“My husband was killed by Putin.” Alexei Navalny's widow doesn't hesitate to point the finger at the Kremlin and suggest that his death may have been caused by the use of Novichok, the nerve agent used in the previous poisoning of the opponent occurred in 2020. And in a video posted on social media, she announces that she is ready to inherit her husband's political legacy on the very day he lands in Brussels to attend the EU Foreign Ministers Council.
Meanwhile, the dissident's former spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh reported that Navalny's mother was told that the body would not be returned to the family for another 14 days, during which unspecified “chemical tests” would have to be carried out. Yarmysh added that the same mother and the opponent's lawyer were prevented from entering the hospital morgue in the morning for the second time in three days
In the Arctic city of Salekhard, the body was taken to the IK-3 penal colony late in the evening of February 16, the day of his death, according to the Russian opposition website Mediazona.
According to Yulia Navalnaya, whose eight-minute video immediately went viral, these shifts confirm that the authorities are “petty lying while waiting for the traces of another Novichok from Putin to disappear.” A reference to the toxic substance that has been involved in attacks on Navalny and other opponents in the past, such as in 2018 in Great Britain against defected former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter. But then Navalnaya made it clear that she was not yet sure about the method used: “We will definitely find out who exactly and in what specific way committed the crime, we will name the names and show the faces,” promised she.
Prisoners' legal protection organization Ovd-Info has launched an online petition to demand the body be immediately returned to the family, saying it has already collected over 60,000 signatures. But when asked to respond to the family's request, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin had no jurisdiction over the matter. “The investigation is ongoing and all necessary measures are being taken in this regard,” the spokesman assured, assessing the allegations made by Western countries against Putin as “gross.” “Of course not these sentences
They may not harm our head of state, but they do not paint a good image at all of those who do
Statements,” Peskov continued.
In her video message, Yulia Navalnaya said she was ready to take over her husband's baton. “I will continue his work, I will continue to fight for our country, and I invite you to stand by my side,” he said, adding that he wanted to build a Russia “as Alexei Navalny imagined, full of dignity, justice and love.” She was then welcomed in Brussels by European Council President Charles Michel, who remembered the dissident as a “warrior” and condemned what he called “the brutality of the rogue regime.”
Kremlin”.
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ANSA Agency The toxicologist: “Novichok is a plausible hypothesis” – News – Ansa.it A Novichok agent should kill Alexei Navalny? “Without access to the body, it is impossible to say,” Sabina Strano-Rossi, associate professor of forensic medicine at the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of the Catholic University of Rome and pr… (ANSA), tells ANSA.
“Julia Navalnaya is a woman who wants to continue fighting to defend freedom in her country and has reiterated that Russia is not Putin and Putin is not Russia,” said Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani. The head of Farnesina added that the High Representative for Foreign Policy Josep Borrell assured her on behalf of everyone that we will continue to support the right to freedom of expression in Russia to be able to wage political struggles and we will ask for release of all political prisoners”.
The Farnesina announced that the chargé d'affaires in Russia, Pietro Sferra Carini, had, on Tajani's instructions, honored Navalny's memory by laying flowers in Moscow, like other Western diplomats, on the Solovetsky Stone, a monument to victims of political repression. US President Joe Biden has announced that the US is considering further sanctions against Russia
Navalny's death. Former President Donald Trump broke the silence about what was happening, but avoided any criticism of the Kremlin, interpreting it more as a sign of the collapse of the United States itself: “Open borders, rigged elections, unfair court decisions are destroying America, we are.” “Are a Country in decline,” Trump argued on his social network Truth.
Hungary’s silence: “Sanctions against Moscow are only a cosmetic solution”
“The European Union, suffering from war psychosis, only wants to obey Washington, the liberal media and NGOs by launching, on the occasion of the second anniversary, another package of sanctions” against Russia, “which is certainly completely useless and only as cosmetic solution”. of the war in Ukraine. Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó, who was present at the Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels, wrote this on Facebook. Budapest has so far blocked the adoption of the thirteenth EU sanctions package. Silence on Navalny's death, to which there was no reaction from Orban's government.
Berlin summons the Russian ambassador
The German Foreign Ministry announced that it had summoned the Russian ambassador today over the death of Alexei Navalny and the suppression of protests by political opponents in Russia. The spokesman for the Foreign Office announced this today in Berlin as part of the government press conference.
“The politically motivated trial against Alexei Navalny and many other critics of the Russian government” shows the “brutality with which the Russian justice system acts against dissidents and the means with which President Putin suppresses freedom of expression in Russia,” said the Foreign Office spokeswoman. “We condemn all of this in the strongest possible terms and expressly call for the release of all people imprisoned in Russia for political reasons,” he added. The federal government also called on Russia to investigate the circumstances of Navalny's death and to hand his body over to his family, as government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit emphasized.
Latvia and Lithuania officially protest against the death of the dissident
The Foreign Ministries of Latvia and Lithuania today summoned the charge d'affaires of the Embassies of the Russian Federation in Riga and Vilnius to express their protest against the death of Alexei Navalny.
During the meeting, representatives of the foreign ministries of the two Baltic states emphasized the need to clarify the circumstances of Navalny's death and expressed the hope that those responsible for the death of the Russian opponent will be brought to justice.
The Foreign Ministry in Vilnius also called for the immediate release of all people arrested in Russia in recent days for publicly paying tribute to Navalny.
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