Photo: Yulia Navalnaya / screenshot from the video
Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, said in an interview with the British Sunday Times that she hopes to see Russian President Vladimir Putin not as a “tsar” but as an “ordinary prisoner” in a Russian prison.
“I want him to go from being a Russian tsar to being an ordinary prisoner in Russia,” Navalnaya said in an interview with the British newspaper, published two days before the release of her late husband’s memoirs. She stressed that she does not hate Putin, but dreams of seeing him behind bars, as her husband once did.
Alexei Navalny, a major critic of the Putin regime, died in February this year in an Arctic prison under unclear circumstances. His death sparked a wave of international outrage, but no clear answers have been provided as to the circumstances of his death.
In July 2023, the Russian authorities added 48-year-old Yulia Navalnaya to the list of ‘terrorists and extremists’ and issued an arrest warrant for her for engaging in ‘extremist activities’. She currently lives outside of Russia and has vowed to continue fighting for her husband’s cause. However, in an interview, Yulia noted that she never intended to lead the Russian opposition after his death: “I think it would have been important for him that I stayed away from these dangerous political things,” she explained. “But you realise that there is no other choice. You can stay silent, but it’s not about me. I will never leave Russia.”
While living in Germany, Navalnaya has ruled out returning to Russia until she is sure that she will not be arrested at the airport, as happened to her husband in January 2021. “No one knows when this might happen,” she added.
Yulia also noted that, although she was sceptical about a possible prisoner exchange that could have resulted in Navalny’s release, she had always doubted the honesty of the negotiations with Putin: “I know what happens when you deal with Putin… He lies all the time. So I never believed that this would happen,” she concluded.
