Navalny’s widow disputes Russian report on her husband’s death
The Russian authorities have attributed the death six months ago of Alexei Navalny, the country’s main opposition leader, to a grab bag of diseases aggravated by heart arrhythmia, a conclusion described as preposterous by his widow on Thursday.
Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, speaking in a recorded statement posted online, said she received a three-page document from Russia’s Investigative Committee last week saying there was no cause to open a criminal investigation into her husband’s death in a remote Arctic prison because a combination of medical factors had killed him.
“Here’s a man under constant surveillance in prison, a globally recognized politician, the leader of the opposition, and suddenly he dies within an hour from a ‘combined illness,’” Navalnaya said. “The report is a lie, and they are hiding what happened that day.”
She demanded that the authorities release the full medical report and return Navalny’s personal effects to his family, including his notebooks and the cross that he wore. The family has requested this material repeatedly, she said, but was told it would have to wait until the committee, the main agency for investigating possible federal crimes in Russia, completed its report.
Navalnaya said that she believed that the real cause of death was murder by the state, and that in the absence of a credible official inquiry, which was unlikely as long as President Vladimir Putin remained in power, the family would conduct its own investigation, no matter how long it took. The Kremlin has strongly denied that it had Navalny killed.
At the time of Navalny’s death, on Feb. 16, Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service said he had lost consciousness and died after taking a walk that day in the prison where he was moved to late last year. His death, at 47, stripped the Russian opposition of its most popular and charismatic leader, a man who had repeatedly embarrassed Putin with investigations into corruption rooted in the Kremlin.
After surviving an attempted assassination by poisoning in 2020, Navalny recuperated in Germany. He was arrested at passport control when he returned to Russia in early 2021 and transferred from one increasingly harsh penal colony to another as the court added more than 30 years to his sentence on various charges considered politically motivated.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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