Lyudmila Navalnaya has been denied the most basic right of a grieving mother: to bury her son. Her son, Alexei Navalny, was the fearless leader of the Russian opposition, who dared to challenge the tyranny of Vladimir Putin. He paid the ultimate price for his courage: he was assassinated in a remote Arctic prison, where he was serving a sham sentence for fabricated charges.
Lyudmila’s ordeal began when she received the devastating news that Alexei had died on Friday, after collapsing during a walk in the prison yard. She rushed to the “Polar Wolf” penal colony in Kharp, a frozen hellhole 1,900 km north of Moscow, where Alexei had been languishing for three decades. There, she was handed a cold, impersonal notice that stated the time of death as 14:17 local time. She was not allowed to see his body, nor to claim it for burial. She was told that a post-mortem examination had to be performed first, and that it could take weeks or months.
Lyudmila knew that this was a cruel lie. She knew that her son’s body was being hidden by the Russian authorities, who wanted to erase any evidence of their foul deed. She knew that they feared the truth: that Alexei Navalny was murdered on the orders of Putin, who saw him as a threat to his iron grip on power.
Lyudmila was not alone in her quest for justice. Thousands of Russians took to the streets to honour Alexei’s memory and to demand accountability. They laid flowers and candles at the “Wall of Grief”, a monument to the victims of Soviet repression. They gathered near Russian embassies in many countries. They faced brutal crackdowns by the police, who arrested more than 300 people in 32 cities.
The world also stood with Lyudmila and the Russian people. The G7 foreign ministers, meeting in Munich, observed a minute of silence for Alexei and called on Russia to “urgently clarify” the circumstances of his death. They condemned the “appalling human rights outrages” committed by the Kremlin and vowed to take action against those responsible. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, said that the UK would not stand idly by while Putin silenced his opponents. The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, called Putin a “thug” and said that he had no legitimacy as the head of a Russian state.
