Bloody mobster

Navalny’s widow fears ‘bloody mobster’ Putin will carry out purge at funeral

Russian opposition leader will be buried in Moscow on Friday.

BY EDDY WAX AND DENIS LEVEN

Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, said she fears that Russian President Vladimir Putin will order arrests at her husband’s funeral on Friday.

Addressing the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday, an ashen-faced Navalnaya said she has spent the past 12 days, since her husband’s death in an Arctic penal colony, getting his body back from the Russian authorities. Navalny’s team announced that a funeral will take place in Moscow on Friday.

“I’m not sure yet whether it will be peaceful or whether police will arrest those who have come to say goodbye to my husband,” she told MEPs. The ceremony will take place in an Orthodox church in a residential area of southeastern Moscow and Navalny will be interred in a local cemetery.

The announcement follows a 12-day dispute between Russian authorities, who were reluctant to let the funeral proceed in case it became a protest rally, and the politician’s family, represented by Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila.

Navalnaya, dressed in black and white, gave a stirring address to the Parliament, calling for Putin to be held responsible for her husband’s death, the crimes of his regime and his “brutal and sneaky” war in Ukraine.

“On his orders Alexei was tortured for three years, he was starved in a tiny stone cell cut off from the outside world and denied visits, phone calls and then even letters — and then they killed him, even after that they abused his body and abused his mother,” Navalnaya said.

She also recounted how three years ago she and her husband had brought their children to Strasbourg, one of their “favorite cities,” while he was recovering in Germany after Russian security officials poisoned him with a nerve agent. “Now my husband is dead. I am back to Strasbourg but no longer walking around with my family,” she said.

She urged lawmakers to treat Putin not as a politician but as a mafia crime boss.

“You cannot hurt Putin with another resolution or another set of sanctions that is no different from the previous ones, you cannot defeat him by thinking he’s a man of principles who has morals or rules. He is not like that and Alexei realized that a long time ago. You are not dealing with a politician but with a bloody mobster,” she said.

Navalnaya received several spontaneous rounds of applause and a final standing ovation from lawmakers who awarded her husband the EU’s top human rights award, the Sakharov Prize, in 2021. The hemicycle was mostly full, except for large swathes of empty seats in the far-right’s section.

The late politician’s former press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, has invited Navalny’s supporters to come to the funeral and participate Friday, emphasizing that people should arrive in advance.

Navalny’s team has reported that funeral agencies were banned from working with them. Though the funeral and burial are have now been organized, Navalny’s team said they were still refused a venue for civil commemoration. 

Parliament President Roberta Metsola called for an independent international investigation into Nalvany’s death. “The world is owed justice,” she said.