Aiexpress – Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of Alexei Navalny, shared her first online post on Sunday following the death of her husband at a Russian penal colony.
Navalnaya expressed her love for Navalny by sharing a heartfelt picture of the two of them together. Her caption was simple yet profound: “I love you.”
According to OVD-Info, an independent human rights project in Russia, at least 336 individuals have been arrested in protests across 39 cities following the alleged murder of Navalny. On Sunday alone, around 13 people were detained.
According to a statement by OVD-Info, Navalny’s death was not just a death, but a deliberate and premeditated murder. They assert that the Russian state, including the very agencies that are claiming to investigate the incident, is responsible for this crime.
Navalny’s arrest and conviction were not mere acts of murder, but rather calculated political assassinations. It is clear that these unjust actions were carried out with the intention of serving the Kremlin’s political agenda.
Navalny emerged as a prominent opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime. He is known for his activism against corruption and gained international attention after surviving a poisoning incident in the Siberian city of Omsk in 2020.
After being poisoned, Navalny received treatment at a hospital in Berlin, Germany. Officials in Germany stated that there was “unequivocal proof” that Navalny was targeted with the nerve agent Novichok. Navalny and others implicated Putin in the incident, although the Kremlin denied any involvement.
Despite narrowly escaping with his life, Navalny made the decision to return to Russia in January 2021. Consequently, he was immediately apprehended and placed in pre-trial detention for supposedly breaching the conditions of a previous suspended jail sentence. Earlier, the politician had been handed a suspended sentence in July 2013 and again in 2014, both of which were widely believed to be politically motivated, stemming from accusations of embezzlement.
In February 2021, Navalny was sentenced to two and a half years in prison after supposedly breaching the conditions of his parole on previous charges. Following his criticism of the war in Ukraine while incarcerated, Navalny was handed an additional nine-year prison term on charges of embezzlement and subsequently transferred to a high-security facility in the Vladimir region of Russia.
In April 2023, Navalny experienced intense stomach pain, which his spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, speculated might have been caused by another poisoning attempt.
Navalny, who was already incarcerated, faced charges of terrorism and received an additional 19-year prison sentence in August. However, in December, he disappeared only to be found later in a penal colony located east of Moscow. Tragically, he passed away three weeks after being discovered at the penal colony.
On Thursday, the day before his death, he was last seen in a video link from a court hearing.
