The widow of the Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny has accused President Vladimir Putin of being responsible for his death and said she would pick up his fight for a “happy, beautiful Russia“.
Yulia Navalnaya posted a video on her dead husband’s social media outlets Monday, saying Putin “killed the father of my children, Putin took away the most precious thing that was my closest and most beloved person”.
She said Russian authorities were “hiding” Navalny’s body in an attempt to disguise the cause of his death – “lying pathetically” and waiting for “traces of another of Putin’s Novichoks to disappear”.
Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent, in August 2020. A CNN and Bellingcat investigation later uncovered an FSB hit squad that planted the poison on his underwear.
Navalnaya didn’t provide any evidence to support her claim that a second poisoning was the cause of her husband’s unexplained death in an Arctic penal colony on Friday.
The Kremlin has said an investigation into the circumstances around Navalny’s death is “under way”, and the results are currently “unknown”.
