‘Putin killed my husband’: Navalny’s wife vows to fight on

Three days on from his death, the widow of Alexei Navalny today vowed to continue the work of her husband to bring democracy to Russia and free it from Putin’s grip. Speaking on her husband’s YouTube channel for the first time, Yulia acknowledged that she ‘shouldn’t be sitting here, shouldn’t have had to record this video’ but the person who should have been, she said, ‘was murdered by Vladimir Putin’. ‘Three days ago, Vladimir Putin killed my husband Alexei Navalny,’ she said. 

Against a montage of images of the Russian Arctic and footage from Navalny’s rallies, Navalny’s wife declared that in murdering her husband, Putin had also tried to ‘kill our hopes, our freedom, our future’. The video featured the last picture the couple ever took together – poignantly taken exactly two years before Navalny’s death.

‘We know exactly why Putin killed Alexei three days ago,’ Yulia said, ‘Soon we will tell you all about it.’