After days demanding that the Russian authorities give the family access to the remains of the dead opposition leader Alexei Navalny, this Thursday his mother assured that she was finally able to see his body. But she has accused investigators of trying to blackmail her into secretly burying him.
Ludmila Naválnaya has denounced these pressures in a video published on her son’s YouTube channel. “They want this to be done in secret, without goodbyes. They want to take me to the edge of a cemetery, to a freshly dug grave and tell me: here lies your son. I do not agree with this,” she said.
Last Saturday he traveled from Moscow to Salekhard, the administrative center of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, about 1,900 kilometers northeast of the capital. From there he drove to Jarp, 60 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. In that town is the IK-3 penal colony, to which the Russian Prison Service transferred his son Alexei in December and where he died suddenly last Friday, February 16, at the age of 47. .
The prison, built in the 1960s on a former Gulag prison camp, is nicknamed Polar Wolf for its harsh living conditions. Especially climatic. Last weekend in Jarp temperatures of about 30 degrees below zero were recorded.
The opponent’s mother received the death certificate from prison officials, Navalny’s collaborators said. They announced this Thursday that the certificate indicated that the opponent died of natural causes.
But neither she nor the lawyers who accompanied her were able to access the body. In fact, at the Salekhard morgue, where prison officials told them they had sent the remains, they were informed that it was not there.
On the social network Specifically, she accused Putin of having ordered his death. “We demand that the Russian authorities immediately hand over Alexei Navalny’s body to his family,” Yármish requested on Saturday.
Ludmila Naválnaya, who is 69 years old, did not make similar accusations. But she protested that she could not see her dead son. On Tuesday she addressed Putin directly in a video posted by Navalny’s team on YouTube.
Recorded in front of Jarp’s IK-3 penal colony Ludmila Navalnaya made a desperate request to the Russian president. “I am addressing you, Vladimir Putin. The solution to this matter depends only on you. Let me see my son once and for all!” said the opponent’s mother, wearing black glasses and a scarf over her head to protect herself. from the cold.
“I demand that Alexei’s body be given to me immediately so that I can bury it as God intended. It is the fifth day that I have not been able to see it. They have not given me his body and they have not even told me where it is,” he complained.
The requests seem to have worked and almost a week after his death the family has some consolation.
But burying him “as God commands” is another story. If funerals for the opponent are held in Moscow, they could attract thousands of people, as has been demonstrated by the creation of improvised altars in numerous cities across the country. And the Russian authorities will not like that.
