Yulia Navalnaya has published a video address 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 another 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.
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.
“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”. “And we will tell you that soon,” she added.
Navalnaya said that 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,” added Navalnaya, who last saw her husband two years ago.
For years, Navalnaya shunned publicity, rarely giving interviews to the media. Instead, she stood by her husband as he galvanised mass protests in Russia, flew him out of the country as he lay in a coma after a poisoning and defiantly returned to Moscow with him.
“All these years I have been by Alexei’s side,” Navalnaya said on Monday. “But today I want to be by your side, because I know that you have lost as much as I have.”
Navalnaya lives in an undisclosed location abroad and said her main aim was to protect her two children from the fallout of her late husband’s political work. She did not comment on whether she planned to return to Russia, where she would probably face persecution.
“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,” she said.
Navalny’s last message to the outside world was a Valentine’s Day note to his wife: “I feel that you are with me every second.”
Many inside and outside the country will now see Navalnaya as the natural heir of the Russian opposition, at a time when his death has stunned and demoralised Russian dissidents. Some posted on social media to voice their support for her.
“Putin thought that by killing Navalny, he would forget his name,” Ivan Zhadnov, a close ally of the family, wrote on X. “But now Yulia will take his spot. Yulia who is free. Yulia who is fueled by noble and just fury. Putin made a grave mistake killing Alexey.”
The exiled opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov wrote: “Yulia, I wish you strength and patience! You can count on my support!.”
Navalnaya’s dramatic video message was published hours before she addressed EU foreign ministers in Brussels, as Germany proposed a fresh round of sanctions over Navalny’s death.
“Never forget Russia is not Putin and Putin is not Russia,” Navalnaya told them, clad in black and imploring the EU and the west to “do more to target Putin’s circle” and his oligarch allies.
Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief who welcomed Navalnaya in Brussels, said the bloc’s foreign ministers “expressed the EU’s deepest condolences” to her. “Vladimir Putin and his regime will be held accountable for the death of Alexei Navalny,” he said.
Sanctions could include the use of frozen Russian assets, a move that would be in addition to a levy Belgium exacts from interest on immobilised cash reserves.
Borrell suggested that Russian prison officials linked to Navalny’s death could be added to the list of those subjected to asset freezes and travel bans in the bloc’s 13th package of sanctions against Russia since Moscow invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, which Hungary – yet to approve – on Monday said it would not veto.
Earlier on Monday, Navalny’s aides said his mother and his lawyers had not been allowed into the morgue in the Russian town of Salekhard near the prison colony where authorities said he had died.
“One of the lawyers was literally pushed out,” Navalny’s spokesperson, Yarmysh, wrote on X, adding that morgue staff would not answer a question on the whereabouts of Navalny’s body.
Over 63,000 people have signed a petition to Russian investigators demanding the release of Navalny’s body, a campaign initiated by the Russian human rights group, OVD-Info.
Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, and his lawyer had travelled over the weekend to the notorious “Polar Wolf” IK-3 penal colony in Russia’s Arctic north, where Navalny had been held since last year, to track down his body, but received contradictory information from various institutions over its location and left without recovering or seeing her son.
The Kremlin said on Monday it had “nothing to add” to the news on the death of Navalny. It denies involvement in his death.
