MOSCOW.– The funeral of the Russian opponent Alexei Navalnywho died on February 16 in prison, will take place on Friday, March 1 in Moscow, his team announced on social networks.
“Alexei Navalny’s funeral service will be held in a church (…) in Marino on March 1 at 2:00 p.m. The funeral will take place at the Borisovski cemetery” in Moscow, his team indicated on the Telegram network.
According to Ivan Khdanov, one of the opposition’s collaborators, the burial will take place about 20 km from the Kremlin walls.
Since the opponent’s body was handed over to his mother last Saturday, the team of the Kremlin’s main detractor was looking for a place to offer a “public goodbye” to Navalni, but was “denied” multiple requests, according to his collaborators.
Those close to the deceased politician assured that the authorities had exerted pressure regarding the place where the burial should take place.
Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the Russian opponent, expressed her fear before the European Parliament on Wednesday that the police could arrest people during her husband’s funeral.
“I don’t know if (the funeral) will be peaceful or if the police will arrest those who are present,” Navalnaya told the European Parliament plenary, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin is the “leader of a criminal organization.”
In his opinion, it will not be possible to affect Putin with sanctions that are not fundamentally different from those already adopted.
“You cannot defeat him thinking that he is a man of principles and morals. He is not like that, and Alexei realized that a long time ago,” said Navalnaya, for whom Putin is a “bloodthirsty gangster.”
“Alexei was tortured for three years,” the widow said before the plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.
Putin “must answer for everything he has done to Alexei,” the widow added.
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AFP
Putin’s silence
The funeral could mobilize numerous Navalny supporters and this could be annoying for Russian President Vladimir Putin ahead of the presidential elections from March 15 to 17.
“Everywhere they refused to give us anything. In some places, they told us that it was prohibited,” Jdanov explained in a statement posted on Telegram, criticizing the “Kremlin and (Sergei) Sobyanin,” the mayor of Moscow, close to Vladimir Putin.
The Russian president, who is scheduled to appear on Thursday in front of both chambers of Parliament on the occasion of his annual address to the nation, has not reacted to the death of Navalny, who had survived a poisoning in 2020 of which he accused Putin himself. , something that the latter always denied.
The circumstances of Alexei Navalny’s death on February 16 in an Arctic prison remain unclear.
According to the Russian prison services, he died after feeling unwell “after a walk.”
But the opposition’s supporters and multiple Western leaders accused Putin of his death, some even alluding to a “murder” ordered after three years of detention.
Source: With information from AFP
