"Show me my son, let his body be handed over to me immediately."
Lyudmilla, mother of Alexei Navalny , asks Vladimir Putin, who released a video launching an appeal to the Russian president.
Navalny's mother speaks outdoors, under the snow, in front of the IK-3 penal colony where the dissident died on February 16: «For the fifth day I haven't seen him, they don't give me his body and they don't tell me where is found. I turn to you, Vladimir Putin, the solution to the problem depends only on you. Let me finally see my son. I demand that Alexei's body be handed over immediately so that I can bury him humanely ."
The video ends with a shot of the dome of a church on which a cross stands. The head of Navalny's anti-corruption foundation, Ivan Zhdanov, stressed that a written appeal was submitted to Putin at the same time.
The Kremlin has meanwhile responded to the accusations of Yulia Navalnaya, wife of the dissident who yesterday pointed the finger at Putin, saying that her husband was poisoned .
" Unfounded and crude accusations against the Head of State ," said spokesman Dmitri Peskov, specifying that Putin "has not seen that video."
" I don't care how a murderer's press secretary comments on my words ", the rejoinder from Navalnaya, who asked the EU not to recognize the outcome of the presidential elections which will take place in March and for which Putin will return to a fifth term.
Russia has also placed Navalny's brother, Oleg, on the wanted list . The charges against him are not specified in the ministry documents, according to Tass. In 2014 the Navalny brothers were sentenced to three and a half years for political “fraud” in a trial rejected by the European Court of Human Rights . Then Alexey Navalny was granted a suspended sentence, but his brother Oleg ended up in prison. However, the Russian authorities used that very sentence to arrest Alexey Navalny upon his return to Moscow in January 2021: the dissident had been treated in Berlin for a poisoning for which the Russian secret services were suspected, and the prosecutor's office accused him of having violated the terms of the parole.
Oleg Navalny was then sentenced in absentia to one year in prison in February 2022 on charges of inciting to take to the streets against his brother's arrest .
(Unioneonline/L)
