Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has made a powerful public address, vowing to continue the work of her late husband, who died last week in a remote Arctic prison in Russia.
On Monday, the 47-year old explained in a nine-minute video posted to YouTube that “…the most important thing we can do for Alexei and for ourselves is to continue to fight.”
“I will continue the life work of Alexei Navalny,” Navalnaya said. “I call on you to stand with me.”
She accused the Russian president of killing her husband, adding that she believed the Kremlin was hiding his body in order for any traces of the nerve agent novichok to disappear from it. Three years ago, her husband had been poisoned by the same nerve agent.
“Three days ago, Vladimir Putin killed my husband,” she said.
“We know exactly why Putin killed Alexei three days ago. We will tell you soon about it. We will also definitely find out who exactly and how exactly this crime was committed. We will name names and show faces.”
“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.”
“[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.”
Navalny’s family have been told they would not get to see his body for another two weeks — a tactic by the authorities to wait for “yet another Putin’s Novichok” to leave his body, according to Navalnaya.
The Kremlin have denied any involvement in Navalny’s death on Friday in the remote “Polar Wolf” IK-3 penal colony in the country’s Arctic north, considered the harshest prison conditions in the country, where he was serving a combined 30 ½-year jail sentence for inciting and financing extremism, among other charges rejected by his supporters.
Navalnaya called on Russians to rally around her as she fought for a free Russia.
“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,”she said.
“All these years I have been by Alexei’s side. But today I want to be by your side, because I know that you have lost as much as I have.”
“Putin killed the father of my children. Putin took away the most precious thing I had, the closest person to me, and the person I loved most in the world.”
The video was released ahead of Navalnaya’s meeting with European Union foreign ministers in Brussels, where her presence would “send a strong message of support to freedom fighters in Russia,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said.
Borrell welcomed Navalnaya in the Belgium capital, saying the bloc’s foreign ministers “expressed the EU’s deepest condolences” to the widow, who last saw her late husband two years ago.
“Vladimir Putin and his regime will be held accountable for the death of Alexei Navalny,” he said.
On Monday, Navalny’s spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said his family and his lawyers were told by Russian investigators that they would not yet release his body, and had been denied access to the morgue.
“Some kind of ‘chemical examination’ will be conducted with it for another 14 days,” Yarmysh said on X.
“They were not allowed to go in. One of the lawyers was literally pushed out. When the staff was asked if Alexey’s body was there, they did not answer.”
“The cause of death is still ‘unknown,'” Yarmysh added. “They lie, buy time for themselves and do not even hide it.”
On Monday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov dismissed the allegations from Navalny’s supporters, insisting that “the investigation is being carried out, all due actions are being taken.”
“But no results of this investigation have been published so far, they are not known yet,” he said.
“When there is no information, we consider it totally unacceptable to make such statements, which are quite rude and gross, to say frankly.”
When he was questioned about Putin’s reaction to Navalny’s death, Peskov said he had nothing to add. The Russian president, who is up for re-election in a few weeks’ time, has not commented on Navalny’s death.
As for Navalnaya, many Russian dissidents are now hoping to see her champion the work of her late husband. She has emerged as a reluctant leader, according to some, and has been called the “First Lady” of the Russian opposition.
In August 2020, when her husband was poisoned with a Soviet-era novichok nerve agent, she fought to have him airlifted to Germany to save his life.