Yulia Navalnaya published a video address yesterday in which she vowed to continue her late husband's political work and called on Russians to rally around her as Alexei Navalny's family were told they would not get access to his body for two weeks.
"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 his body and waiting for traces of the nerve agent novichok to disappear from it.
"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, her voice occasionally trembling with emotion. She said she knew "why exactly Putin killed Alexei three days ago", adding: "And we will tell you that soon."
By "killing Alexei", Putin had "killed half of me, half of my heart and my soul", said Navalnaya.
"But I still have the other half, and it tells me that I have no right to give up," added Navalnaya, who last saw her husband two years ago.
Hours after Navalnaya's comments, Navalny's spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said Russian investigators told his family and his lawyers that they would not yet release his body. "Some kind of 'chemical examination' will be conducted with it for another 14 days," Yarmysh said.
This story is from the February 20, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the February 20, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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