“They look me in the eyes and tell me that they will do something with my son's body if I don't accept a secret burial.” The mother of Russian opponent Alexei Navalni, Lyudmila Navalnaya, openly denounced the Kremlin's Family “blackmailed” with the funeral of the dissident who died in strange circumstances in a remote prison in the Arctic Circle on February 16. “Time is not on your side, the body is decomposing,” was one of the warnings from a member of the forensic team quoted by Navalny's mother in a new public video, dressed in austere mourning and who he says has his own Son's body seen in the morgue this Wednesday.
“Investigators say they know the cause of death,” Navalnaya added. “They have all the medical and legal documents ready and I have signed the death certificate. “According to the law, they should have handed over Alexei's body to me immediately, but so far they have not done so,” he complained. Navalny's spokeswoman, Kira Yarmish, has revealed that the medical report shows that he died “of natural causes”, a version that the opposition circle rejects because it directly points to President Vladimir Putin for alleged murder.
Navalnaya does not want to give in to the threats in order to give Russians the opportunity to say goodbye to the dissident in an act that threatens the Kremlin with the largest demonstration against him in years. “They are blackmailing me, they are giving me conditions as to where, when and how Alexei should be buried,” said the mother of Putin’s main political opponent. “They want it to be done in secret, without saying goodbye. They want to take me to the edge of the cemetery, to a fresh grave, and tell me, “Here lies your son.”
“I do not agree,” Navalnaya emphasized in a firm voice, pointing out that not only the family had to be present, but also all Russians who valued the opponent. “I want you, who loved Navalni and for whom his death was a personal tragedy, to have the opportunity to say goodbye to him.”
The Kremlin is trying to bring about a change with Navalny, but many Russians continue to remember the opponent. Although around 400 people have been arrested across Russia since his death for laying flowers at monuments to victims of political repression, according to the organization OVD-Info, there are still citizens who continue to leave roses in the same places where they shielded were reported to the police.
This is also not the first time that President Putin has played pranks at the funeral of one of his political enemies. The remains of the owner of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was killed along with the rest of the company's leadership when his plane exploded, were discreetly buried on August 29 in a second-class cemetery on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. The one who was known as “Putin's Cook” aspired to be buried in one of the majestic cemeteries in the center of the city, but his rebellion against the high command deprived him of the pantheon and was fired by his thousands of followers, many of them front-line veterans .
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Navalny's entourage criticized the Russian president for publicly declaring that the Kremlin was committed to defending traditional values while at the same time not allowing his political rivals to even have a human funeral. “I don’t know if this has ever happened in history, I don’t know what evil is in Putin’s head, it’s beyond any imaginable limit,” Yarmish lamented.
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