“We already knew that Putin's faith was false, but now we see it more clearly than ever.” The voice of Yulia Navalnaya is firm, decisive, like her terrible denunciation: dressed in black, in mourning, the widow of the Kremlin's number one rival accuses Putin of having taken the body of her husband Alexey Navalny “hostage” to force her mother to accept that the funerals are held in secret. «Give us back my husband's body. You tortured him while he was alive and now you continue to torture him when he is dead. You are making fun of the remains of a dead man” she denounces in a short film published today on the internet.
How Navalny died is unclear, and in a country like Putin's Russia the truth risks never coming out. However, the shadow of Putin's regime looms over the opponent's death. The Russian president's main political opponent died on February 16 in the “Polar Wolf”: the remote prison in the Arctic where he was unjustly detained on completely invented charges to target him. More than a week has now passed, but the authorities continue to refuse to hand over the body to his family and opponents accuse the Kremlin of having had the dissident murdered and of now wanting to “hide the evidence”. Moscow claims to suffer “indiscriminate accusations” from the West, but Navalny denounced very serious abuses behind bars and many believe that the responsibility for the tragedy falls in any case on the regime.
“They threaten to bury him in prison if the funeral is not held in secret”
However, Team Navalny still denounces new abuses. The opponent's mother, Lyudmila, was in fact presented with a real ultimatum: the threat to bury her son in the distant penal colony where he died, if he did not agree to hold a secret funeral. However, yesterday the woman reportedly “refused to negotiate” with the Russian authorities although – according to what Yulia Navalnaya says – she was made to understand that she did not have much time to decide because the body was decomposing.
If the dictatorship is pushing for secret funerals, it is more than likely that it wants to prevent Navalny's supporters from gathering for a final farewell to the man who for years was the main driver of the anti-Putin protests. The public funeral would be a tribute to an opponent who died after reporting terrible abuses during three years in prison, but could turn into an open demonstration of dissent against a regime that stifles all forms of dissent. Already in recent days, Russian police have arrested hundreds of people who remembered Navalny by placing roses and carnations at the foot of monuments to the victims of Soviet repression. The Kremlin probably wants to prevent new demonstrations of solidarity with Navalny, especially now that the presidential elections in mid-March are just a few weeks away (the result of which is in any case considered a foregone conclusion).
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Yulia Navalnaya sends a doubly important message. Not only because he asks that Alexey Navalny's body be finally handed over to his family so that the funeral can be held and he can be buried “in a humane way, in the ground, as is customary in Orthodox Christianity”, but also because he calls into question Putin's religiosity: a faith that the Russian president has often put on display, using it as a political tool. “No true Christian could ever do what Putin is now doing to Alexey's body,” Yulia Navalnaya said.
The dictator is often filmed in church and tries to present himself both in Russia and abroad as the defender of alleged “traditional values” in contrast with “Western” ones, and he does so against the backdrop of initiatives that in reality often turn out to be violations of human rights (such as the provision that branded the “international public LGBT movement” as “extremist”). The Patriarch of Moscow, Kirill, is also considered very close to the regime and its leader and has issued several statements in support of the cruel invasion of Ukraine ordered by Putin. Yulia Navalnaya in her video instead openly stands against the war in Ukraine, which she says was unleashed by Putin “hiding behind Christian values”. «He's just killing them – denounces Navalny's widow -. He is simply killing people while they sleep at night using missiles blessed by the church.”
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