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Alexei Navalny’s mother has asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to return the late opposition leader’s body after he died last week in unexplained circumstances.
Standing outside the prison colony in remote northern Russia where her son had been held since December, Lyudmila Navalnaya said officials were refusing to give her his body or tell her where it was.
“I am appealing to you, Vladimir Putin, the solution depends on you alone. Let me see my son at last. I demand you immediately release Alexei’s body so I can bury him with dignity,” Navalnaya said in a video posted on social media on Tuesday.
Navalny’s wife Yulia Navalnaya and his team of exiled activists have accused the Kremlin of ordering and then covering up the circumstances of his death last Friday in the IK-3 maximum security prison colony in Kharp, a small town in the Arctic Circle.
Yulia Navalnaya met EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday and told them that “the criminals were hiding the traces of their crime” by refusing to hand over her husband’s body, according to her remarks that her team published on Tuesday.
The widow also called on the EU not to recognise the results of Russia’s presidential election next month, in which Putin is certain to extend his 24-year rule until at least 2030.
Putin “wants the whole world to believe that everyone in Russia loves and supports him. Don’t believe the propaganda. Don’t recognise these elections,” Yulia Navalnaya said. “A president who killed his main political opponent can’t be legitimate by definition.”
Russian investigators have not determined a cause of death and told Lyudmila Navalnaya on Monday that they would hold on to his body for a further 14 days while conducting a “chemical examination”.
Navalny’s followers say the 47-year-old, who was the most credible opponent to Putin’s regime, was murdered on the president’s orders. The anti-corruption activist spent the past three years in prison, including multiple times in a punitive isolation cell, which they said amounted to torture. He was arrested in 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany, where he had been treated for poisoning with the nerve agent novichok.
In a separate message to supporters posted on Monday, Yulia Navalnaya said Russian officials were “pathetically lying and waiting for the traces of yet more of Putin’s novichok to disappear” from his body and vowed to soon reveal “exactly why Putin killed Alexei”.
Russia has rejected accusations from Navalny’s family and western leaders that Putin is responsible for his death.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said neither he nor Putin had watched Navalnaya’s address, but told reporters her “rude comments about the head of the Russian state” were “nothing but baseless accusations with no supporting evidence”.
Peskov also rejected calls from Josep Borrell, the EU’s top foreign policy official, to hold an international investigation into Navalny’s death. “We don’t accept demands like that at all. Especially from Mr Borrell,” he said.
Thousands of people braved freezing temperatures and heavy police pressure to lay flowers in Navalny’s memory at memorials to Soviet political prisoners last weekend. Police arrested almost 400 people and threatened several others, actions that Peskov said were “in strict accordance with the law”.
Putin, who has not uttered Navalny’s name in public for more than a decade nor commented on his death, meanwhile promoted a top prison service official whom Navalny’s family has accused of ordering the opposition leader to be tortured, according to a decree dated on Monday.
Valery Boyarinev, deputy head of the prison service, had personally ordered a penal colony near Moscow where Navalny was previously held to limit the amount of money he could use to buy food, according to an account of a 2023 court hearing by independent Russian news outlet iStories.
Ivan Zhdanov, director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said the award was “Putin openly rewarding [Boyarinev] for torture” and claimed Boyarinev had “personally given the order to limit Alexei’s food accounts, as well as all the other torture”.
Peskov said the promotion was part of “regular procedure”.
