Alexei Navalny’s Widow Vows to Fight For ‘Free Russia,’ Accuses Putin For Husband’s Death

Widow of Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, in a video message Monday said, that she would continue the work of her husband who died in mysterious way inside the prison where he was jailed. Yulia Navalnaya said that she will “fight for a free Russia” and urged for the Russians to join and support her.

“By killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul. But I still have the other half, and it tells me that I have no right to give up,” Navalny’s wife said, according to translation of her video statement released on Monday. “I will continue the work of Alexei Navalny, continue to fight for our country. I urge you to stand next to me, to share not only my grief and endless pain, but also to share the rage,” she went on to add.

Navalny died a suspicious death in a Russian arctic penal colony, and his body has not been released, according to Yulia. The Russian authorities, who refused to hand Navalny’s dead body to his mother, announced that they would hold the opposition leader’s remains for a further two weeks for investigation to establish the cause of death. Navalny’s family were told they would not get access to his body, his wife noted in the nine minute video. She urged, “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.”

Navalny was ‘killed by Vladimir Putin’: Yulia Navalnaya

The 47-year-old blamed the Kremlin and Russia’s president Vladimir Putin for the murder of her husband, saying that the authorities have held his deadbody as they are waiting for traces of ‘novichok’ the soviet era nerve agent to leave from his system. Navalny’s spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, claimed, that a group of lawyers who visited the morgue were turned away from the facility without seeing Navalny’s deadbody. “Some kind of ‘chemical examination’ will be conducted with it for another 14 days,” Navalny’s spokesperson 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 in her video. The latter climate that she knew “why exactly Putin killed Alexei three days ago”. “And we will tell you that soon,” she added.

“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,” the wife of late Navalny said from an undisclosed location abroad. “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 claimed. Navalnaya saw her husband two years ago, and she last received a message from her husband on Valentine’s Day the read: “I feel that you are with me every second.”