The widow of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny branded Vladimir Putin a “murderer and a war criminal” after a court in Russia ordered her to be arrested.
Moscow’s Basmanny district court ruled on Wednesday to arrest Yulia Navalnaya, who lives in exile outside Russia, on charges of alleged involvement in an extremist group.
She faces immediate arrest if she was to set foot in the country, with a two-month detention order imposed.
Reacting to the court’s decision, part of a sweeping Kremlin crackdown on the opposition, Mrs Navalnaya reiterated claims of Russian President Putin’s involvement in the death of her husband. “His place is in prison, and not somewhere in The Hague, in a cosy cell with a TV, but in Russia — in the same colony and the same two by three metre cell in which he killed Alexey,” she said in a social media post.
“Oh, won’t there be the usual procedure? A foreign agent, then the opening of a criminal case, then an arrest?! When you write about this, please do not forget to write the main thing: Vladimir Putin is a murderer and a war criminal.”
Mr Navalny died in February in an Arctic prison while serving a 19-year sentence on extremism charges that he condemned as politically motivated.
He was Russia’s highest-profile opposition leader and spent years criticising Putin. Mr Navalny was imprisoned after returning to Moscow in January 2021 from Germany, where he had been recuperating from a nerve agent poisoning in 2020 that he blamed on the Kremlin.
Mrs Navalnaya, 47, has stepped into the spotlight following her husband’s death and said she will continue the fight for the “beautiful Russia of the future”. The Kremlin has denied ordering Mr Navalny killed. Authorities said he became ill “after a walk” but have otherwise given no details on what happened.
Since her husband’s death, Mrs Navalnaya has met a number of senior Western leaders, including US President Joe Biden in San Francisco.
The US-based non-profit group Human Rights Foundation named her as its chair last week, and she said she would use the new role to step up her the struggle waged by her husband against Putin.
“We will take on board everything that can be useful to fight Putin, to fight for the beautiful Russia of the future,” she said on X
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz denounced the Moscow court’s ruling as “an arrest warrant against the desire for freedom and democracy”.
Russian authorities have yet to specify the charges against Mrs Navalnaya. They appear to relate to authorities designating Mr Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption as an extremist organisation. The 2021 court ruling that outlawed Mr Navalny’s group forced his close associates to leave Russia.
A number of journalists have recently been jailed on similar charges for their coverage of Mr Navalny.
