'I WILL NEVER GIVE UP'

After her husband, anticorruption activist Alexei Navalny, was poisoned and murdered by the Kremlin, she became the public face of Russia's opposition. In this candid interview Yulia Navalnaya opens up about life on the run, her perilous family life and why she's continuing her husband's fight to save their country

- DECCA AITKENHEAD

YULIA Navalnaya probably could have stopped her husband from returning home in 2021, to his imprisonment and ultimately his death. Five months earlier the Russian opposition leader had been poisoned with novichok by President Vladimir Putin's secret agents in Siberia.

Airlifted to Berlin, where doctors saved his life, he spent weeks in a coma and many more relearning to talk, write and walk, with his wife by his side. She was still by his side when they boarded a plane together to Moscow. Both knew it might be Alexei Navalny's final act as a free man - but never once did she consider persuading him not to.

"I could have. I could have made a quarrel, shouting and everything.

And he would have listened. And then we would have been living in exile, unhappy." On landing he was arrested, locked up, and the following morning sentenced to prison, never to be released. Three years later, at a remote penal colony in the Arctic Circle in February, Navalny collapsed from another suspected poisoning. This time no one was there to save him.

"When he decided to return to Russia there was no reason to stop him, because his political life was based in internal Russian politics. He couldn't be in exile. It was obvious Putin and his regime wanted him to be in exile. And that's a terrible tragedy in my life. But I absolutely understood that you need to fight. It's his life, it's his choice, it's his beliefs.

To persuade him to stay in exile, I would feel much more guilty." Knowing what she knows now, if she could turn back the clock would she change their decision to return? After an agonised silence, she says softly, "It's a difficult question. I am trying not to think about it."