The Russian president despised the popular opposition figure and security forces will ensure his mourners are arrested “and then everything will die out”.
Already a subscriber?Hours after learning her husband Alexei Navalny had probably died in a remote Russian penal colony, Yulia Navalnaya made an unplanned appearance at the“If this is true, I want Putin and all of his entourage, Putin’s friends and his government to know they will be held accountable for what they have done to our country, to my family and to my husband. And that day will come very soon,” Navalnaya said.
“Putin isn’t supposed to have any competition. But he . Not so much in the electoral sense, but the existential one,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Now our commander-in-chief doesn’t have any competition.” In Moscow, dozens of people lined up to lay flowers at the Solovetsky Stone, a memorial to Soviet political prisoners outside the headquarters of the FSB security service, the KGB’s successor. Smaller memorials took shape in several other cities across the country, while anti-war Russians organised protests outside embassies around the world.
“Navalny hadn’t had a voice or a platform for a long time,” a former senior Kremlin official said. “There will be a wave of memorials for him, all sorts of mourning and protest events. They will arrest the activists. And then everything will die out.” Though the circumstances of Navalny’s sudden death remain unclear, his supporters have accused Putin of being ultimately responsible in any case.
“It makes sense for them to get rid of someone who could have driven protests in the run-up to the election. The administration knows as well as we do what the real mood in society is, how sick people are of the war and how much they want an alternative,” said Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist.
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