Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the late Russian opposition chief Alexey Navalny, will meet European international ministers in Brussels on Monday, the European Union’s international coverage chief mentioned.
The 47-year-old Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most outstanding home foe, died in a Russian jail on Friday after spending greater than three years behind bars, prompting outrage and condemnation from Western leaders and his supporters.
“On Monday, I’ll welcome Yulia Navalnaya on the EU Overseas Affairs Council,” Josep Borrell mentioned late on Sunday on X.
“EU Ministers will ship a powerful message of assist to freedom fighters in Russia” and “honour” Navalny’s reminiscence, he mentioned.
Earlier on Sunday, Navalnaya shared a submit on Instagram that confirmed an image of the 2 collectively, their heads touching as they watched a efficiency.
“I like you,” she wrote within the submit two days after her husband’s demise.
It introduced a private be aware to the loss she expressed extra formally on a public stage simply hours after Navalny’s passing was introduced by the Russian jail service.
Navalny, 47, fell unconscious and died on Friday after a stroll on the “Polar Wolf” penal colony within the Arctic, the place he was serving a three-decade sentence, the jail service mentioned. There are nonetheless few particulars on why he died.
On Friday afternoon, Navalnaya appeared earlier than an viewers of leaders, diplomats and different officers on the Munich Safety Convention, saying she had weighed popping out on stage or instantly leaving to be with the couple’s two youngsters, Daria and Zakhar, deciding her husband would need her to talk.
If the information of his demise was true, Navalnaya, 47, mentioned, “I need Putin, his whole entourage, Putin’s associates, his authorities to know that they’ll bear duty for what they did to our nation, to my household, to my husband”.
A whole bunch arrested
Navalny’s sudden demise was a crushing blow to many Russians, who had pinned their hopes for the longer term on Putin’s fiercest foe.
Navalny remained vocal in his unrelenting criticism of the Kremlin even after surviving a nerve agent poisoning and receiving a number of jail phrases.
His demise got here a month earlier than a presidential election in Russia that’s broadly anticipated to provide Putin one other six years in energy.
A whole bunch of individuals in dozens of Russian cities streamed to ad-hoc memorials and monuments to victims of political repressions with flowers and candles on Friday and Saturday to pay tribute to the politician.
In additional than a dozen cities, police detained 366 folks by Sunday night time, in accordance with the OVD-Data rights group that tracks political arrests and supplies authorized help.
Greater than 200 arrests had been made in St Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest metropolis, the group mentioned.
Amongst these detained there was Grigory Mikhnov-Voitenko, a priest of the Apostolic Orthodox Church – a spiritual group unbiased of the Russian Orthodox Church – who introduced plans on social media to carry a memorial service for Navalny and was arrested on Saturday morning outdoors his residence.
He was charged with organising a rally and positioned in a holding cell in a police precinct, however was later hospitalised with a stroke, OVD-Data reported.
Courts in St Petersburg have ordered 42 of these detained on Friday to serve from one to 6 days in jail, whereas 9 others had been fined, court docket officers mentioned late on Saturday.
In Moscow, a minimum of six folks had been ordered to serve 15 days in jail, in accordance with OVD-Data.
Questions stay
Questions on the reason for demise have lingered, and it stays unclear when the authorities could launch Navalny’s physique.
Greater than 12,000 folks have submitted requests to the Russian authorities asking for the politician’s stays to be handed over to his kinfolk, OVD-Data mentioned on Sunday.
Navalny’s workforce mentioned Saturday that the politician was “murdered” and accused the authorities of intentionally stalling the discharge of the physique, with Navalny’s mom and legal professionals getting contradicting data from varied establishments the place they went of their quest to retrieve the physique.
Russian authorities considered Navalny and his supporters as extremists with hyperlinks to the CIA intelligence company in the US, which they are saying is in search of to destabilise Russia. Navalny all the time dismissed accusations that he was a CIA asset.
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