“Let me finally see my son”: Navalny’s mother begs Putin to let her to bury her son in a dignified manner

Alexei Navalny’s mother made a plea to President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, pleading with him to step in and give her son’s corpse back so she may bury him in a dignified manner.

In an apparent video, Lyudmila Navalnaya—who has been attempting to get his remains since Saturday—was seen outside the Arctic prison colony where Navalny passed away on Friday.

It’s the seventh day that I haven’t seen him. They refused to provide his corpse to me. In the footage, which showed the barbed wire of Penal Colony No. 3 in Kharp, around 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow, a black-clad Navalnaya said, “And they’re not even telling me where he is.”

“Vladimir Putin, I’m contacting you. You are the only one who can decide how to resolve this. Let me see my kid at last. “I request the immediate release of Alexei’s body, so that I can bury him in a humane manner,” she said in the video that Navalny’s team shared on social media.

Members of Navalny’s team indicated that the preliminary inquiry is still ongoing and that Russian officials have said that the reason of his death is still unclear. They have also refused to release his remains for the next two weeks.

They said that the administration was trying to conceal evidence by delaying. Yulia Navalny, the widow of Navalny, made public a video on Monday in which she accused Putin of murdering her husband and said that the government’s reluctance to reveal his corpse was a cover-up.

She said, “They are lying terribly, cowardly, and meanly hiding his body and refusing to give it to his mother.”

This screen grab, obtained from a video uploaded by the Navalny Team on February 20, 2024, shows Lyudmila Navalnaya, the mother of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, speaking outside the prison colony in the Russian town of Kharp.
Lyudmila Navalnaya and her son’s attorneys approached law enforcement and the morgue where the corpse is said to be housed in the Arctic area, but they were unable to convince them to give it over or reveal its whereabouts. Alexei Navalny passes away in jail, but his template for anti-Putin action will continue on.

The claims of a cover-up were denied by Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, who told reporters that “these are absolutely unfounded, insolent accusations about the head of the Russian state.”

Regarding Navalny’s passing, Putin has remained silent. He issued an order on Monday elevating many military and law enforcement personnel, among them Valery Boyarinev, the first deputy head of the State Penitentiary Service. Navalny’s team has accused Boyarinev, who was given the title of colonel-general, of directly dictating limits on the opposition leader.

Peskov denied that Boyarinev’s new rank and Navalny’s death had anything to do with one another.

With less than a month to go before an election that will almost certainly give Putin another six years in office, the Russian opposition has lost its most well-known and inspirational figure due to Navalny’s passing. In the face of Putin’s relentless persecution of the opposition, Navalny was seen by many Russians as a rare chance for political reform.

Yulia Navalnaya pledged to keep up his battle against the Kremlin in her video from Monday. Her X account, where she had uploaded the video, was momentarily suspended by the site on Tuesday without any notice, but it was subsequently reinstated.

This screen grab, obtained from a video uploaded by the Navalny Team on February 20, 2024, shows Lyudmila Navalnaya, the mother of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, speaking outside the prison colony in the Russian town of Kharp.
“I love you,” writes the widow of Alexei Navalny on Instagram after her husband’s death in a Russian jail.
She asked EU leaders to punish more Putin cronies, assist Russians fleeing the country, and refuse to accept the results of the election scheduled for next month in a speech delivered on Monday to the Foreign Affairs Council of the European Union. The words were made public on Tuesday by Kira Yarmysh, a spokesperson for Navalny.

In reaction to Navalny’s passing, the White House said that it is planning fresh “major sanctions” on Russia. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby stated that the new package will be revealed on Friday. He refused to go into specifics or explain how they would toughen up on the sanctions that the United States and its allies have already placed on Russia.

The only information provided by Kirby was that the penalties would be “specifically supplemented with additional sanctions regarding Mr. Navalny’s death” and that they will take effect on the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The 47-year-old Navalny has been detained since January 2021, when he was brought back to Moscow after his recovery in Germany from a nerve agent poisoning that he attributed to the Kremlin. Since then, he has served three jail sentences for offenses he denied having political motivations for.

The head of EU foreign policy, Josep Borrell, demanded an international probe into Navalny’s killing, but Peskov said the Kremlin would not accede to such a demand.

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This screen grab, obtained from a video uploaded by the Navalny Team on February 20, 2024, shows Lyudmila Navalnaya, the mother of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, speaking outside the prison colony in the Russian town of Kharp.
Mother of Alexei Navalny looks for her son’s corpse in the Arctic region of Russia.
As they attempted to honor Navalny with flowers and candles after his passing, over 400 individuals have been arrested across Russia, according to OVD-Info, an organization that keeps track of political arrests. Some of the nation’s monuments to victims of Soviet persecution that were being utilized as places to lay improvised tributes to Navalny were sealed off by authorities. At night, police removed the flowers, but others kept popping up.

Peskov said that by holding those honoring Navalny, police were behaving “in accordance with the law.”

According to OVD-Info, the government has received petitions from more than 60,000 individuals requesting for Navalny’s remains to be returned to his family.

Navalny said he was aware he was “serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of this regime” after the last decision, which resulted in a 19-year sentence.

“By killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart, and half of my soul,” his widow said in the video released on Monday.

However, the fact that I still own the other half indicates that I have no right to quit up. Yulia Navalnaya said, “I will carry on Alexei Navalny’s mission.