In a challenging and emotional speech, the wife of Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, Yulia Navalnaya, said that if the news of her husband’s death is true, Russian President Vladimir Putin must be brought to justice.
“Putin and everyone around him, his friends and the government, know that they will be held accountable for what they did to our country, to my family and to my husband,” she said.
“And that day will come soon.”he added upon receiving a standing ovation.
Navalnaya also called on the international community to “unite and defeat this evil.”
Navalny was serving a long prison sentence when his death was announced this Friday.
Russian prison authorities said the Kremlin critic had become unwell after a walk and had lost consciousness in prison. Siberian prison colony known as “Polar Wolf”.
Speaking at the Security Conference headquarters in Munich, Germany, Yulia Navalnaya said she did not know “whether or not to believe this terrible news that we received from government sources.”
“You all know that we cannot trust Putin’s government. They lie constantly,” he told an audience of dignitaries.
Navalnaya burst into tears while continuing to make a dramatic call to the security conference – a meeting that brings together leaders from around the world – to “fight this horrible regime that exists in Russia today.”
“He would be in this scenario,” she said, referring to her husband.
The 47-year-old wife of the Russian opposition leader was undecided about whether to stay in Munich or fly to immediately join her children.
“First lady” of the opposition
Yulia and Alexei Navalny, who was a lawyer, met in Turkey on vacation in 1998 and married two years later. Their two children, Daria and Zakhar, were born in 2001 and 2008.
Yulia Navalnaya attracted international attention in the summer of 2020, when Navalny was rushed to hospital in the Russian city of Omsk, southwestern Siberia. under suspicion of poisoning.
At that time she demanded that her husband be sent to Germany for treatment.
They arrived in Berlin, where German doctors confirmed that he had been poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent. She then became a de facto spokesperson for her husband.
Novaya Gazetaa former Russian newspaper now published in the Latvian capital Riga, named Navalnaya “Hero of the Year” 2020 for their resistance and support for Navalny in his fight to expose Kremlin corruption.
Navalnaya, an economist by training, soon became the center of media attention as the “first lady of the Russian opposition.”
Returning from a near-death experience when he was brought out of a coma a few months later, Navalny said of his wife: “Yulia, you saved me.”
She returned to Russia with her husband in January 2021, and when Navalny was detained, she maintained that his arrest was proof that authorities were trying to silence him.
The most important thing about her husband, she said, was that he was not afraid, adding: “And I’m not afraid either.” She urged her followers to never give up, even if Navalny went to jail.
In Navalny’s last Instagram post for Valentine’s Day, he wrote: “Honey, with you everything is like a song: between us there are cities, airport takeoff lights, blue snow storms and thousands of kilometers.” .
Navalny said that, despite the enormous distance that separates them, “I feel that you are close every second and I love you more and more.”
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