Yulia Navalnaya attacks Vladimir Putin. The widow of the Kremlin's number one rival claims that two laboratories "in two different countries" reached "the same conclusion," namely that Alexei Navalny "was poisoned" with "biological material" that she claims was "smuggled abroad to safety" after her husband's death in prison.
Navalnaya called for the results of the tests conducted immediately after Navalny's death to be published: "They are of public importance and must be made public. We all deserve to know the truth," she declared. Alexey Navalny died in February 2024, under circumstances that remain unclear, while unjustly held in a prison in the Russian Arctic. And his allies directly blame the Kremlin for his death.
"Putin is responsible for my husband's death," Navalnaya accuses. She also published what she claims are photos of the dissident's cell immediately after his death—a pool of vomit is visible on the floor—and adds that, according to five employees of the "Polar Wolf" penal colony, the dissident suffered severe convulsions before his death. Furthermore, his widow, now a key figure in the Russian opposition, claims there is no longer any trace of the videos filmed by the prison's surveillance cameras on the day of Navalny's death.
The Kremlin has not commented. "I know nothing about these statements. I can't say anything about it," Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, simply said. Navalnaya claims her husband was not properly treated. "He wasn't even taken to the infirmary. They simply took him back to his cell number 16," she said in an online video, citing what she says are prison guards' statements to their superiors.
"Alexey collapsed to the floor, pulled his legs up to his stomach, and started moaning in pain," she says. "He said his chest and stomach were burning," she adds. "Then he started vomiting."
Alexey Navalny was the driving force behind the protests against Putin's authoritarian drift in Russia, and the investigations by his Anti-Corruption Foundation caused more than a few headaches for the president's loyalists. In 2020, he was treated in Germany for what Western experts believe was a poisoning in Siberia with a deadly military nerve agent—Novichok—for which the Kremlin's intelligence services are suspected. Meanwhile, Putin's regime had begun to churn out charges against him, but Navalny nevertheless returned to Russia in January 2021, despite knowing he would end up in prison.
He was arrested as soon as he set foot at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport and later sentenced to 19 years in prison on charges of clearly politically motivated "extremism." But even from behind bars, he continued to criticize Putin and the Kremlin-ordered military aggression against Ukraine. A year ago, The Insider reported that it had analyzed "hundreds of documents related to Navalny's death," arguing that the "content" of these documents demonstrated that "Russian authorities consistently removed references to the symptoms that prison doctors noted Navalny was suffering from," which, according to the newspaper, "clearly indicated that Navalny was poisoned."
According to The Insider, investigators initially reported that the dissident had experienced stomach pain, vomiting, and convulsions, and then lost consciousness. However, these symptoms were removed in the latest version.
(Unioneonline)