Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Alexei Navalny, walks away from her photo after lighting a candle at the end of a service in St. Mary’s Church for the late Russian opposition politician Navalny on his birthday on June 4 in Berlin.
Sebastian Gollnow/Photo alliance via Getty Images
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Sebastian Gollnow/Photo alliance via Getty Images
MOSCOW — A Russian court has ordered the arrest in absentia of Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of former Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
The Moscow court order, issued on Tuesday, means that Navalnaya – who currently lives outside Russia – risks arrest if she returns to her home country soon.
Court documents claim Navalnaya has been hiding from Russian investigators and are seeking her extradition from abroad, saying she would be held for two months initially pending an investigation.
Similar extremism-related charges have been used to sentence Navalny’s associates to years in prison – part of a government crackdown on Navalny’s once-nascent grassroots political network.
Last December, Ksenia Fadeyeva, a Navalny ally who served as a member of parliament in the Siberian city of Tomsk, was sentenced to nine years in prison.
Lilia Chanysheva, who led Navalny’s operations in Bashkortostan, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison. In April, a court added an additional two and a half years to her sentence, arguing that the original sentence had been too lenient.
A reluctant politician emerges
The arrest warrant for Navalnaya suggests that Russian authorities are taking seriously her growing role in Russia’s often divided opposition.
Following her husband’s still-unexplained death in a remote Arctic prison camp in February, Navalnaya reluctantly announced that she would continue her husband’s mission to fight for a freer, more democratic Russia — what Navalny once championed as “the beautiful Russia of the future.”
“There should have been another person in my place, but that person was killed by Vladimir Putin,” she said at the time.
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied any involvement in Navalny’s death.
This month, the widow announced that she had accepted the position of president of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation.
Navalny was serving a long prison sentence on charges including extremism, which he had always called politically motivated.
In response to the arrest warrant, Navalnaya made it clear that she believed the authorities were trying to put the wrong person behind bars.
“When you write about this, remember to write the main thing: Vladimir Putin is a murderer and a war criminal,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
“His place is in prison, not in a comfortable cell in The Hague with a television, but in Russia, in the same type of colony and the same 2 by 3 metre cell in which he killed Alexei.”
Denying any role in Navalny’s death, President Putin said Navalny’s body simply collapsed.
“It happens. There’s nothing we can do about it. That’s life,” Putin said in his only public comments on Navalny’s death last March.
Prison officials said Navalny collapsed while walking in the prison yard at the penal colony in the Yamalo-Nenets region where he was being held, but provided no further details.
Meanwhile, Navalnaya and her late husband’s exiled allies have conducted their own investigation into Navalny’s final days and vowed to reveal the truth behind what they insist was his murder.
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News Source : www.npr.org
