Russian jail by Putin’s regime”.
Sweden, Finland and Germany summoned Russian ambassadors to their countries, and the EU and the US have threatened to impose further sanctions on Russia.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, however, dismissed accusations against President Putin as “arrogant” and “unacceptable”. Several hundred people were detained or fined across Russia for joining impromptu memorials to Navalny over the weekend.
Yulia’s video received over 475,000 views and more than 75,000 comments within hours of it being uploaded Monday morning.
Three days after the announcement of Alexei Navalny’s death in the Arctic prison, his family still can’t claim or even see his body.
We discovered live cam footage of a midnight convoy possibly transporting Navalny’s body over the ice river crossinghttps://t.co/XqjCEKyP56 pic.twitter.com/fM9FClFgXK
— Mediazona English (@mediazona_en) February 18, 2024
On Sunday, a video reportedly showing a Russian convoy carrying Navalny’s body over an icy river crossing posted by Mediazona, an independent Russian news channel on X, formerly Twitter, received over a hundred thousand views so far.
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