Yulia Navalnaya has published a video address in which she vowed to continue her late husbandâs political work and called on Russians to rally around her as Alexei Navalnyâs family were told they would not get access to his body for another two weeks.
âI will continue Alexei Navalnyâs work ⦠I want to live in a free Russia, I want to build a free Russia,â Navalnaya said in a powerful nine-minute video published on social media.
âI 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.â
Navalnaya, 47, accused the Russian authorities of murdering her husband, hiding his body and waiting for traces of the nerve agent novichok to disappear from it.
Hours after Navalnayaâs comments, Navalnyâs spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said Russian investigators told his family and his lawyers that they would not yet release his body.
âSome kind of âchemical examinationâ will be conducted with it for another 14 days,â Yarmysh said.
âI shouldnât have been in this place, I shouldnât be recording this video. There should have been another person in my place. But that person was killed by Vladimir Putin,â Navalnaya said, her voice occasionally trembling with emotion.
She said she knew âwhy exactly Putin killed Alexei three days agoâ. âAnd we will tell you that soon,â she added.
Navalnaya said that by âkilling Alexeiâ, Putin had âkilled half of me, half of my heart and my soulâ.
âBut I still have the other half, and it tells me that I have no right to give up,â added Navalnaya, who last saw her husband two years ago.
For years, Navalnaya shunned publicity, rarely giving interviews to the media. Instead, she stood by her husband as he galvanised mass protests in Russia, flew him out of the country as he lay in a coma after a poisoning and defiantly returned to Moscow with him.
âAll these years I have been by Alexeiâs side,â Navalnaya said on Monday. âBut today I want to be by your side, because I know that you have lost as much as I have.â
Navalnaya lives in an undisclosed location abroad and said her main aim was to protect her two children from the fallout of her late husbandâs political work. She did not comment on whether she planned to return to Russia, where she would probably face persecution.
âPutin 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,â she said.
Navalnyâs last message to the outside world was a Valentineâs Day note to his wife: âI feel that you are with me every second.â
Many inside and outside the country will now see Navalnaya as the natural heir of the Russian opposition, at a time when his death has stunned and demoralised Russian dissidents. Some posted on social media to voice their support for her.
âPutin thought that by killing Navalny, he would forget his name,â Ivan Zhadnov, a close ally of the family, wrote on X. âBut now Yulia will take his spot. Yulia who is free. Yulia who is fueled by noble and just fury. Putin made a grave mistake killing Alexey.â
The exiled opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov wrote: âYulia, I wish you strength and patience! You can count on my support!.â
Navalnayaâs dramatic video message was published hours before she addressed EU foreign ministers in Brussels, as Germany proposed a fresh round of sanctions over Navalnyâs death.
âNever forget Russia is not Putin and Putin is not Russia,â Navalnaya told them, clad in black and imploring the EU and the west to âdo more to target Putinâs circleâ and his oligarch allies.
Josep Borrell, the EUâs foreign policy chief who welcomed Navalnaya in Brussels, said the blocâs foreign ministers âexpressed the EUâs deepest condolencesâ to her. âVladimir Putin and his regime will be held accountable for the death of Alexei Navalny,â he said.
Sanctions could include the use of frozen Russian assets, a move that would be in addition to a levy Belgium exacts from interest on immobilised cash reserves.
Borrell suggested that Russian prison officials linked to Navalnyâs death could be added to the list of those subjected to asset freezes and travel bans in the blocâs 13th package of sanctions against Russia since Moscow invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, which Hungary â yet to approve â on Monday said it would not veto.
Earlier on Monday, Navalnyâs aides said his mother and his lawyers had not been allowed into the morgue in the Russian town of Salekhard near the prison colony where authorities said he had died.
âOne of the lawyers was literally pushed out,â Navalnyâs spokesperson, Yarmysh, wrote on X, adding that morgue staff would not answer a question on the whereabouts of Navalnyâs body.
Navalnyâs mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, and his lawyer had travelled over the weekend to the notorious âPolar Wolfâ IK-3 penal colony in Russiaâs Arctic north, where Navalny had been held since last year, to track down his body, but received contradictory information from various institutions over its location and left without recovering or seeing her son.
The Kremlin said on Monday it had ânothing to addâ to the news on the death of Navalny. It denies involvement in his death.