Russian President Vladimir Putin’s punishment “for all the horrific things” done by his government “will come soon,” the wife of imprisoned dissident Alexei Navalny said after Russia’s authorities announced his death.
“We cannot believe Putin and his government. They are lying constantly,” Yulia Navalnaya said during an impromptu appearance at the Munich Security Conference to explain her uncertainty about whether to believe the report of her husband’s death. “But if it is the truth, I would like Putin and all his staff, everybody around him, his government, his friends: I want them to know that they will be punished for what they have done with our country, with my family, and with my husband.”
Russian prison authorities announced Navalny’s death on Friday, just over three years after his arrest on charges of violating his probation by failing to check in with authorities at a time when he was “in a coma” recovering from an assassination attempt in 2020. His death comes one month after he marked the anniversary of his imprisonment by declaring from prison that “Putin’s state isn’t viable,” as he explained the “convictions” that motivated his decision to return to Russia after receiving treatment for his poisoning in 2020.
“It so happens that in today’s Russia, I have to pay for my right to have and to openly express my convictions by sitting in solitary confinement,” he said in a Jan. 17 statement, according to a Meduza translation. “My convictions aren’t exotic, sectarian, or radical. On the contrary, everything I believe in is based on science and historical experience. Those in power must change. The best way to elect leaders is through honest and free elections. Everyone needs a fair court. Corruption destroys the state. There should be no censorship. The future lies with these principles.”
Navalny and his team conducted a variety of anti-corruption investigations that served to embarrass Putin. Russian authorities extended his prison term by charging him with terrorism and transferred him to a prison in the Arctic.
“For more than a decade, [the] Russian government, Putin, have persecuted, poisoned, and imprisoned Alexei Navalny, and now reports of his death,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday from the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. “First and foremost, if these reports are accurate, our hearts go out to his wife and to his family. Beyond that, his death in a Russian prison and the fixation and fear of one man only underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built. Russia is responsible for this.”
Two days after Navalny’s arrest in January 2021, Navalny’s associates published a lengthy documentary called “Putin’s palace,” a “history of [the] world’s largest bribe.” He released that investigation just weeks after publishing a video of himself in a phone call with a man whom he identified as an FSB agent — the very agent, he said, implicated in his poisoning.
In the video, Navalny posed as a Russian government official who wanted a report on the poisoning operation and used spoofing software to make the call appear to have come from a familiar FSB number. Over the following 49 minutes, the putative FSB agent said that they attacked Navalny by putting a toxic poison in “the underpants.” He speculated that Navalny only survived because the plane on which he was traveling when he fell ill made an emergency landing that allowed for his prompt treatment at a local hospital.
“Everyone was convinced that [Putin’s] just a bureaucrat who was accidentally appointed to his position,” Navalny said in court after returning to Russia. “Murder is the only way he knows how to fight. He’ll go down in history as nothing but a poisoner. We all remember Alexander the Liberator [Alexander II] and Yaroslav the Wise [Yaroslav I]. Well, now we’ll have Vladimir the Underpants Poisoner.”
Russian state media have claimed that Navalny died of a “detached blood clot,” but one of his doctors cast doubt on that assessment.
“It somehow seems to me that this is an unlikely reason for a natural death,” Dr. Alexander Polupan told Meduza. “They could have said ‘sudden cardiac arrest’ but only an autopsy can show a thromboembolism [blood clot]. There are no other methods. … If an honest autopsy is performed, the blood clot should be visible. A diagnosis of a thromboembolism cannot be made without the detached blood clot being found.”
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Russia’s Foreign Ministry acknowledged that “no forensic examinations have been conducted yet” in a statement complaining of the Western consensus that his death would be a murder. Navalny’s wife evinced no doubt about the cause of her husband’s death and the fate of Putin and his associates.
“They will be brought to justice, and this day will come soon,” she told the Munich conference through an interpreter. “And I would like to call upon all the international community, all the people in the world: We should come together and we should fight against this evil, we should fight this horrific regime in Russia today. This regime and Vladimir Putin should be personally held responsible for all the atrocities they have committed in our country the last years.”
