This Tuesday, Alexei Navalny’s widow took up the initiative of her husband, who died last month in an Arctic prison, and called on Russians to show their rejection of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin in the next presidential elections. Yulia Naválnaya asked her compatriots from exile to go vote on March 17 at noon and to cast their vote for anyone other than the current Russian president.
Alexei Navalny, who was buried last Friday in Moscow in the presence of thousands of his followers and amidst great police surveillance, entered the Russian electoral campaign last December, when from the IK-3 penal colony in Jarp, 60 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, he asked Russians to vote for another candidate.
Yulia Naválnaya, who said she had regained new hope after seeing the crowd that attended the funeral, asked this Wednesday in a video broadcast on YouTube that Russians use the elections to show their rejection of Putin, resuming the action that her husband proposed.
The widow of the most prominent dissident leader of the last decade in Russia asked that critics of the current Russian rulers show up to vote on Sunday, March 17 at noon. And if you don’t want to vote for one of the other three candidates either, cancel your ballot.
“We need to use election day to show that we exist and that we are many. We are real, people who are alive, and that we are against Putin. You have to go to the polling stations on the same day and at the same time: December 17 March at noon,” said Navalnaya.
“And then what to do? The choice is yours. You can vote for any candidate except Putin. You can invalidate the ballot, you can write ‘Navalni’ in big letters. And if you don’t even see the point in voting, you can just go and stay in front of the polling station, walk around and go home,” he added.
The result of these presidential elections will not be a surprise. Vladimir Putin’s re-election is guaranteed, allowing him to reach his fifth term as head of state of Russia.
The security in his victory is based on the strong support that the polls give him. But also to the absence of real opponents. The repression, accelerated since the beginning of the Russian intervention in Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, has ended up with the main opposition figures in prison or in exile.
Putin’s rivals in the elections will be Leonid Slutski, leader of the nationalist Liberal-Democratic Party; Nikolai Kharitonov, for the Communist Party; and Vladislav Davankov, from Gente Nueva, all from groups aligned with the Kremlin’s policy on the most important issues.
Navalnaya assured that neither the opposition nor the world will consider Vladimir Putin a legitimate president.
The lawyer and opposition activist Alexei Navalny, who was 47 years old and was serving a combined sentence of three decades in prison, died on February 16 in a remote prison in the Russian prison system, known as Polar Wolf for its harsh living conditions. The IK-3 penal colony in the village of Jarp, in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, is located 1,900 kilometers northeast of Moscow and 60 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle.
The death certificate given to his mother, Ludmila Naválnaya, states that he died of natural causes. According to prison authorities, the opponent felt ill after taking a walk, lost consciousness and then neither the prison services nor the ambulance that arrived could revive him.
Navalny’s co-religionists reject this version and directly accuse Putin of ordering what they call “murder.” Several Western governments have also blamed the Russian president, accusations that Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov rejected as “unacceptable.”
