The widow of Putin foe Alexei Navalny was temporarily booted from X shortly after using the platform to vow to continue her husband’s fight against Vladimir Putin.
Yulia Navalnaya shared her first post on the platform Monday, and less than 24 hours later her account had been suspended for supposedly “violating the X rules.” Her account appeared to have been reinstated a short time later, with the platform saying it had been taken offline as the result of a simple error.
“Our platform’s defense mechanism against manipulation and spam mistakenly flagged @yulia_navalnaya as violating our rules,” X’s safety team wrote in a statement. “We unsuspended the account as soon as we became aware of the error, and will be updating the defense.”
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The brief suspension came as other members of Navalny’s family turned the pressure up on the Kremlin. The late opposition leader’s mother on Tuesday appealed directly to the Russian president to demand the release of her son’s body after he died suddenly in a remote penal colony north of the Arctic Circle last week.
“For the fifth day I can’t see him, they aren’t giving me his body, they aren’t even telling me where he is,” Lyudmila Navalnaya said in a video filmed in front of the Polar Wolf penal colony, where her son was reported dead on Feb. 16.
“I am addressing you, Vladimir Putin. Resolving this issue depends only on you. Let me finally see my son. I demand that Alexei’s body be immediately handed over so that I can bury him humanely,” she said.
The late Kremlin critic’s allies have complained of authorities giving them the runaround as they try to locate his body, with some fearing his remains may never be handed over if they contain proof he suffered a violent death or was poisoned (again).
Shortly after Navalny’s mother’s public appeal on Tuesday, and perhaps in response to it, police announced a new criminal case against Alexei Navalny’s younger brother Oleg, according to TASS.
Oleg Navalny had previously served prison time on fraud charges in 2014 that were widely seen as politically motivated, and many believed authorities targeted him in order to put pressure on his famous brother.
