Alexei Navalny’s wife said on Friday she did not know whether to believe the “awful” news of her husband's death, if only because Vladimir Putin and his government were “always lying.”
But if it did turn out to be true, Yulia Navalnaya told an audience in Germany, she wanted the dictatorial Russian president to know that he would be held responsible—“and that day will come very soon.”
Navalnaya, a 47-year-old economist, was making a planned appearance at the high-level Munich Security Conference in Germany.
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Clearly struggling to control her emotions, she told the audience that she had considered dropping out of Friday’s event. “I thought long and hard. Should I stand here before you or should I fly straight back to my children? Then I thought, what would have Alexei done in my place? And I’m sure that he would have been here, he would have been here on this stage.”
She went on: “I don’t know whether or not to believe the news, the awful news, which we are hearing only from government sources in Russia. Because for many long years, as you know, we have not been able to believe Putin or Putin’s government. They are always lying.
“But if it is true, I want Putin, those around him, Putin’s friends, and his government to know they will be held responsible for what they have done to our country, my family, and my husband—and that day will come very soon.”
Navalnaya met her future husband, then a young lawyer, on a holiday in Turkey in 1998 and they married two years later—well before he became famous as a pro-democracy blogger and anti-Putin activist.
Although often seen at his side, Navalnaya did not get involved in politics to the same degree as her husband, but she was forced to speak out after a GRU plot to murder Navalny in August 2020 with the nerve agent Novichok. It was only at her insistence that Russian officials let Navalny be flown to Germany for treatment that saved his life.
To the surprise of many, the couple returned to Russia in January 2021 even though Navalny—by now recognized as the most important voice in Russia’s opposition—was facing certain arrest.
Navalny was duly detained on arrival at Moscow’s Sheremyetovo airport, the couple’s final kiss captured by waiting news crews, before Navalny himself was subjected to a string of ludicrous show trials ending in a 19-year-prison sentence and his being sent to a Soviet-era penal colony in the Arctic Circle, where he was said to have died on Friday afternoon.
On Wednesday, Navalny sent his wife a Valentine Day’s message from his freezing prison camp. “Baby, everything with us is like a song: between us there are cities, take-off lights of airfields, blue snowstorms and thousands of kilometers,” he wrote. “But I feel that you are near every second, and I love you with all my strength”
Unfortunately for Navalnaya, it appears that the news of her husband's death at IK-3 penal colony is indeed true—Navalny’s own father was said to have confirmed it on Friday evening.
But for Yulia Navalnaya, once the “First Lady of the Russian opposition,” the biggest battle is still ahead.
“I want to call on the entire international community, everyone in this room, people around the world, to unite together and defeat this evil, defeat the appalling regime that is now in Russia,” she declared to a standing ovation at the Munich conference.
