A milestone for the next day of opposition to Vladimir Putin’s regime may in the future prove to be the speech of Yulia Navalnyaya, widow of Alexei Navalny.
A woman who until recently preferred to be in her husband’s shadow when it came to active involvement in politics.
Now, however, she seems to have decided that, in the name of the late Alexei and his spiritual/ideological legacy, she must take a leading role.
In a short video posted on social media on Monday 19 February 2024, Yulia Navalnyaya reiterates that her husband was murdered, paying with his life for Putin’s abysmal hatred of him.
“Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul.”
Alexei Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, has vowed to continue her husband’s work — and expose the circumstances of his death. pic.twitter.com/xTnCDbnFpY
— DW News (@dwnews) February 20, 2024
As Navalnyaya points out, Vladimir Putin and failed to silence his greatest political rival within Russia, or even to break, despite his constant and relentless persecution, imprisonment and attempts to assassinate him with poisons, which were allegedly carried out by secret agents at Putin’s behest.
‘By killing Alexei, Putin has taken half my life, half my heart and half my soul from me,’ is Navalnyaya’s heartbreaking, yet stubborn and powerful, statement.
But she makes it clear that ‘whatever Putin took from me by killing my husband, I still have the other half of myself.
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Which tells me that I have no right to back out.
In the same video, Yulia Navalnaya promises to continue Alexei Navalny’s work from where he left it, until the final goal is achieved, which is a “free Russia”, as Navalnaya puts it. She met with the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, on Monday 19/2 in Brussels.
Navalnyaya seems absolutely determined to go all the way. She already claims that she has all the evidence that Alexei was murdered and that Yulia Navalnyaya also knows exactly why Putin thought Navalny should be taken out of the way.
Navalnyaya also promised that very soon, within the next few days, she will release evidence that proves that Putin’s people murdered Alexei Navalny.
Of course, predictably, Kremlin circles are describing it as “clearly malicious” and that, in any case, there are still no facts surrounding the circumstances of Alexei Navalny’s death.
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As far as her background, Yulia Navalnyaya is 47 years old, i.e. she was exactly the same age as Alexei, with whom she has two children, Darya, now 23, and 16-year-old Zahar.
Yulia herself is an economist and the daughter of a scientist, Boris Aleksandrovich Abrosimov.
She and Alexei Navalny, then a young lawyer, met in the summer of 1998 on a leisure trip to Turkey.
They married in 2000 and, at the same time, both became members of Yabloko, a social democratic political party.
Yulia retired in 2011, but remained her husband’s most loyal and devoted partner. Since 2007 she had stopped working, concentrating on raising her children.